To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  A veteran reformer, by 1888 Impey had visited the United States three times. During her travels there, she had developed personal ties to a network of sympathetic American writers and leaders that included many of Wells’s friends and allies. When Wells first arrived in Street, the two women must have spent some time just catching up on the health and welfare of common acquaintances such as T. Thomas Fortune, Albion Tourgée, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Frances Harper, and of course Helen and Frederick Douglass. Never married, and affluent enough to pursue her “social reform work” full time, Impey had chosen “a life of independence” and political activism over any domestic alternative—choices that may have provided her with another connection with Wells.

  Moreover, Wells must have been gratified to learn that even before her arrival, Impey had already begun to make herself known as a fearless opponent of lynching. Before the 1890s, lynching, which was never practiced in Britain, was known there as a form of “‘frontier justice’ committed by isolated communities that lacked access to an effective legal system.” As the historian Sarah L. Silkey notes, “British authors related their encounters with lynch mobs as colorful adventure stories about rural American folk-ways.”77 Even the 1891 lynching of eleven Sicilians in New Orleans, which received widespread coverage in the European press, did not clarify matters. A mob massacre of a group of alleged Mafiosi on trial for murdering the New Orleans police chief, it received attention largely for the diplomatic crisis it provoked between the United States and Italy.78

  By contrast, Impey’s Anti-Caste drew attention to racially motivated lynchings as early as the late 1880s. Intent on exposing the evils of racism, Impey filled her paper with information drawn from a wide variety of international as well as national sources. Anti-Caste chronicled lynchings such as the murder of eight black men who were tied to a tree and shot in Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1889.79 The Barnwell massacre was a naked display of white power designed to suppress black self-assertion in a still “moderately Republican” part of the state. Two of the victims were accused of killing their landlord, and six were charged with the murder of the son of the plantation owner for whom they worked.80 The Barnwell lynchers were never brought to trial, reported a horrified “Negro Professor at a Southern University” in a letter that Impey published in Anti-Caste. “People read of the South and think that they know all about it, but they know nothing of the grievances we have to endure.”81

  Impey committed herself to publicizing the evils of lynching in Anti-Caste. Shortly before Wells’s visit, she hit upon a dramatic way of doing so. In January 1893, she shocked Anti-Caste’s readership by opening the journal with a photograph of a lynching that took place near Clanton, Alabama. A reproduction of the postcard that Albion Tourgée had supplied, it featured a dead black youth hanging from a tree surrounded by a jubilant white mob whose members included a number of small children. Horrifying on its own, the appalling image was all the more shocking as a grisly souvenir manufactured to commemorate the mob violence that had just taken place. Moreover, Impey also reproduced the chilling inscription one of the lynchers had written on the back: “This S-O-B was hung at Clanton, Ala. Friday Aug 21st, ’91 for murdering a little [white] boy in cold blood for 35¢ in cash.”82 Impey’s use of the image on the postcard dramatized the brutality of lynching to powerful effect. It contrasted the “shameless satisfaction on the faces of the men” in the photograph with the “innocent wonder of those of the children,” a spectacle that Impey’s caption explained by noting, “The white men are teaching the children how an accused negro ought to be treated,—no trial—no defence.”83 On reading Anti-Caste when she got to Britain, Wells was evidently impressed by the result; she went on to include the same photograph and inscription in two of her own publications, The Reason Why (1894) and A Red Record (1895).

  Postcard of lynching at Clanton, Alabama, August 1891. On the right is the back of the card, complete with its prolynching message.

  A like-minded colleague, Impey also proved an excellent host, whose arrangements helped make Wells well known in Britain. Impey’s collaborator Isabelle Mayo was equally supportive and had secured several lecture dates for Wells in Scotland. More affluent and better known than Impey, Mayo would go on to become a member of the Woman’s Political and Social Union—a suffragist organization—having already made her name as a writer. Serialized in the religious press, the books she wrote under her pseudonym, Edward Garrett, stressed the womanly ideals of “morality and self-sacrifice,” and usually featured, as one reviewer put it, “good, kind, wise women, who seem to be sent into the world to put things straight and lift everyone to a higher plane of existence.”84

  Described by her young American visitor as an “asylum for East Indians,” Mayo’s Aberdeen home was the first stop on Wells’s lecture tour. There, Wells and Impey received a warm welcome from not only Mayo but her boarders, who included two men from Ceylon, a thirty-year-old dentist named Dr. George Ferdinands and a young relative of his who was studying in Britain; and a German music teacher. All “three protégés of Mrs. Mayo threw themselves wholeheartedly into the work of helping make preparations for our campaign,” Wells later remembered. The multicultural group spent a “happy two weeks…writing letters, arranging meetings, seeing the press, and helping to mail out ten thousand copies of Anti-Caste”—Impey having prepared a special issue in Wells’s honor, which announced her schedule and promoted her talks. The special issue also announced the organization of the Society for the Recognition of the Universal Brotherhood of Man (SRUBM)—an antiracist organization that “regarded lynchings and other forms of brutal justice inflicted on the weaker communities of the world as having their root in race prejudice.”85

  Picking up where the abolitionist movement left off, the SRUBM reaffirmed the Christian ideal of human fellowship that had once led a British abolitionist to coin the mottos “Am I not a man and a brother?” and “Am I not a woman and a sister?” Likewise, Wells’s British lectures consistently appealed to Britain’s abolitionist heritage. In her autobiography, Wells recalled presenting British audiences with the “same heart stirring episodes which first gained me the sympathy and support of my New York friends,” which “needed no embellishment or oratory from me.”86 But discussions of her visit published in Scottish and English newspapers suggest that she pursued a far more sophisticated and strategic approach to wooing the British public. Working in collaboration with Impey, Wells reframed her antilynching campaign for English audiences, transforming it into a revival of Britain’s glorious antislavery movement. Although critical of British imperial regimes in India, Africa, and elsewhere, the Quaker radicals in Impey’s circle had long “centered their radicalism on a notion of England’s past as a fount of liberty and justice, and on a particular ‘English’ way of thinking.” Wells’s antilynching work presented a similar view of Britain.87

  Whereas her American lectures frequently discussed lynching and Jim Crow as a betrayal of “American institutions,” in Britain Wells presented conditions in the American South as a betrayal of abolition.88 Wells began her lectures with a description of “how the troubles of the colored people did not end…at the close of the Civil War.” Since then, “the Negroes had been terrorized into abstaining from voting, and the legislation had all tended toward the social degradation and exclusion of the colored people.” Freedom was “mocked in the country that boasts herself the freest in the world,” Wells told Scottish audiences in Aberdeen, Huntly, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. During the English portion of her lecture tour, the parallels Wells drew between antislavery and antilynching grew ever more explicit. “England has shown America her duty in the past,” she told a Newcastle audience, and “will do so again.” And when a Birmingham journalist protested “being expected to give my attention to matters of municipal detail…in a civilized country at great distance,” Wells defended her decision to protest the Memphis lynching and other “American atrocities” abroad with an eloquent appeal to England’s historic role in the
antislavery movement. At a time when “the press and the pulpit of our country remains silent on these continuing outrages,” African Americans had no recourse but to appeal to the people of Great Britain. “The moral agencies at work in Great Britain did much for the final overthrow of chattel slavery. They can in a like manner pray, write, preach, talk and act against civil and industrial slavery; against the hanging, shooting and burning alive of a powerless race.”89

  Wells’s approach was effective, garnering her large and enthusiastic audiences. “Miss Wells has made an impression on the minds of thousands (perhaps ten thousand direct—beside those who read press accounts),” Catherine Impey wrote in an exultant letter to Albion Tourgée. Her arguments inspired “‘leading newspapers of the United Kingdom’ to issue ‘ringing and outspoken editorials’ against lynching.” Now a veteran public speaker, Wells clearly captivated her British listeners. Impey struggled to capture the exact character of Wells’s appeal: “with great simplicity & directness & with a burning intensity of feelings well controlled—it was the most convincing kind of speaking—it sounded so intensely genuine & real—There was no attempt at oratory—no straining for effects—a persecuted suffering woman came to lay her case before an impartial jury.”90 However, despite a “splendid audience” in Birmingham and “wonderfully interesting meetings” in Manchester, Wells’s first British trip was cut short before her appeals to the British public could have the impact that they would later achieve.91

  After Wells left Manchester, her organizational arrangements collapsed as a result of a bitter conflict between her two hosts that led Mayo to withdraw her support. The falling-out between Catherine Impey and Isabelle Mayo had nothing to do with Wells, though it had its genesis in the “happy two weeks” all three women had spent in Mayo’s Aberdeen home. During that time, Catherine Impey had developed strong feelings for Mayo’s protégé, Dr. George Ferdinands. As Wells later recalled the story, the British woman was confident that her affection was returned, and therefore shared her feelings with Ferdinands in a letter written shortly thereafter, “taking this advance step because she knew he hesitated to do so because he was of the darker race.” He need hesitate no longer, she told him: “she had written her family acquainting them with the state of affairs, and telling them to prepare to receive him as her husband and that she rejoiced to give this proof to the world of the theories she had approved—the equality of the brotherhood of man.”92

  Unfortunately for Impey, her letter came as a complete surprise to Dr. Ferdinands, who “had never dreamed of her in any such connections as her letter indicated.” Her declaration to Ferdinands was “a mortifying blunder,” Impey later admitted in a letter to her friend Albion Tourgée. She had misinterpreted, she noted ruefully, the young dentist’s devotion to “our movement (& myself as its rather careworn founder)” as something more. Meanwhile, Impey’s embarrassment was soon compounded when Ferdinands chose to forward the letter to Mayo in Edinburgh, where she and Wells were hard at work “planning for the future.” Outraged by the letter, Mayo summoned Impey to Edinburgh to dress her down and demand that she “withdraw from the work” immediately. She also expected Wells to abandon her collaboration with Impey. Wells, however, saw no reason why she and her collaborators could not continue working together as planned. To be sure, Impey had “fallen in love with Dr. Ferdinands, and had been indiscreet enough to tell him so,” but the “incident need not be known by anyone but ourselves” or “harm our work.”93

  Why Mayo refused to consider this solution is unclear. Still furious at Impey, she warned Wells that “Miss Impey was the type of maiden lady who used such work as an opportunity to meet and make advances toward men; that if we went on, she was likely to write such letters to others who might strike her fancy and throw suspicion and ridicule on our cause.” And when Wells doubted this prediction, Mayo told her that Impey was a “nymphomaniac.” The meaning of this term was initially lost on the sexually naive Wells. But even after Mayo had shocked her by explaining what it meant, Wells remained unwilling to “quit Miss Impey,” as Mayo demanded. A longtime political ally to people of color, Impey had made Wells’s British trip possible and introduced her to Mayo. Impey might have made a “mistake” in declaring her affections for Ferdinands, but it was a mistake she was unlikely to repeat, Wells concluded. One suspects that Wells was also troubled by the vituperative tone of Mayo’s attack on Impey. She “had never heard one woman talk to another as she did,” she recalled in her autobiography, “nor the scorn and withering sarcasm with which she characterized her. Poor Miss Impey was no match for her.”94

  In the long run, Wells’s sympathy for Impey would cost her Mayo’s support—a loss no doubt mitigated by Ida’s continuing unease with the tone and character of Mayo’s charges, which only became more expansive and vituperative over time. Mayo was a “stern upright Calvinist,” according to Wells, and a notably unforgiving one. Her attack on Impey long outlasted their collaboration. Intent on driving Impey out of British and American reform circles, Mayo, between 1893 and 1894, circulated news of Impey’s ill-considered letter wide and far, and also publicly accused the reformer of “mental instability.”95 Neither Impey nor Mayo left diaries chronicling the day-to-day interactions that led to their quarrel, leaving questions that cannot be resolved. Did something actually occur between Impey and Ferdinands in Aberdeen, and was Mayo jealous? Or did Mayo’s racial liberalism simply not extend to interracial relationships?

  At the very least, it is clear that Mayo’s defamation of Impey insinuated that a white woman would have to be literally crazy to wish to marry a person of color—a claim that ran counter to Wells’s conviction that America’s laws against intermarriage helped foster lynching by making consensual relationships between white women and black men illegal. Mayo’s reform credentials did not preclude such views, as much of Mayo’s fiction suggests that she had what some scholars have termed a “maternalist” approach to reform.96 The legacy of an abolitionist movement in which benevolent Christian white women campaigned to free powerless slaves, maternalism did not require its adherents to see oppressed people of color as social or racial equals. Instead, especially in the late nineteenth century, it was fueled by a reform ethos that stressed female sexual purity as the source of white women’s superiority over both white men and people of color—who were deemed primitive and oversexed in Victorian racial science. Accordingly, a sexually aggressive act such as Impey’s pursuit of Ferdinands challenged the image of white women at the core of maternalist reform—calling Impey’s mental health into question.

  By the time Wells returned to England in 1894, Mayo was actually saying as much. Writing in Fraternity, a new magazine published by the SRUBM, Mayo published an article titled “The Female Accusation,” in which she contended that false accusations against black men by white women were one of the causes of lynching. Contrary to Wells, she did not trace these accusations back to social sanctions against consensual relationships between white women and black men. Instead, she attributed them to the “morbid peculiarities…of women who will ‘fancy’ anything which will give them a sensation and a little passing notoriety.” “These female sufferers of this diseased egotism are not necessarily young and flighty. They are often elderly, dowdy and disappointed,” Mayo wrote in a vicious and thinly veiled attack on Impey. Such women caused trouble between the races by imagining that “men fell in love with them” and were one source of the “female accusation” behind many American lynchings.97 Although focused on Impey, Mayo’s charges hint at racist beliefs that may well have troubled Wells, who believed that interracial relationships were a fact of life. Certainly, she cannot have appreciated Mayo’s conviction that white women had to be mentally ill to even desire such unions.

  Caught in the cross fire, and dependent on both women to facilitate her work, Wells did not challenge Mayo’s view of Impey. But she refused to jettison Impey on the grounds that Impey’s letter to Ferdinands was a private missive that should have remained th
at way. Wells’s remarkably evenhanded account of the Impey-Mayo conflict in her autobiography reserved its most explicit moral judgment for Dr. Ferdinands. “I often wonder,” she wrote, “if he ever realized his mistake in passing on the offending letter instead of destroying it.”98

  Wells’s lingering disapproval of Ferdinands’s mistake is not surprising given that Wells soon found herself on a ship back to the United States as a result of his actions. Both Wells and Impey had been scheduled to travel to London to lobby on behalf of the antilynching cause at the many annual meetings of reform organizations that routinely took place in Britain’s capital city during the month of May. But their plans had to be abandoned when Mayo threatened to withhold the funding she had promised. Wells lacked the funds to disagree, and the result was disastrous. Without Impey’s connections, the American reformer was not yet “well known enough to secure entrance…at these important meetings.” Ironically, only the British Women’s Temperance Association, an organization that Impey had abandoned on account of its failure to oppose racial segregation in its U.S. affiliates, opened up its platform to Wells. And when called on to speak at their meeting Wells found that she was expected to talk about temperance. Undeterred, she insisted on speaking about lynching, inspiring at least one of their affiliates to adopt an antilynching resolution. But she also realized her trip was over. “My duty was to tell a story whenever an opening had been made, so when time came for no more meetings it was the appropriate hour for me to return.”99