To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  But she still had trouble attracting white support as she traveled across the country during the fall of 1894 and winter of 1895. Ida’s first lecture after her return from England was at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in downtown Manhattan, where she addressed an enthusiastic audience of more than three hundred people, including “many whites.”26 How many of them were press, however, remains an open question. When Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire—one of the last surviving Radical Republicans in Congress—proposed in August 1894 House Resolution 214, which called for a federal investigation into lynching, it went largely unsupported outside the black community. Only African Americans petitioned in favor of the resolution, which died in committee. Wells had managed to win over some influential white reformers, such as the clergyman and editor Lyman Abbott and the women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, but her white American allies were too few and far between to sustain her lecture tour.

  After New York, Ida traveled to Chicago and spent a month there resting and organizing her cross-country tour. But while she was feted by a standing-room-only audience at the African Methodist Church’s Quinn Chapel, she still had trouble securing white audiences. It was not for lack of a national reputation. Wells did attract the attention of the owner and director of the Slayton Lyceum Bureau. Mr. Slayton, a white man, attended Wells’s talk at Quinn Chapel and was impressed enough by her skills as an “effective public speaker” to offer her a job. He could guarantee her “four engagements a week at fifty dollars a night, over and above expenses.” But she was “to leave out any talks on lynching”—“the American people will not pay to hear you talk about lynching.” Not surprisingly, Wells refused. But Slayton’s prediction proved accurate. Between the summer of 1894 and the following spring, Wells traveled “from the Atlantic to the Pacific” speaking out against lynching before audiences that were still largely black. She earned, as she noted in her autobiography, “every dollar of my expenses connected with the trip with addresses delivered to my own people.”27

  Wells’s antilynching campaign continued to meet with suspicion even among liberal white reformers. She attended gatherings of Protestant ministers in Kansas City and San Francisco but was unable to persuade either to issue any strong resolution against mob violence. In Kansas City, Southern sympathizers walked out of a meeting of the city’s Ministers’ Alliance, which was considering such a resolution, after a debate that included many “unkind, ungentlemanly and unchristian remarks.” In San Francisco, Wells could not even command a hearing. Along with the other women at a meeting of California ministers, she was “excluded from the room” while a male minister discussed the subject, “relating some thrilling instances of negro depravity which he did not consider it proper for ladies to listen to.”28

  Farther north, Wells was gratified to see Boston’s William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., honor the activist memory of his famous abolitionist father by supporting her antilynching campaign. Enlisted by Moncure Conway, a Virginia-born abolitionist who had lived largely in England since the Civil War, Garrison led a meeting launching the Massachusetts Anti-Lynching League at Faneuil Hall in August 1894. But support for Wells was not universal even among Massachusetts radicals. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who numbered among the “Secret Six” of abolitionist radicals who had funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, objected to Wells’s approach. She was not hard enough on rape, he argued, explaining: the “condemnation of lynching…was in no way impaired by linking it with the condemnation of another offense closely associated with it in the public mind as often affording the occasion for lynching and always its argumentative excuse.”29 Higginson’s remark underscored the most serious problem that Wells faced in attempts to mobilize whites against lynching. Her antilynching argument was rejected by the one audience that might have been able to lend it the most authority: white women reformers.

  White female reformers such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard both resisted and resented Wells’s insistence that lynchings had little to do with rape or sex. Indeed, Willard continued to challenge Wells on these points long after their initial conflict in London. The Negro rapist was “a cause of constant anxiety…among the white women and little girls” of the South, Willard told the national meeting of the WCTU in Cleveland in late 1894, which Wells also attended. In a speech that equated sex between white women and black men with rape, Willard once again publicly denounced Wells’s argument that white women often initiated sex between the races as “unjust, and save in the rarest exceptional instances, wholly without foundation.” Moreover, Willard also rejected Wells’s claim that black women were frequent victims of sexual violence in the New South. “The bleaching of the black race which was the ever-present bar sinister of the olden time in the slaveholding States has largely ceased,” the white reformer insisted.30

  The conflict between Wells and Willard was far more than a failure of empathy or understanding on the part of Willard and other white members of the WCTU. Under Willard’s leadership, the WCTU had become a major player in the turn-of-the-century “social purity” campaigns that sought to protect white women from sexual predators of all kinds, and especially those of the lower races. The organization’s largely white membership had a pointed interest in “the racial politics of rape,” at least when it came to defending the purity of the white race—and for that reason was uneasy about denouncing lynching. These members of the “woman movement” subscribed to a race-based “evolutionary republicanism,” which advocated the linked goals of temperance, social purity, and white women’s suffrage as a means of “safeguarding the development of the Anglo Saxon…race.”31 Much like Scotland’s Isabelle Mayo, Willard and other white members of the WCTU saw white female reformers as uniquely qualified for moral leadership of the world’s peoples by virtue of the racial and sexual superiority possessed by white women—a conviction that made it difficult for them to believe that white women would ever seek out sexual relationships with African American men. White women were supposed to be passionless and pure representatives of the highest morality the human race had to offer. Their enlightened influence could inspire men to turn their backs on alcohol and the weaknesses of the flesh.

  Unintimidated by Willard’s critique, Wells stood her ground one more time. In her own appearance before the Cleveland convention, she maintained that all her statements could be documented, unlike Willard’s ridiculous assertions “that it was unsafe for a white woman to venture out of doors in the South.” Declaring her respect for Willard and her temperance work, Ida maintained that she found some of Willard’s “positions on the lynch question untenable.” Defending her own integrity as a journalist, she noted: “We have to give the facts. In giving them no imputation is cast upon the white women of America, and it is unjust and untruthful for any one to so assert. I wish it were possible not to make such allusions, but the Negro race is becoming as careful as to its honor as the white race.” Accordingly, Wells called for the WCTU to endorse “a strong set of resolutions condemning lynching.” Wells’s speech received nearly unanimous support from the organization’s black members.32

  The organization’s largely white membership, however, favored Willard over Wells. “No anti-lynch resolutions passed the WCTU national convention held here last and this week, notwithstanding Miss Wells’ short address (longer time was not given to her),” reported The Cleveland Gazette. Instead, the WCTU passed a toothless antiviolence resolution that deplored “lawless acts” in general, while also condemning the “unspeakable outrages which have so often provoked such lawlessness.”33

  Moreover, after the meeting, Willard attempted to cover up the conflict between black and white women in the organization with a series of personal attacks on Wells that seem to have been informed by a disdain for black people of Wells’s class. “They are a pathetic people when educated,” she wrote in her diary in 1896 after visiting a black school in the South. Unwanted in America, their life here was bound to be “grievous.” “If I we
re in their place I’d make a beeline for Africa.”34 Not surprisingly, she had little sympathy for Wells, who refused to migrate anywhere. Instead, Willard was threatened enough by Wells to write letters denouncing her to a variety of prominent white reformers. She told her “good friend” Albion Tourgée that Wells was a “percussive personality” who “lacked the balance and steadiness that are requisite in a good reformer.” On this point, however, Willard got no support from Tourgée, who instead spoke out in defense of Wells. Addressing the Wells-Willard squabble in his regular column in the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean on November 24, 1894, Tourgée, writing in his characteristically emphatic style, underscored that all Wells’s charges against Willard and the WCTU were “literally true.” The organization led by Willard had been “absolutely silent” about lynching until confronted by Wells and her British allies, and “it had not yet uttered any vigorous protest.”35 Undeterred by Tourgée’s sharp rebuke, Willard sought out other allies, calling on some of America’s most prominent reformers to chastise Wells.

  Descended from abolitionists, the WCTU leader was “devoted to the cause of the colored people,” maintained a flattering February 1895 letter, ostensibly written by Frederick Douglass. Signed by a distinguished group of reformers including Wells supporters Lyman Abbott and William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., it contained a barely veiled attack on Wells: “We feel that for any person or persons to give currency to statements harmful to MISS WILLARD as a reformer, is most misleading and unjust.”36 Published by Willard’s friend Lady Somerset in an English newspaper, the letter, as it turns out, did not have the support of all its signatories. Garrison had endorsed its vague and general statement of support for Willard without knowing anything about what had happened during the WCTU’s November conference. Moreover, once he knew more, he was “horrified at this ‘apology for southern outrages.’”

  Likewise, Frederick Douglass, who died a day after he signed the letter, had also been unaware that his endorsement of Willard condoned the WCTU’s temporizations on the subject of lynching—as well as Willard’s attack on Wells. “Any impeachment on this or any other matter was an insult to his memory,” Helen Pitts Douglass told Florence Balgarnie, after the British woman wrote her to find out whether Douglass had knowingly lent support to the temperance leader’s attack on Wells. Although private, Mrs. Douglass’s letter was in accord with her late husband’s last public comments on Willard, which were highly critical. A little more than a year before he died, Douglass had presented a fiery antilynching lecture that denounced “the good Miss Frances Willard, of the W.C.T.U.” as a “Northern woman, of Southern principles.” Also published as a pamphlet titled The Lesson of the Hour: Why Is the Negro Lynched? (1894), Douglass’s lecture indicted Willard and several other white American leaders for defaming the black man as a “moral monster, ferociously invading the sacred rights of woman and endangering the home of the whites.”37

  Despite such rebuttals, Willard’s attempts to discredit Wells continued until Willard’s death in early 1898. With the help of Lady Henry Somerset, who continued to lead the British WCTU, Willard launched another assault on Wells at an international gathering of WCTU affiliates held in London in 1895. Under fire among their British WCTU affiliates for failing to take a strong stand against lynching, the WCTU leaders issued a resolution criticizing mob violence, followed by a contradictory one endorsing the American WCTU’s stance on lynching and segregation. Somerset charged “Miss Ida Wells, the colored agitator against lynching” with having made “unfair attacks upon Miss Frances E. Willard and other temperance leaders in the United States, charging them with being unsympathetic with the Negroes in the United States.” Willard seconded this critique and “regretted…that Miss Wells by her attitude had stirred up the black blood to strife”—a point echoed by several American members of the WCTU.38

  Only the secretary of the British Anti-Lynching Committee, Florence Balgarnie, spoke up on Wells’s behalf. In tears by the end of the proceedings, Balgarnie maintained that “the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of America had acted the part of the apologist for, rather than that of a denouncer of, the outrages perpetrated on Southern Negroes.” Although accurate, Balgarnie’s statement was met with “a systematic series of objections” from a hostile audience that eventually forced the secretary to sit down.39

  The American temperance leader Frances Willard, c. 1880–98

  However, Wells had other British allies. “The American ladies, led by Miss Willard, appear to complain that Miss Wells had not sufficiently minced words in telling of these shocking outbursts of lawlessness,” noted The Daily News (London)—which was still edited by Wells’s London host, Peter Clayden.40 Equally critical of Willard was Wells’s old friend Catherine Impey, who had withdrawn from the WCTU in the 1880s to protest the segregationist practices of its Southern branches. Impey was appalled by Willard’s attempt to characterize the segregated branches of the WCTU as the benign product of the organization’s conviction that “coloured women, as a class, much prefer to affiliate with those of their own race.” The segregation within its Southern branches, Impey wrote, had nothing to do with the preferences of its black members; it was a consequence of the spirit of “caste segregation” that prevailed among Southern whites. Worse, that spirit was sanctioned by the WCTU leaders, who took no responsibility for preventing Jim Crow within its ranks—much as “the national government of America repudiates the responsibility of Lynching, &c.”41 None of these critiques, however, posed a serious challenge to Somerset’s and Willard’s leadership of the WCTU.42

  Despite Willard’s continuing animus against her, Wells devoted little time to their quarrel after 1894. Still lecturing, Wells was also completing a new pamphlet, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Cases of Lynching in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (1895). Filled with facts and figures on lynching drawn from the Chicago Tribune’s annual compilation of lynching statistics, A Red Record juxtaposed the empirical data she presented on her subject with Willard’s penchant for hearsay. Willard kept insisting that “colored men have been lynched for assault[s] on women,” Wells noted, but her own data showed that in many cases “the facts were plain that the relationship between the victim lynched and the alleged victim of his assault was voluntary, clandestine and illicit.”43

  Addressed to the “student of American sociology,” A Red Record marshaled the research-based social analysis advocated within this emerging scientific field to challenge Willard’s more traditional assertion of a moral female authority that came from within. Wells’s longest antilynching work, A Red Record was written in accordance with the methodology advocated by the sociologists of her day, who urged researchers to address social problems by analyzing “all available pertinent facts about the past and present.”44 It was also an extended rebuttal to Willard in which Wells insisted that “virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon the complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect.”45

  Wells was ahead of her time. Still in school when she published A Red Record was a new generation of black leaders including the future Harvard Ph.D., W.E.B. Du Bois, who would soon look to the social sciences for the “emancipation of the American Negro.” Hoping to expose and controvert race prejudice and document racial discrimination, Du Bois devoted much of his early career to ambitious studies of African American communities, in the hopes that a scientific knowledge of the race could be applied to the “social and economic advancement of the Negro People”—an approach he would later reject as useless.46

  Far less committed to the scientific method than Du Bois, Wells did not expect as much from it, and closed A Red Record with a call for activism that displayed her lifelong conviction that the only remedy for injustice was agitation and public action. She called upon readers to “disseminate the facts contained in this book,” mobilize their churches and civic associations to denounce lynching, challenge the idea of a “white man’s government,” “and support [Senator]
Blair’s anti-lynching resolution.”47 But her call to action would go largely ignored among whites until the 1930s, when the Texan Jesse Daniel Ames led a revolt “against the crown of chivalry which has been pressed like a crown of thorns into our head.” Lynching, Ames and the other women in the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching at long last realized, policed not only the South’s black population, but Southern white women as well. White women were not protected but rather held in thrall by the discussions of black-white rape that became “the folk pornography of the black belt.” As the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall explains: “the fear of rape regulated white women’s behavior and restricted their interactions with the world. The ideology of chivalry helped construct white womanhood: it shaped white women’s identities and options even as it guarded caste lines.”48

  Both ahead of her time and unpopular with most white women, Wells never breached those lines, as her battle with Willard showed. Indeed, she could not even persuade her good friend Susan B. Anthony, the former abolitionist and preeminent women’s rights activist, to reject Willard’s leadership of the WCTU or challenge the segregated women’s suffrage associations in the South. A supporter of Wells’s antilynching campaign, Anthony hosted Wells when she spoke in Rochester, New York, late in 1894. Committed to black equality, Anthony fired her secretary during Wells’s visit—after the woman “refuse[d] to take dictation from a colored woman.” But she supported Willard’s position on segregation within the WCTU, telling Wells that “for the sake of expediency, one often had to stoop to conquer on the color question.” Anthony had repeatedly done so herself, she confided to Wells. For instance, she always asked longtime suffrage activist Frederick Douglass to stay home when the Equal Suffrage Association met in the Southern states, so his presence would not prevent white Southern women from joining the ESA. And she refused to organize black women’s branches of the ESA below the Mason-Dixon Line for similar reasons. Do “you think I was wrong in so doing?” Anthony asked Wells. Wells’s answer was an uncompromising “yes.”49