To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  Impey, who saw Wells off at Southampton, “blamed herself bitterly for the sudden ending of what promised so well.” But Wells never doubted that Impey “had been actuated by any but the purest motives and highest idealism”—an autobiographical recollection that is borne out by the facts that Wells and Impey remained fast friends through both her trips to England and Impey received an invitation to Wells’s wedding in 1895.100 Though eager not to burn bridges with either of her British sponsors, Wells consistently refused Mayo’s demands that she denounce Catherine Impey. Frustrated by Wells’s “ingratitude,” Mayo would go on to become a public critic of both women.101 Fortunately, when Wells returned to England in the spring of 1894 she would receive support from a variety of new friends and allies.

  5

  Capturing the Attention of the “Civilized World”

  “IDA WELLS, THE COLORED WOMAN WHO HAD BEEN COLLECTING in England to suppress the lynch law in the south, has returned to this country to visit the world’s fair,” an Atlanta Constitution editorial column noted on June 21, 1893. “If her funds hold out she will attend to the lynching business later, but she must have a frolic in Chicago first.”1 Although jarring, this studied insult from a white columnist testified to the success of Ida B. Wells’s British campaign. Before she left for England, both Wells and her cause went virtually unnoticed in the white press. But after several weeks of largely favorable coverage in the British press, Wells finally began to attract the attention of mainstream journalists in her own country. White Americans could ignore Wells when she addressed black audiences at home, but when she mobilized antilynching sentiment abroad she became much harder to overlook. Accordingly, Wells spent much of the mid-1890s working hard to rally international sentiment against lynching.

  With this end in view, on her return from Britain she proceeded immediately to Chicago, where the United States had invited “the civilized world” to come and celebrate “the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America” at the World’s Columbian Exposition. For Wells, of course, the exposition was less of a celebration of Columbus’s “discovery” than it was a chance to address the world in her home country. She would soon learn it was more effective to address her home country from abroad. The Chicago world’s fair attracted more than 27 million people and was hailed by white visitors as “a new era in the onward progress of [American] civilization.” Within the fair’s exhibits, however, African Americans were located largely outside that progress. Black American participation in the event was largely confined to a “Colored People’s Day,” while their African ancestors were displayed in “ethnological” exhibits designed to entertain visitors and document mankind’s primitive past. Wells was on hand to protest, along with Frederick Douglass and Chicago blacks such as Ferdinand Barnett. But their protests were largely lost on the fairgoers intent on enjoying such exhibits.

  So after the exposition closed in the fall of 1893, Wells looked to Britain again, despite the fact that her six months in Chicago had left her ready to resettle there for good. Willing to brave further collaboration with Mayo to finish the promising work she had begun among British reformers, she set sail for Liverpool once again in early 1894. Her collaboration with Mayo would not last long, but Wells’s second sojourn in Britain was otherwise a success, publicizing her antilynching campaign in both England and the United States, where Wells’s British lectures and publications were vilified in the white press and challenged by white leaders. Public denigration was the major means by which her American critics sought to silence her. It failed. Indeed, a rising chorus of attacks on her in American newspapers only served to publicize both her cause and career, making Wells a celebrity and transforming lynching into an enduring public issue.

  Denounced in The New York Times as a “nasty-minded mulatress,” Wells was more popular among English audiences, who proved more receptive to her message—and more respectful to Wells herself. The British antilynching movement she gave rise to “rippled back to the United States,” fostering a “transatlantic debate that linked the practice to Jim Crow racial segregation, exploitation, and discrimination.”2 Lynching did not end as a result of Wells’s efforts, and neither did Jim Crow. But her work would ensure that lynching no longer passed as “frontier justice” in the eyes of the world. Indeed, a long campaign to mobilize federal authority against lynching began shortly after her second British tour—with an unsuccessful U.S. House resolution to investigate the matter. Blocked by Southern politicians, Northern inertia, and the nation’s commitment to limit the federal government’s judicial authority over the states, federal antilynching legislation would never succeed, but lynching would no longer go uncontested among whites after Wells made her case to the world. Instead, many whites outside the South learned to deplore lynching, and Southern whites learned to deplore Wells.

  Storming the White City

  Despite the disappointing end to her British trip, Ida’s spirits were rejuvenated by an enjoyable ocean voyage home. No doubt relieved to escape the tensions between her quarreling British hosts, she had a far more pleasant time on her return voyage home than she had had on her way over. She remained in good health throughout the trip, having learned how to avoid seasickness from one of her fellow passengers (a “secret” which her autobiography does not divulge). Moreover, she also traveled in good company. The ship had “few if any Americans on board,” and thus she experienced little discrimination. Instead, she was befriended by a group of fifteen friendly young Englishmen, who became her primary travel companions.

  Like her, they were bound for the Chicago world’s fair. Many of them were Quakers, and several were familiar with Wells’s work from the English papers. Egalitarian in their outlook, Wells’s new friends “were as courteous and attentive to me as if my skin had been the fairest.” They helped her speed to her destination, accompanying her “almost all the way to Chicago,” and enlivening her journey throughout. Once in the United States, their gentlemanly treatment of Wells caused great consternation among American observers, which did not discourage Wells’s English friends in the least. On the contrary, “they seemed to take great pleasure in shocking onlookers with their courteous and respectable attention to me.” Wells was equally gratified by these cross-cultural exchanges, reporting that she “enjoyed it hugely, because I had never met any members of the white race who saw no reason why they should not extend to me the courtesy they would have offered to a lady of their own race.”3

  Wells’s journey also provided her with a hard-earned break from the grueling speaking and writing schedule she had kept up since leaving Memphis little more than a year earlier—which she would pick up again soon enough. Fun at the fair was, of course, not her objective there—The Atlanta Constitution’s insinuations to the contrary. Rather, she was anxious to salvage the protest pamphlet she and Douglass had planned. Progress on the project had languished in Wells’s absence, despite the fact that Frederick J. Loudin, a black musician and businessman who led the internationally renowned choir the Fisk Jubilee Singers, had lent his support to Wells’s and Douglass’s fund-raising efforts. As of February, Douglass, Loudin, and Wells had hoped to address the fair’s exclusion of African Americans’ cultural and economic contributions to the nation with “a carefully prepared pamphlet, setting forth the past and present condition of our people and their relation to American Civilization…printed in English, French, German and Spanish.”4 Designed to address an international audience, the pamphlet would be distributed at the fair itself, and simultaneously protest and remedy the lack of African American representation in its exhibits. But an April circular soliciting donations to publish the pamphlet had garnered little support—leaving Loudin and Douglass ready to abandon the project.

  Wells, by contrast, returned from Britain more certain than ever that the world’s fair provided African Americans with an important opportunity to put “our case before the public,” as she told Douglass. Open to the public between May 1 and October 31, 1893, the fair
was “in full blast” by the time Ida reached the United States in late June.5 Determined to have the pamphlet in circulation as soon as possible once her ship docked in Manhattan, Wells “sped through New York,” according to The Indianapolis Freeman, “like a comet, if not of ‘tremendous size’ of great velocity,” bent on getting there in time “to get out that ‘pamphlet.’”6 By the summer of 1893, Wells was increasingly alone in her unwavering commitment to the project. From 1890 onward, African Americans had protested their exclusion from the fair’s planning, staffing, and exhibits to little avail. But even after it opened, there was little consensus in the black community about how African Americans ought to be represented, and whether a protest pamphlet was appropriate.

  At issue were disputes about how to best represent the status of African Americans within the nation’s body politic. Long before the protest pamphlet idea came up, black leaders were divided over whether the race should be featured in a separate exhibit or represented by a commissioner who would be responsible for securing a proper representation “of the arts, sciences and industries of the colored people of the United States” in the respective exhibit halls.7 In the end, however, black Americans were shut out of both options by white leaders who offered little support for black participation of any kind, citing disputes within the African American community over black participation as one of their rationales. When a congressional bill was proposed to fund a separate colored exhibit, lawmakers cited black objections to such an exhibit as one argument against the measure. No such appropriation was necessary, they concluded, “in view of the fact that the development of the colored race could not be differentiated from the development of the whole population of the United States.”8

  In practical terms, however, this disingenuous resolution provided blacks with absolutely no representation in the fair. For although the national commission appointed by President Benjamin Harrison to work with Chicago’s municipal leaders in planning the event included commissioners from every state and territory, it had no African American members. As a last-minute concession to African American interests, Harrison later added one alternate commissioner, a St. Louis educator named Hale G. Parker. But his appointment was another blow to African American hopes. The principal of St. Louis’s public colored school, Parker enrolled his own children in the city’s white public schools. Moreover, his own racial identification was somewhat uncertain—or so his critics claimed. “Parker always denied that he has Negro blood in his veins,” charged one black paper.9 Identity aside, Parker had little power to increase black representation at the fair. The American exhibits were chosen by state screening committees whose membership was no more diverse than the fair’s national leadership. Accordingly, although officials encouraged African Americans to propose exhibits, virtually all of their submissions were rejected. In the South, where the majority of America’s black population lived, such rejections were a matter of policy. Southern officials, as Parker would later explain, did not wish to encourage ‘the social equality of exhibits,’” or support the “commercial brotherhood of their producers.”10

  Black women’s efforts to secure representation at the Columbian Exposition’s Women’s Building were equally fruitless. One of the great innovations of the exposition, the Women’s Building was the first international exhibit of its kind. “Never before had the United States government positioned women as national representatives at an international event,” notes the historian T. J. Boisseau.11 A result of intensive lobbying on the part of Susan B. Anthony and other female reformers, the Women’s Building honored the history and achievement of women in general and American women in particular. Moreover, by late 1890 it offered the last venue available for African American representation at the fair. African Americans hoped that white women, having struggled for representation, would be sympathetic and “a helpful influence for colored women.”12 But the Women’s Building Board of Lady Managers, appointed by President Harrison in the spring of 1890, was no more diverse than the rest of the fair’s leadership: it was composed of 116 white women from every state in the Union. African American women hoped the board would be willing to remedy his oversight.

  Accordingly, they formed two lobbying associations dedicated to adding a black woman to the board: the Women’s Columbian Association (WCA) and the Women’s Columbian Auxiliary Association (WCAA), which differed only as to whether the board’s African American appointment should develop a separate exhibit dedicated to black women or pursue more integrated representation. But once again differences within the black community over what constituted appropriate African American representation provided white fair officials with a pretext for excluding blacks altogether. No black board member would be appointed, announced Bertha Palmer, the Chicago socialite who presided over the Board of Lady Managers: “the colored people were divided into factions and it would be impolite to recognize either faction.”13 A two-year lobbying campaign led by “representative Negro Women of the United States” did little to change matters. In January 1893, the Board of Lady Managers finally responded to scores of petitions and letters from black women by appointing an African American woman, Mrs. A. M. Curtis, to organize the African American exhibits, but Curtis soon resigned from “a post that was farcical given the few exhibits and the uncooperativeness of the Chief of Installation.”14

  As Curtis’s complaint indicated, white women’s exhibits predominated in the Women’s Building, which emphasized representations of European queens in honor of Columbus’s sponsor Queen Isabella of Spain. The representation of women of color was relegated to a mural on “Primitive Womanhood.” Lest visitors miss the point, a display of women’s “rude arts” featured three types of modern savagery: “the [Native] American, the Negroid, and the Mayolo-Polynesian.”15 Although not the most democratic of figures, the white queen appealed to the fair’s organizers as an imperial symbol of the power and freedom modern women enjoyed, especially in comparison to their primitive inferiors—African American women included. “We covet not titles or rank in this land of ours, where every woman may be a queen,” proclaimed the Board of Lady Managers as it unveiled a portrait of its president, Bertha Palmer, wearing a tiara and carrying a scepter. But “when the women of America choose a leader and representative she is not only a queen, but queenly.”16 Left out of this latter-day understanding of American women as monarchs were, of course, the black women whom Palmer refused to represent.17

  The actions of Palmer and many other exposition officials ensured a thoroughly white world’s fair, which may be another reason why Wells remained adamantly committed to a pamphlet protesting the fair’s exclusion of African Americans. The fair’s popularity no doubt also contributed. It succeeded beyond its organizers’ dreams, attracting a larger audience than any previous world’s fair. “Victorian America’s equivalent to the modern-day Olympics and Disney World rolled into one,” according to historian Robert W. Rydell, the fair was all the more frustrating to blacks on account of its success.18 African Americans were “not a part of it,” Frederick Douglass complained, while another black fairgoer lamented: “There is a lump which comes up in my throat as I pass around through all this…and see little to represent us here.”19 Moreover, the segregationist spirit that shaped the fair only became more obvious as the summer of 1893 approached. As a concession to black protests over lack of representation, fair officials announced that they would hold a special black Jubilee Day on August 25, 1893. Also known as “Colored People’s Day,” it was the brainchild of a delegation of blacks from Boston, who had appealed to the World’s Columbian Exposition authorities to set aside a special day in commemoration of “African American cultural achievements since emancipation.” Although not unlike similar days that fair officials had set aside for white ethnic groups, Colored People’s Day infuriated many black leaders, who saw it as an insulting and segregationist response to African American demands for representation at the fair.

  Wells was among them. She had objected to the id
ea of a separate day for black people even before she left for England. And on her return she was horrified to find the event designated as “the colored people’s day, a day of ‘glorious jubilee.’” Among other things, this designation seemed to “certify to the world that the colored people of the United States are content with the treatment accorded to them as citizens of the great Republic in several states of the American Union.”20 Other critics were less decorous: “No ‘Nigger Day,’ No ‘Nigger Pamphlet,’” proclaimed The Indianapolis Freeman in March 1893, linking this new plan to the Wells-Douglass pamphlet project in a way that further complicated the challenges that Wells and Douglass faced in soliciting black support for their publication. Both the separate pamphlet and the separate day, the Freeman maintained, promised to draw “a lowering and invidious attention to the Negro from ‘representatives of the civilized world.’”21 Blacks would be demeaned in front of foreigners and subject to additional American prejudice as a consequence. Meanwhile, other opponents of the pamphlet questioned whether it was worth the expenditures it would require: “The race have too much in pamphlets and too little in their pockets,” The Bee (Washington, D.C.) lamented.22

  Objections to the proposed day were not universal, however. Frederick Douglass supported both the day and the pamphlet—which he saw as having similar ends. Highly annoyed by the Freeman’s use of the word “nigger,” he fired off a letter to the Midwestern paper that admonished both its language and its arguments. “No Brother Freeman, we must not be silent,” he thundered. “We have but one weapon unimpaired and that weapon is speech, and not to use this and use this freely, is treason to the oppressed.”23 Although initially ambivalent about Colored People’s Day, Douglass had agreed to preside over the August 25 celebration because it also offered African Americans a public forum at the fair. His decision came after several classically trained black musicians, including his grandson Joseph Douglass, managed to persuade him to lend his support to a showcase of young black artists at the fair’s Festival Hall during the Colored People’s Day ceremonies. In exile at his post in the Haitian pavilion, Douglass clearly welcomed a chance to preside over his own people—if only for a day.24 As Douglass’s biographer William McFeeley notes, America’s premier black leader still “had sufficient vanity to look forward to being the centerpiece of celebration.”25