To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  Southern Horrors

  Lynching, Wells insisted, was not about rape or even sex: it was about power. Her first pamphlet, Southern Horrors (1892), which reprinted her New York Age articles, illustrated the narrative strategy she would use to challenge conventional accounts of lynching. Printed with money that her New York supporters collected for her, it began by positioning Wells as a Christian witness to sin and inequity—much like the abolitionists she had always admired. A letter of support from fabled abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass added to Wells’s bona fides, as did Douglass’s endorsement of her work as an appeal “to the power of a merciful God for final deliverance.” Wells published Douglass’s letter immediately after her preface, and proceeded with a modesty in keeping with her sex. “It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed,” she assured her readers. “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen to me to do so. The awful death-toll that Judge Lynch is calling every week is appalling, not only because of the lives it takes, the rank cruelty to its victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters and the stain it places against the good name of a weak race.”32

  In Southern Horrors Wells drew on the traditional moral and religious authority granted to women in nineteenth-century culture as license for her crusade against lynching, which also defended the good name of both black men and women. She countered the attacks on black sexuality often invoked in defense of lynching with questions about the sexual morality of whites, while also using her skills as a journalist to expose the logic of white mob violence. Wells recognized that lynchings were justified by the stories that lynch mobs told about their victims—stories which inevitably sanctioned their deaths. But, as Southern Horrors showed, these stories could be turned around to tell tales on the lynchers. A sweeping exposé of Southern sexual politics, the pamphlet documented that white men often used the rape myth to justify killing black men at will and routinely went unpunished for sexual assaults on African American women. It also revealed the shadowy presence of the often licentious Southern white women who hid behind the fury of the mob.

  Southern Horrors (1892) was Ida B. Wells’s first published pamphlet.

  Written in the “simple, plain, and natural” style long cultivated by Wells, Southern Horrors supported her stories with “names, dates and facts” designed to attest to their veracity. An early muckraking journalist, Wells had used investigation and eyewitness testimony to inform her early discussions of lynching in Free Speech. As a result, she had figures to show that fully two-thirds of the lynch mob’s victims had not even been charged with rape, but her argument did not dwell on statistics. Instead, Wells attacked the rape myth, which, she believed, served as the justification for all lynchings—“a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime…concedes the right to lynch any person for any crime.”33

  Her work sought to counter images of African Americans as “a race of rapists, who were especially mad after white women” by exposing an underworld of black-white interactions that were criminal only under the South’s Jim Crow statutes.34 Whereas accounts of lynchings by Wells’s white contemporaries often featured “graphic descriptions of the murders designed to restage the murders as much as possible,” Southern Horrors focused on the clandestine interracial relationships between white women and black men that formed the backdrop to many lynchings inspired by rape allegations.35 Wells’s approach was by far more daring. A taboo subject, such relationships were usually ignored by the press even when they ended in mob violence. As a result, the main cause of many lynchings remained shrouded in secrecy. White men, Wells broke this silence to argue, were determined to preserve their side of the color line—by any means necessary.

  Indeed, they policed the actions of both white women and black men, since “many white women would marry colored men if such an act would not at once place them beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law.” Indeed, one such woman, Sarah Clark of Memphis, who “loved…and lived openly” with a black man, was “indicted last spring for miscegenation,” and went to jail for her crime even though “she swore in court that she was not a white woman.” Lower-class and unmarried to boot, Clark was not free to choose a black partner or change her racial identity. “‘The leading citizens’ of Memphis are defending the honor of all white women, demimonde included.”36

  Meanwhile, many white women did not share Sarah Clark’s willingness to face the consequences of miscegenation, and accused their black lovers of sexual assault rather than face exposure themselves—with tragic results. Wells illustrated this point by citing the testimony of Mrs. J. S. Underwood, the wife of a minister, whose rape accusation led to the imprisonment of her black lover William Offett in 1888. She later recanted, explaining to The Cleveland Gazette, “I met Offett at the Post Office. He had a strange fascination for me, and I invited him to call on me.” An affair ensued, which Wells also chronicled, quoting Mrs. Underwood’s graphic testimony in detail. Offett had accepted Underwood’s invitation to call, arriving at her door carrying “chestnuts and candy for the children. By this means, we got them to leave the room. Then I sat on his lap. He made a proposal to me and I readily consented…He visited me several times after that and each time I was indiscreet. I did not care after the first time. In fact, I could not have resisted, and had no desire to resist.” Only the fear of exposure had caused Underwood to cry rape. A neighbor had witnessed Offett’s visits; she also feared that she “might give birth to a Negro baby.” With these worries on her mind, she told her husband a “deliberate lie,” which sent her lover off to prison for four years.37 Offett was lucky to be released when the remorse-stricken Mrs. Underwood finally came clean in 1892. The pious Mr. Underwood, who promptly divorced his wife, was gracious enough to secure the innocent man’s release.

  But many black men who associated with white women were far less fortunate, especially in the South. In 1891, Wells noted, a black boy had been lynched in Tuscumbia, Alabama, for assaulting a white girl in the woods, even though the couple met regularly in those woods. Three black men in South Carolina “disappeared,” shortly after a white woman gave birth to what was obviously a biracial child and named three possible fathers. And in Nashville a black man named Eph. Grizzard was charged with rape for daring to visit a white woman. Arrested, he was taken from jail and “dragged through the streets in broad daylight.” With the state’s governor, police, and militia all standing by, Grizzard was then put to death. “Knives [were] plunged into him at every step, and with every fiendish cruelty a frenzied mob could devise, he was at last swung out on a bridge with hands cut to pieces as he tried to climb the stanchions.”38

  Similar violence, Wells pointed out, was never used to protect women on the other side of the color line. Indeed, on the very day Grizzard was dragged from his Nashville cell to meet his death, a white man sat in the “same jail for raping eight-year old Maggie Reese, an Afro-American girl. He was not harmed.” Likewise, a man in Oklahoma Territory who had “inflicted such upon another Afro-American child that she died,” also went unpunished. Wells consistently interspersed her discussion of lynching with brief accounts of white men who raped African American females—many of them prepubescent. And she closed Southern Horrors with a brief reference to an equally brutal crime against “poor little thirteen year old Mildrey Brown.” Suspected, on circumstantial evidence alone, of poisoning an infant, Brown was “legally (?) hung” in Columbia, South Carolina.39

  From Southern Horrors onward, Wells’s work would memorialize black female victims of rape, sexual assault, and lynching. Her discussions of these women usually provided few specifics other than their age, shielding the painful details of the sexual violation they had suffered from public scrutiny. But despite her Victorian discretion, Wells’s accounts recovered and publicized these women’s sufferings “at the hands of a violent white majority” at a time when assaults on black females went largely igno
red.40

  Moreover, Wells’s stories about sexual violence against black women and girls played a crucial role in her analysis of lynching: they underscored that lynching had very little to do with the crime of rape. As she pointed out, the way white Southern men treated black women made it clear that they were “not so desirous of punishing rapists as they pretend. The utterances of leading white men show that with them it is not the crime but the class.” The region’s white leaders were “apologist[s] for the lynchers of the rapists of white women only.” “Governor Tillman of South Carolina…declared he would lead a mob to lynch the Negro who raped a white woman. So say the pulpits, officials and newspapers of the South. But when the victim is a colored woman it is different…nobody is lynched and no notice is taken.”41

  This double standard also proved that the lynch mobs that assaulted black men were not actually policing the crime of rape. Rather, they protected white supremacy and guarded the color line by reserving white women for white men. White men’s sexual assaults against black women were neither policed nor punished, but love affairs between white women and black men, if discovered, often resulted in a lynching. “White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue,” Wells concluded, “but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.”42 A powerful indictment of lynching as a crime against black men, Wells’s critique of mob violence exposed the racial and sexual double standards that allowed white men to victimize black women with impunity. Moreover, as Patricia Schechter observes, Wells’s analysis of lynching “connected the ‘private crime’ of rape to the ‘public’ crime of lynching,” and in doing so “remapped the authority of the black woman intellectual.” Her work demonstrated that neither crime could be limited to the public and private spheres that were thought to divide the concerns of men and women. Instead, “lynching and rape formed a web of racist sexual politics aimed at subjugating Southern blacks.”43

  A radical revision of conventional wisdom, this analysis of lynching made antilynching a women’s issue, while also winning her influential allies such as Frederick Douglass. Recently retired from a post as U.S. minister and consul to Haiti, the fiery former abolitionist contacted Wells after reading her work in The New York Age. According to Wells, her articles in the Age had come as a revelation to the legendary “Sage of Anacostia.” Until he read them, he told Wells, “he had been troubled by the increasing number of lynchings, and had begun to believe it true that there was an increasing lasciviousness on the part of the Negroes.”44 Wells’s exact impact on Douglass is difficult to verify, since he never voiced this belief elsewhere. But he certainly attended one or more of Ida’s 1892 lectures, and the high praise he had for them can be seen in a letter she wrote to him in October of that year. As she prepared to reprint her antilynching articles in Southern Horrors, Wells asked Douglass to help promote her pamphlet by putting “in writing the encomiums you were pleased to lavish on my article on Lynch Law in the June 25 issue of the Age.”45 Douglass did not hesitate to put his praise in writing, supplying a letter that described Wells’s discussion of lynching as having “no word equal to it in convincing power.”46

  Portrait of Frederick Douglass, c. 1890. A resident of the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Anacostia, where he settled in 1877, Douglass was often known in his old age as the “Sage of Anacostia.”

  Convinced himself, Douglass seems to have taken a new interest in lynching after reading Wells’s work. Douglass’s own first extended discussion of lynching, which he described as “feeble” in comparison to her work, appeared shortly after Wells first began writing for the Age.47 Despite his admiration for her work, however, Douglass never fully embraced Wells’s gendered analysis of racial violence. His discussions of lynching left the question of white violence against black women aside in favor of a qualified defense of black men that did not fully link lynching and Jim Crow. Some black men might “be guilty of the peculiar crime so often imputed to [them],” Douglass conceded. But the crime of rape was “easily imputed” and “difficult to disprove,” and also the offense that “the Negro is least likely to commit.” The glory days of emancipation had proved that black men were not rapists. Even during the Civil War, when “the wives, daughters, the mothers and the sisters of the rebels” were left alone on the plantation, “no instance can be cited of an outrage committed by the Negro on the person of a white woman.” If black men had begun to attack white women, Douglass concluded, “the crime is a new one for the Negro, so new that a doubt may be reasonably maintained that he has learned it to any such extent as his accusers would believe.”48

  Wells touches on a similar point in Southern Horrors, but much more briefly. As she seems to have realized, defenses of black men that stressed the fealty of the slaves during the Civil War came dangerously close to embracing white Southern nostalgia for the “old-time darkies.” Moreover, because they focused on the past rather than the present, they posed little challenge to 1890s discussions of rape as the “new Negro crime.” Accordingly, in Southern Horrors Wells avoided such pitfalls—and Douglass’s Civil War point of reference. Instead, she engaged lynching in the Jim Crow context in which it took place, challenging the rape myth directly while also making sense of the context in which it took shape.

  Douglass’s admiration and support for Wells suggests that he agreed with her analysis of lynching, even if he chose not to follow her lead. One has to suspect that Douglass’s own personal life left him in a compromised position when it came to analyzing the interracial sexual liaisons between black men and white women. To the dismay of many Americans on both sides of the color line, black America’s elder statesman had married his white secretary Helen Pitts in 1884, a few years after the death of his first wife, Ana Douglass. The marriage pleased no one but the bride and groom. Half white himself, Douglass jokingly maintained that it proved that he was racially “impartial”: “My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father.” Other African Americans, however, were generally unhappy with his choice. Indeed, according to Douglass, his wife was treated with resentment by virtually all of his black women friends, with the exception of Wells and Sarah Moore Grimke, the wife of Francis Grimke, the radical Presbyterian minister who married the couple.49

  Wells’s acceptance of Helen Pitts helped solidify her relationship with Douglass. As befitted the politics that she outlined in Southern Horrors, Wells did not oppose interracial relationships per se, deploring only the coercive, dangerous, and illegal interactions between men and women fostered by Jim Crow antimiscegenation laws. The Douglasses’ union, of course, posed no such issues. They “lived together in the holy bonds of matrimony rather than the illicit relationship that was the cause of so many lynchings.” Wells admitted that she would nonetheless have preferred it if “Mr. Douglass had chosen one of the beautiful, charming colored women of my race for his second wife.” But, following the dictates of her modest rural upbringing, Wells treated Douglass’s wife with “courtesy and deference”—or “ordinary good manners”—and soon came to admire and respect Helen Pitts Douglass.50 As a result of her friendship with both Douglasses, Wells became a regular guest at their Washington home, deepening her bond with her abolitionist hero.

  Always good at attracting father figures, Wells relied on Douglass for mentorship and advice right through to his death in 1895. Moreover, starting in the fall of 1892, the two began collaborating on a pamphlet to protest the representation of the Negro at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Originally scheduled to open in October 1892, the fair celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World. The precursors of modern-day “expos,” nineteenth-century expositions and world’s fairs boosted the economic and political achievements of the cities and countries in which they took place with elaborate displays of industrial, scientific, and artistic accomplishments. In the works for more than a decade, the Columbian Exposition was the second world’s fair hosted in
the United States. Its promoters hoped to build on the popular success of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had drawn more than ten million people.

  African American representation and participation in Chicago, however, was an open question. The 1876 centennial had neglected and demeaned African Americans. Barred from any form of participation, Philadelphia’s black population was not even eligible for employment on construction crews that built the fairground. The centennial’s only representation of African Americans was in a concession variously known as “The South” or “The Southern Restaurant.” The brainchild of a white businessman from Atlanta, it featured banjo-playing “old-time plantation ‘darkies’” singing odes to “Ole Virginny.” Meanwhile the post-emancipation Negro was represented by nothing more than a bronze statue titled The Freed Slave. Designed by a white artist, it did not necessarily display freedom as a good thing. According to the novelist William Dean Howells, at least, the statue portrayed “a most offensively Frenchy Negro, who had broken his chain, and spreading both his arms and legs abroad is rioting in declamation of something (I should say) from Victor Hugo; one longs to clap him back into hopeless bondage.”51 Wells was too young for the centennial, but Douglass must have remembered it well. Although not asked to address the crowd during the opening ceremonies, he had been invited to attend and offered a seat in the stands with other dignitaries. But when the day came, he was refused admittance by the Philadelphia police. He remained outside the centennial’s grounds until escorted in by Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York.