To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  Undeterred and perhaps not entirely surprised, Wells did not even consider leaving. “I have come abroad to give 3 months of my time to work,” Wells wrote Frederick Douglass as she scrambled to reorganize her plans, “and I am going to do it.”60 She had been invited to report on her visit for Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean, which gave her an unprecedented opportunity to chronicle her antilynching activities as a correspondent for a white newspaper, and Wells was determined to do so. She also had plans to sell Southern Horrors—which she and Edwards had repackaged for a British audience under the title American Atrocities—and hoped to cover her expenses that way.

  Fortunately, her first speaking engagement was arranged in advance and soon led to others. On March 12, Wells addressed an audience of 1,500 at the Pembroke Chapel in Liverpool. Her host was Charles F. Aked, an energetic young Baptist minister who had built one of the largest congregations in that city. On her first visit, Aked had been skeptical of Wells—so much so that he had refused a proposal to let her address his congregation, “because he didn’t know me or believe what I said was true.” But a visit to Chicago for the world’s fair shortly thereafter changed his mind. There, Aked followed “the sensational” newspaper coverage of the Bardwell, Kentucky, lynching. Some weeks later came another report: “the Kentucky mob had lynched the wrong man!” Reading this “under the shadow of the statue of liberty” in Chicago’s Jackson Park, Aked realized that “what Miss Wells said was true.” Contrite, he was happy to host her on her return visit. And on learning that her arrangements with Mayo and Edwards had fallen through, Aked and his wife opened their home to her. Their Liverpool house became her new “headquarters” and the Akeds her close “friends and ardent supporters.” What was more, the couple, Wells remembered, “seemed to know that I did not like, or rather had no confidence in white people, and they set themselves at work to uproot my natural distrust and suspicion. The queen of England herself could not have been treated with more consideration than I was during the course of my stay with them.”61

  Also crucial to the success of Wells’s second tour was help from Catherine Impey, who was still working for the SRUBM behind the scenes. Although now marginalized by Mayo’s public criticism, Impey’s family contacts gave her entrée into important Quaker reform circles. Her cousin Helen Clark would host Wells in Somerset, and Quaker relatives of Clark’s organized dates for Wells in Bristol.62 However, with Edwards ill, Impey in disgrace, and Mayo refusing to have anything to do with her, Wells’s reform credentials were once more in question.

  Aked had introduced her to his congregation as “accredited to the friends of progress by the Hon. Frederick Douglass.” The minister later suggested that Wells write and ask Douglass to supply him with “a letter of introduction in case there was ever any necessity for it.”63 But when Wells passed this request on to Douglass, his reply was frosty. He supplied Aked with a tepid letter and fired off a curt note to Wells. “I see you are already advertised as accredited to England by me,” he noted, clearly not happy to be embroiled in a conflict about which he knew very little. “I had not supposed that, being invited to England, you needed my endorsement…Will you oblige me by telling me frankly who invited you to spend three months in England and what assurances they gave you of support while on this mission?”64

  Wells was devastated. “With all the discouragements I have received,” she told him in a six-page letter that supplied a blow-by-blow account of her interactions with Mayo, “I have never felt so like giving up since I received your very cool and cautious letter this morning.” She had not thought to ask him for a letter before she left, she explained, because it “never occurred to me that I would need letters of introduction as I was coming as I did before—on invitation.”65 By way of proof, Wells enclosed the letter she had received from Mayo outlining the SRUBM’s speaking invitation. Wells’s letter and its enclosure satisfied Douglass, whose doubts about her mission seem to have been partially fueled by the fact that Wells had borrowed twenty-five dollars from him to help pay for her voyage to England, and was now seeking additional sponsorship, which made him wonder how much other support she actually had for her mission. Moreover, his doubts may have also reflected the endless bad press that Wells received in the United States—much of which described her as a huckster who promoted antilynching for personal gain. But he was reassured by her letter. By May, Douglass was in her corner again, and wrote several letters on her behalf.

  Douglass’s faith in Wells could only have been confirmed by the reception she received among his old antislavery friends in Britain. The Quaker hosts that Impey had enlisted on her behalf included members of abolitionist families that had once supported Douglass himself. Kinship ties linked many of them to Impey, so they may well have appreciated both Wells’s cause and her loyalty to Impey; and they were quick to commend her work to Douglass. Moreover, in doing a favor for Douglass’s wife, Helen Pitts, Wells managed to make a particular friend of Ellen Richardson, an elderly Quaker who lived in Newcastle, a port city that was once a hotbed of antislavery sentiment. Richardson’s acquaintance with Douglass went all the way back to the 1840s, when Douglass had visited England as a fugitive slave. Richardson and her sister-in-law, Ana Richardson, had raised the money needed to purchase Douglass from the white family who still owned him, thereby securing his freedom. Douglass never forgot their kindness. Neither did his wife, Helen Pitts, who asked Wells to pay a thank-you call on her behalf to her husband’s benefactor, should she travel to Newcastle. Wells obliged. Ellen Richardson, very impressed by Wells, sat down that day to send Douglass a favorable account of his protégée.66 Thereafter, the older woman also followed Wells’s tour in the British press, telling Douglass that Wells reminded her of him as a young man. “The child of slave parents and yet can command the attention of high and low,” she wrote as Wells was finishing up her visit. “It is astonishing to me how Miss Wells has made her way here—people like her simple earnest way of stating her cause.”67

  Wells “made her way into the hearts of our editors,” Richardson told Douglass. Among other things, Richardson must have noticed that British journalists never failed to describe Wells’s appearance, which they found both enormously appealing and racially “odd.” “She is the very notable product of that mixing of the blood which is proceeding so rapidly in the United States of America,” The Daily Chronicle (London) noted, going on to explain: “she claims relationship with the red Indian, the negro, and the Anglo-Saxon races. She is under thirty years of age, very vivacious in manner, and decidedly good-looking.” Another paper was more succinct, describing Wells as “a good looking mulatto, dressed in uncommonly good-taste.”68

  Wells took her various accolades in stride. Thirty-two years old in 1894, she welcomed the British impression that she was much younger. Indeed, she soon began subtracting several years from her age when she chronicled her “28 years in the South.” Moreover, she took little offense at the complimentary British discussions of her exotic appearance, which certainly improved upon American references to her as a “saddle colored Sapphire.” However, when one commentator labeled her black blood as a “taint,” she objected: “Taint, indeed: I tell you, if I have any taint to be ashamed of in myself, it is the taint of white blood!”69

  Aware that British fascination with her looks reflected a preoccupation with race mixture that could easily shade into disdain, Wells did not downplay inquiries into her background but instead used them to drive home her point. Blacks had not sought miscegenation, Wells told a British reporter who confessed to being “dead set against it.” The color line was routinely violated by white men, whose public disdain for race mixture had not prevented them from creating a mulatto population. Their actions had created the mixed ancestry that the British found so notable in the slave-born Wells. Moreover, “even today…the white man is continually mixing his blood with the black; it is only when he seeks to do so honorably that it becomes a crime.”70 A steadfast focus on her antilynching argument also
allowed Wells to both capitalize on and transcend the more prurient attention she received.71

  Wells used the public attention to address the difficulties of denouncing lynching to British audiences. She visited Britain at a time when the “white slavery” of working-class girls in London brothels was a major concern in the nation’s news. In England, much like the United States, Wells had to challenge conceptions of lynching as an appropriate punishment for sexual aggression against white women. As a petite and feminine woman of color who had been threatened with lynching herself, Wells was living evidence that would-be lynchers did not limit their racial violence to men. Moreover, her lectures challenged the lynching-for-rape myth with both the story of her exile from Memphis and accounts of white mob violence against other African American women. Indeed, Wells used recent examples of such violence to powerful effect. On March 21, 1894, she told a Liverpool audience that just before she left the United States, she had seen an account of a colored woman who was found hanging from a tree in Little Rock, Arkansas, and had since learned of the still more horrible lynching of another black woman. In Manchester, she listened with tears rolling down her cheeks as a member of her audience read an account of a “woman in San Antonio, Texas, who had been boxed up in a barrel with nails driven through the sides and rolled down a hill until she was dead.”72

  Wells used such powerful stagecraft both to “argue the black female body into consciousness” and to draw attention to lynching as an atrocity that surpassed even the evils of white slavery. A product of the “civil and industrial slavery” that still persisted in the American South, lynching victimized black women as surely as did the domestic violence associated with chattel slavery, Wells argued, reclaiming the abolitionist mantle worn by reformers who had sought to eradicate “white slavery.” In doing so, she also offered British reformers the chance to reclaim the glory days of their antislavery campaign.

  As during her first visit, Wells missed few opportunities to link antilynching to antislavery and implore her British hosts to once again lead Americans to justice. Appealing to her hosts’ sense of national pride, Wells drew unfavorable contrasts between the United States and Britain, while at the same time offering British audiences a short course in American race relations—a set of rhetorical moves she shared with the American readers of her Daily Inter Ocean column. Although once “the greatest cotton market in the world,” she told both audiences, Liverpool had “redeemed herself from slavery.” In Liverpool and other British cities, “a colored person can ride in any sort of conveyance in any part of the country without being insulted; stop in any hotel or be accommodated in any restaurant one wishes without being refused with contempt; wander into any picture gallery, lecture room, concert hall, theater or church and receive only the most courteous treatment from officials and fellow sightseers.” Blacks knew no such freedoms in the United States, where they were instead subject to “lynching atrocities” that went unchecked and unpunished. Indeed, Wells was forced to air her people’s grievances abroad rather than at home because her race could “not get a hearing in the United States.” With the “press and pulpit of the country practically silent…the society for the recognition of the brotherhood of man in England and Scotland” offered African Americans their only opening.73

  Like her abolitionist predecessors, Wells aimed to mobilize the British press and pulpit to address their American counterparts. As she traveled through the English cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and London, her Daily Inter Ocean headlines relayed much of the message she sought to get across. “England Sympathizes with the African Race,” one noted, while others declared, “Audiences Are Shocked” and “Cordial Receptions from Churches of All Denominations—Horrified at Cruelties Perpetrated.”74 But the progressive readers of the Daily Inter Ocean were not the only Americans she wished to reach. So she courted British audiences that could spread the message beyond the confines of her existing readership at home. Again borrowing the tactics of the antislavery movement, Wells appealed to British editors, churches, and reform organizations to denounce lynching.

  Thanks to her popularity with British editors, by the time Wells reached London, the press coverage was “beyond all expectation.” “I have quite lost count of the number of times I have been interviewed,” she told her Daily Inter Ocean readers.75 Featured in The Daily Chronicle, The Daily News, The Westminster Gazette, The Sun, The Star, The Echo, and many newspapers in other cities, her work was the subject of interviews, editorials, and lively discussion. Moreover, Wells made powerful contacts among British journalists, including Peter Clayden, the editor of London’s second largest paper, The Daily News. After attending one of Wells’s first talks in that city, Clayden’s wife insisted that Wells move into their London home rather than staying at a hotel. There Wells received additional assistance from a network of supporters who gathered in the Claydens’ breakfast room every morning to mail out copies of whatever favorable reports on her work had appeared in the British press to the most prominent U.S. politicians, religious leaders, and news organizations. Meanwhile, Wells continued to receive help with publicity from her Liverpool host, successfully enlisting Charles Aked “to introduce her ideas into conservative forums from which she was herself excluded.”76

  As a result of his influence, several important British monthlies condemned lynching without ever mentioning Wells herself. They were swayed by an article that Aked published in the prominent British monthly The Contemporary Review in June 1894, which seems to have been written with some help from Wells. Although framed for an English audience and published under Aked’s name, “The Race Problem in America” used Wells’s statistics and arguments without attribution and included an uncited passage by Wells in its central argument. “The demand of the Negro is for the most elementary justice,” Aked wrote, reiterating a statement Wells had supplied to The Daily Chronicle: “Make your laws as terrible as you like…but prove your criminal a criminal first. Hang, shoot, roast him, if you will—if American civilization demands this—but give him a trial first.”77

  Aked’s powerful essay elicited supportive columns in other important British monthlies such as The Spectator and The Economist, publications that had never covered Wells herself—knowingly, at any rate. As Sarah L. Silkey has pointed out, the “mutual respect and close working relationship” between Wells and Aked rule out any assumption that the minister used her words and ideas without her permission. Wells would name her firstborn son after Aked—a choice that illustrated her abiding admiration for a man whom she clearly never regarded as a plagiarist. “Instead, it would seem,” as Silkey suggests, that “Aked lent his name, reputation and white male British identity to give credibility to Wells’s ideas,…bringing her ideas before an audience that would not have heard them otherwise.” His success can be seen in the endorsement his views received in The Economist, a journal so conservative that its editors felt the need to reaffirm their support for white supremacy even as they denounced lynching. “Be it understood that we do not write as friends of the negro. The equality of the races does not exist.” America should move to eradicate lynching not “for the sake of the negro, but for that of their own countrymen, who cannot be good Republicans with the Lynch Law in their midst.”78

  Ironically, Wells had more trouble garnering antilynching resolutions from British churches and reform organizations than Aked had in securing the support of The Spectator. Her work garnered endorsements from the Baptist and Congregational Unions, the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, the Aborigine Protection Society, the British Women’s Temperance Association, and the “women members of the society of friends,” but many organizations proved unwilling to offer “substantive endorsements for action against lynching.” At issue, in some instances, were their ties to their American counterparts. Despite substantial support for Wells among British Unitarians, the National Conference of Unitarians refused to pass an antilynching resolution, with delegates to the denomination’s April meetin
g contesting Wells’s assertions about the complicity of American churches in lynching as “unjust” to their United States brethren. American churches might well be uninformed on the subject, maintained Brooke Hereford, one of the denomination’s defenders. “Miss W. says she has sent them [Northern clergy] her pamphlet,” he wrote fellow Unitarian William Axon. “What do pamphlets amount to these busy days?”79

  “I find the Christian bodies here less responsive by far than the press has been to the cry of the oppressed,” Wells told The Daily Chronicle (London) in May. She was clearly troubled to find that even in England she could not escape the influence of American Protestant leaders, who often served as apologists for lynching in the South.80 Fed up, she lashed out. In an article titled “Mr. Moody and Miss Willard,” Wells took on two of America’s best-known Protestant leaders, both of whom had strong support in the South. Internationally known evangelical minister Dwight L. Moody, who led a large congregation in Chicago, was a frequent and popular visitor to Britain. To Wells, however, he was an example of the American clergy’s failure to speak out against segregation and racial violence. As a young man, Moody had been a leading figure in the religious reconciliation between many of the American Protestant denominations that had divided over slavery. Ironically, it originated during the yellow fever epidemic that swept the South in 1878, killing both of Wells’s parents. A moment of spiritual crisis and renewal, the epidemic had reanimated the bonds between Southern and Northern Protestants, as well as fostering generous Northern aid to the South. The reconciliation, however, required Northern Protestants to abandon any criticism of Southern “method[s] of dealing with the Negro.” Moody did so. Like most white American clergy, he offered no critique of lynching even as his evangelical tours offered segregated revival meetings in the South.81