To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  Booker T. Washington, c. 1890

  Washington’s advocacy of black self-help and industrial education reassured whites in both the North and the South that the Negro problem was largely the responsibility of the Negro. Unlike Douglass and Wells, the educator from Alabama did not rebuke the white South for using a combination of disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and racial violence to all but reenslave African Americans. Nor did he ask white Northerners to intervene in Southern affairs. Instead, he maintained that African Americans did not “command respect” among whites because they did not “amount to anything.”5 Instead of appealing to Northern whites for help, blacks needed to embrace hard work and a modest education designed to prepare them for industrial jobs. Not surprisingly, Washington’s message proved far more attractive to white Americans than Wells’s demands for equal rights and protection from white violence.

  Washington’s doctrine of accommodation proved immensely popular among whites, who acclaimed him black America’s spokesman in the fall of 1895, not long after Douglass’s death. Before then the little-known head of a small educational institution in a backwater state, Washington catapulted to fame as a spokesman for blacks after receiving tremendous white acclaim for a speech he delivered on September 16, 1895, at the opening of Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition—the South’s own world’s fair. In what would become known as his Atlanta Compromise Speech, Washington never even acknowledged the racial violence that had driven Wells and many other black Americans north. Instead, he counseled blacks to remain in the South and abandon any pursuit of social or civil equality in favor of bettering themselves by working in the South’s fields and factories. The segregated black audience who caught Washington’s speech from the balcony of the Exhibit Hall might have questioned whether blacks could prosper in a region where segregation barred most African Americans from well-paying jobs. But he offered whites an alluring vision of a profitable New South, built on the backs of a tractable and politically powerless black labor force.

  Indeed, Washington’s speech was a welcome contrast to the “dreadful assertions” made by Ida B. Wells, one local white woman noted after attending his lecture. “I thought yesterday as I listened to the dignified, logical and splendid speech of that negro man how different would be the influence should he take the lecture platform.”6 Her words would prove prophetic. Washington would soon have a distinctive influence on his race. His Atlanta Compromise Speech in 1895 ushered in an era in African American history sometimes known as Booker T. Washington’s age of accommodation.

  From the latter half of the 1890s to his death in 1915, Washington was the nation’s best-known and most widely respected black leader. He advised several presidents and controlled most of the white philanthropy and political patronage allotted to his race as well as much of the black press. The moderate face of black leadership, he was so prominent among whites that his compromising politics have sometimes obscured the historical record embedded in the complaints of his more radical black contemporaries. But the uphill battles against lynching and Jim Crow waged by Wells and other black activists during this period should caution us against thinking about African American accommodation as a reality. Even Washington, as it turned out, did not fully support his own program. Throughout his career he secretly funneled money into African American legal challenges to Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, while offering no public comment on these issues.

  Moreover, even as Washington was courting favor among whites, Wells was still using the protest tactics pioneered by the abolitionists to draw public attention to an unpopular cause. Uncompromising in her politics, Wells was incapable of the diplomacy, duplicity, or racial deference practiced by Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist leadership made her antilynching campaign more necessary than ever.

  “The Problem of the Civilized World”

  Indeed, Wells entered the most influential phase of her antilynching campaign in the year or so leading up to her marriage—just as Washington rose to fame. Whereas Washington looked to white Americans for support, as Wells toured the United States “talk[ing] about lynching from one end of the country to the other,” she had to rely on British and African American allies. Not surprisingly, she was in constant contact with her most devoted ally, Ferdinand Barnett, who supported and encouraged her work, even as it delayed their nuptials. Wells’s American tour saw her “trying to organize antilynching leagues [and] antilynching societies,” a task which Barnett helped by founding the Illinois Anti-Lynching League, an organization which feted Wells on her return to Chicago in August 1894.7 Wedding plans would not prevent her from completing the American phase of her antilynching crusade. Designed to capitalize on the British antilynching movement she had started, her coast-to-coast American tour could not wait. Partners in politics, and soon to be partners in life, the couple did not announce their engagement until a few weeks before they married on June 27, 1895.

  A forceful counter to Washington’s accommodationism, Wells’s antilynching crusade achieved its successes without ever generating widespread public support for herself or her followers. Much like the abolitionists, who challenged the morality of slavery without ever amassing a large following, Wells and her supporters managed to stir up enough “discussion, agitation and censure” to create social change despite generating little public enthusiasm. If nothing else, between 1893 and 1897 Wells’s antilynching movement shamed some state leaders into legislative attempts to curb vigilante violence in their states. During those years North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, and Texas all passed antilynching laws designed to protect prisoners in police custody and/or to punish participants in mob violence, while other states considered such measures. Lynching did not come to an end in these states or anywhere else, but these rarely enforced, and sometimes overturned, state laws, together with an unsuccessful attempt by Senator James Blaine of Vermont to sponsor a congressional investigation into lynching, signaled the beginnings of a public outcry that simply did not exist before Wells’s British tour.

  Arguably, what influence the antilynching movement gained stemmed largely from the animus it inspired. When Wells returned to the United States in the summer of 1894, she found herself even more unpopular among American whites than she was when she left. A few days after her return to New York, The New York Times denounced her as “a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress, who does not hesitate to represent the victims of black brutes in the South as willing victims.” Not surprisingly, white Southerners were still offended by what one editor called Wells’s “outrageous libels on the women of the South.” Her antilynching campaign, he predicted, would only “pave the way for more lynch law.” His prediction seemed accurate enough, at least in Memphis, where The Memphis Scimitar responded to the campaign by calling for Wells to be “tied to a stake at Main and Madison streets, and branded on the forehead with a hot iron.”8

  No longer neglected by the white press, Wells might well have wished she was. But after her second British tour, she no longer pursued her antilynching campaign alone. She came home with a powerful new ally in the form of the British Anti-Lynching Committee, an energetic organization of elite British men and women whom her white countrymen could not dismiss as easily as they did Wells.

  The committee made its debut with an international press release issued on August 1, 1894, which announced its intention to respond to the “appeal for help” that its members had received from the “negro population in the United States.”9 Thereafter, it began a crusade against lynching and mob violence that soon had American politicians and the American press in an uproar. During Wells’s second visit, British congregations and reform organizations had repeatedly fired off antilynching resolutions to American news organizations and political leaders. And after her departure, the British Anti-Lynching Committee joined in, flooding American newspapers and political officials with antilynching correspondence. Following Wells, who had long stressed the importance
of investigation in exposing the true causes of violence, the committee also sent out letters investigating recent lynchings in several American states. “It appears almost incredible that such lawlessness can occur in communities supposed to be civilized,” Anti-Lynching Committee secretary Florence Balgarnie wrote Alabama governor Thomas J. Jones on October 6, 1894, addressing a lynching that had taken place in his state two months earlier. By October the committee had already sent out similar letters, “modified according to circumstances,” to the governors of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida.10

  Most state governors took offense. But, in so doing, they also drew public attention to lynching. Governor Jones of Alabama, for example, responded to the Anti-Lynching Committee in a widely circulated letter. Issued under his secretary’s name, Jones’s missive charged that just as American reformers did not inquire into “the eviction laws in Ireland, or the oppression of the natives in Egypt or India,” British reformers had no business in investigating American affairs. “A similar communication from the authorities of another country would be treated as an international incident which no government in England would overlook or fail to resent.” Likewise, other state governors in both Northern and Southern states, whether or not they received letters of inquiry about lynching in their own states, were near-unanimous in denouncing the committee’s censures as “a meddle-some interference.”11

  The Southern governors’ positions were generally echoed in the nation’s leading newspapers. The Washington Post, for example, described the British Anti-Lynching Committee as a “Committee of Impertinence,” while The Atlanta Constitution issued a sarcastic call for “a committee over here to protest against the wholesale slaughter of darkies in Africa whenever John Bull gets after them.” Meanwhile, The New York Times blamed lynching on its victims, noting “it is a peculiar fact that the crime for which negroes have frequently been lynched, and occasionally been put to death with frightful tortures, is a crime to which negroes are particularly prone.”12 Moreover, critiques of the Anti-Lynching Committee that appeared in Britain’s conservative newspapers were widely referenced, reprinted, and endorsed in the American press—while support for the committee in the liberal British press received no coverage of any kind.13

  In the South, however, neither rationales nor indignation could entirely address the unease created by the Anti-Lynching Committee’s activities. Short of capital since the Civil War, the Southern states had been especially hard hit by the Panic of 1893—a series of bank failures that marked the beginning of an economic depression that lasted through 1896. Export prices for cotton declined steadily throughout this period, leaving the leaders of many Southern states anxious to attract foreign investors. Always ambivalent about their largely black labor force, by the mid-1890s Southern officials were also interested in attracting European immigrants, whose labor, they believed, would strengthen their economy. Accordingly, the British Anti-Lynching Committee’s relentless attention to racial violence worried many Southern editors and state officials.

  Indeed, such fears were strong enough to prompt many Southern whites to denounce antilynching as a plot designed to sabotage the Southern economy. Other critics, by contrast, maintained that antilynching was a capitalist plot. Censured for the racial violence in his state, Governor William Northern of Georgia maintained that British opposition to lynching had been drummed up to support “the enforced development of the western country, largely mortgaged to English and New England capitalists.” These crafty conspirators had entered into the business of “slandering the southern people, as a result of worries that they could lose their investments, should western immigration be diverted south.”14

  These wild theories about the true sources of British antilynching sentiment may have amused Wells, who would have loved to have had the support of generous British and American capitalists during her British travels. Certainly they amused a British reporter for The Daily Chronicle (London), who noted that The Sun (New York) simultaneously reported that Wells was “destitute of funds” and employed by the “interests of a Western land boom.” Did American politicians, this writer wondered in a pointed critique of the corruption that ran rampant in Gilded Age politics, believe that absolutely everyone was under the control of “a trust or a syndicate with dollars in it”?15 Especially in the South, Wells was routinely represented as either an “enterprising missionary” or the clueless “agent” of unspecified conspirators, long after she returned from Britain.16 By and large, Wells ignored these preposterous allegations. If nothing else, she may have seen no need to: in the fall of 1894, Southern whites provided ample evidence that everything that Wells said was true.

  Such evidence included a new mass lynching in Millington, Tennessee—just fifteen miles from Memphis—on August 31, 1894. Six black men accused of burning down several barns in the area were arrested. In the custody of two deputies and handcuffed together in a wagon bound for the county jail, they were assaulted by a white mob armed with shotguns. They died in their shackles, shot en masse; unprotected by the deputies, who later claimed that “they had been waylaid, and their prisoners forcibly taken from them and killed.”17 The mass murder of six unarmed men, who could do little to defend themselves other than jump out of the wagon and die in a heap bound together by heavy iron manacles, was an embarrassment to the white South. One white newspaper in Ohio noted: “If Ida B. Wells had desired anything to substantiate the charges against the south that she has been rehearsing, nothing more serviceable could have come to hand.”18

  Indeed, even the Southern press was at a loss when it came to defending the Millington massacre. None of its victims was charged with rape, and no real evidence could be found to suggest that they were even guilty of arson. Moreover, if they had been, as Wells fumed in an interview given the following day, “there is no other place in the world where a capital offense is made of burning barns.”19

  Under closer scrutiny than ever before, whites in Memphis publicly rued the Millington murders. Taking a far different tone than it had after the murder of Wells’s friends just two years earlier, The Memphis Scimitar lamented, “Every one of us is touched with blood guiltiness in this matter unless we prove ourselves ready to do our duty as civilized men and citizens.” Moreover, even though his state had never prosecuted lynchers in the past, Governor Peter Turney of Tennessee announced that he would now move “to put an end to these ‘crimes against civilization’ in Tennessee.”20 State officials also convened a grand jury that indicted thirteen white men for their complicity in the Millington lynching. Among them were the two deputies who delivered the prisoners to the mob.

  The show of public outrage displayed in Memphis reflected a new embarrassment about lynching on the part of white citizens there. But in the end, it was just a show: little had actually changed. “The south has made many such demonstrations,” predicted a cynical writer for the black newspaper The Cleveland Gazette. In staging a trial, the “Memphis grand jury and courts are simply exercising a little extra care in working the same old Southern bluff or blind.”21 The Gazette’s predictions proved spot-on: by January an all-white jury had refused to convict any of the Millington lynchers, leaving their crimes forever unpunished.

  At the time, however, Wells took satisfaction in the signs of change she saw in Memphis. If not for her antilynching campaign, she believed “Memphis would have been just as self-satisfied and complacent over the murder of the six colored men in 1894, as it was in 1892.”22 Only after “the attention of the civilized world” focused on lynching in America did “the people of Tennessee feel the absolute necessity for a prompt, just and vigorous arraignment of all the murderers connected with the crime.” As early as November 1894, Wells was also aware that the Memphis murderers were unlikely to be punished. But whatever doubts she may have had about whether the lynchers would receive justice in Southern courts, she was happy to see them arraigned. “Lynching is no longer ‘our problem,’” she concluded: “it is the pro
blem of the civilized world.”23

  If nothing else, the British Anti-Lynching Committee’s scrutiny had prompted several state governors to make public statements opposing mob law—statements they were under some pressure to uphold, at least so long as Wells could keep the attention of the civilized world. That fall, Wells had little difficulty in doing so. The British Anti-Lynching Committee’s scrutiny and condemnation of racial violence elicited a steady stream of largely negative press focused on the impropriety of any English interference in American affairs. But at the same time, lynchings received far more negative press than they ever had before, and were subject to new, if largely unsuccessful, attempts to convict both the lynchers and the lawmen who turned prisoners over to them.

  Hard to prevent, lynching was even harder to punish. Southern whites, as one potential juror in the Millington case put it, were unwilling “to convict any white man for killing a —— nigger.”24 Indeed, the state-level antilynching laws that were proposed, and in some cases even passed during the 1890s, all grappled with the issue of how to create effective penalties for lynching. Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Texas passed laws to penalize state officials who failed to protect prisoners, while South Carolina, North Carolina, and Ohio made the lynch mob liable for damages to the families of their victims. However, these laws proved no easier to enforce than the many existing laws that lynch mobs broke when they bypassed the legal system in the name of vigilante justice. Still, the new laws may have contributed to the slow decline in the number of American lynchings that began in the mid-1890s. As Wells noted, public support for mob violence among American politicians had “encouraged Lynch Law, and upon the revolution of this sentiment we must depend for its abolition.”25