To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  A tribute to Wells’s career as an outspoken black female leader, the conference saw new expressions of militancy among the middle-class club women who responded to Ruffin’s call. “There was a time when our mothers and sisters could not protect themselves from such beasts,” one of its founders commented, “but a new era has begun and we propose to defend ourselves.”75 Likewise, the conference convener, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, noted that black women could no longer continue to be reduced to “mortified silence” by charges of a “delicate and humiliating” nature.76 Accordingly, the conference participants formed a permanent organization “pledged to correct the image of black women.”77

  Led by Margaret Murray Washington, the National Federation of African American Women “united 36 women’s clubs in twelve states.” A year later, the NFAAW merged with the National League of Colored Women, a rival coalition of black women’s clubs that came together in 1895 under the leadership of Mary Church Terrell. A prominent Washington, D.C., club woman, Terrell was the daughter of the wealthy black businessman Robert Church, who had funded Wells’s escape from Visalia, California, more than ten years earlier. Old acquaintances, she and Ida would remeet at the inaugural meeting of the new organization produced by the merger, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), in Washington, July 14–16, 1896. Wells-Barnett must have welcomed a second chance to enjoy the national movement she had inspired, especially since it included some of the most influential women in the country. “A famous gathering of famous women,” it included Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass’s daughter Rosa Douglass Sprague, and many others, such as longtime Wells supporters Victoria Earle Matthews and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin.78

  Ironically, however, Wells-Barnett would never have any real opportunity to assume a leadership role in the organization that she inspired. The different clubs in the NACW were led by powerful regional leaders, and although Ida’s national reputation, powerful personality, and central role in the club movement’s origins made her a logical candidate for NACW leadership, both her personality and personal history effectively barred her from ever being considered. For all that Ida’s outspoken campaign against lynching and Jim Crow helped inspire a new sense of activism among black women, the NACW’s highly respectable leadership would not follow in her controversial footsteps.

  Instead, leadership struggles within the NACW focused largely on which one of the handful of privileged and powerful women who dominated the various black women’s clubs in different parts of the country would be chosen to lead the national organization. Would it be Boston’s Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, or Washington’s Mary Church Terrell, who had led the National League of Colored Women? And finally there was the first president of the short-lived NFAAW, Margaret Murray Washington, whose power base was in the South. An advocate of self-help among women, Washington had risen to national prominence along with her husband.

  In 1896, Mary Church Terrell won out, becoming the first president of the NACW. Although longtime acquaintances, Wells and Terrell were not close friends, and the gulf between them dramatized the class differences between Wells and the leading club women. A decade earlier, Wells had been very taken with the fair-skinned, elegant “Mollie” Church when she had a chance to spend some time with her in Memphis. “She is the first woman of my own age I’ve met who is similarly inspired with the same desires hopes & ambitions,” she had enthused in her diary after spending a morning with Church in 1887.79 But the two had little opportunity to become friends. While Ida began teaching at sixteen, the daughter of the South’s first black millionaire attended Oberlin and spent little time in Memphis thereafter. After marrying a Harvard-educated lawyer, Robert Herberton Terrell, she settled in Washington, where as one of the wealthiest and best-educated black women in the country, Terrell rapidly became a leading member of Washington’s black elite.

  In 1896, Terrell won the NACW presidency largely on the strength of her position as the head of the Colored Women’s League of Washington—a federation of 113 women’s clubs in D.C. and the surrounding area that amounted to more than half of the two hundred clubs in the NACW. The other leading contenders for the post, including Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Margaret Washington, were appointed vice presidents—and Washington also become the editor of the organization’s newsletter, National Association Notes. The new organization’s Joan of Arc, by contrast, was given far more minor responsibilities. Wells-Barnett chaired the resolutions committee during the meeting, graciously approving a resolution endorsing the work of the WCTU put forward by members of the League of Washington Women rather than jeopardize the fragile coalition of women’s clubs that were joining to create the NACW. She also received an appointment to the editorial board of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s Woman’s Era and a few other little assignments, such as serving as secretary on the committee charged with publishing the new organization’s minutes.

  She left the meeting unfazed, however, since the most notable milestone in Wells-Barnett’s life during 1896 had nothing to do with the NACW. That year, she was “not too busy to find the time to give birth to a male child.”80 Born exactly nine months after his parents’ wedding, and named after Wells-Barnett’s British mentor, Charles Aked Barnett testified to Wells’s decision to ignore “the advice of certain people who advised the use of whatever contraceptives were available back in the 1890s.” She had no interest in preventing a pregnancy, she later explained to her daughter Alfreda. “She really enjoyed her family, and she felt that people who deliberately did not marry and did not have children were losing the rounding-out possibility of their lives.”81 The oldest of her mother’s eight children, Wells entered motherhood with a confidence born of the experience of “having had the care of small children from the time that I was big enough to hold a baby.”82 On the road with her firstborn within months of his birth, she initially juggled motherhood and work with great success.

  Wells-Barnett and her first child, Charles Aked Barnett

  Barnett supplied a nurse to accompany his wife and child to the Washington meeting of the NACW. Just two months later, Wells-Barnett was back on the road again, lecturing in support of suffrage on behalf of the Illinois Republican Women’s central committee. The committee could not afford to supply Wells-Barnett with a full-time nurse but agreed to hire nurses to help out at each of her public events. So the fall of 1896 saw Wells-Barnett traversing Illinois with her six-month-old. In doing so, she became, as she noted in her autobiography, “the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches.” But her nursing baby occasionally raised his voice in an “angry protest” of his own when he heard his mother’s voice on the lecture podium.83

  Wells-Barnett had her second child, Herman, in November 1897, and would give birth to two daughters thereafter: her namesake Ida arrived in 1901, and her youngest, Alfreda, in 1904. But Herman’s birth marked the point when Wells-Barnett began to be convinced that “the duties of a wife and mother were a profession in themselves, and it was hopeless to expect to carry on public work.” Not only did a second child make the balancing act that Wells-Barnett performed in the year after the birth of her first child increasingly impossible, but her view of motherhood had begun to change.

  Wells-Barnett had entered her marriage believing that something had smothered “the mother instinct” in her—perhaps a youth spent raising her siblings, or her “early entrance into public life,” or both, she mused. But with the birth of her sons, that instinct blossomed and reshaped her life. “I had to become a mother,” Ida noted in one of the most sentimental passages in her largely unsentimental autobiography. “I realized,” she wrote, “what a wonderful place in the scheme of things the Creator has given women.” Having children, she then understood, provided women with “one of the most glorious advantages in the development of their own womanhood.”84

  As she began to see motherhood as both a womanly vocation and a profession, Ida pursued both with he
r characteristic intensity. Accordingly, in 1897 she gave up her editorship of the Conservator and abandoned “her public work” to dedicate herself to raising her children. As a mother, Ida admitted, she chose to emulate the “Catholic priest who declared that if he had the training of a child for the first seven years of his life, it would be a Catholic for the rest of his days.” A firm believer in her own values and Protestant religious faith, Wells-Barnett stressed her desire to be there for the “training and control of her child[ren]’s early and most plastic years.”85

  By all accounts, Ida achieved her goal. “I know I still carry with me, the admonitions of my mother and father about various things,” her youngest daughter Alfreda admitted more than fifty years after Wells-Barnett’s death.86 But motherhood did not preclude activism. Despite her decision to dedicate herself to her children after Herman’s birth, for example, Wells-Barnett delayed giving up the presidency of the Ida B. Wells Club until she had led a successful battle to establish black Chicago’s first kindergarten.

  Wells-Barnett’s interest in making sure that Chicago had a kindergarten that was open to black children was in accord with most progressive education theories of her day. Developed in Germany, kindergartens were an “experimental” innovation in the 1890s, designed to ease children into the daily discipline of school. They were generally private institutions established by “educated and elite women with leisure time.” Chicago had several, including one in “what was then the Negro district.” Known as the Armour Institute, it was accessible to blacks, but “its waiting list was such that there was little hope for the many colored children who needed this training.”87 So Wells held her presidency of the Ida B. Wells Club until 1899 in order to lead a successful campaign for weekly kindergarten classes at the Bethel Church. Open to black children throughout the city, the classes were led by two young black women with kindergarten training, who had previously been unable to secure work in the city’s white kindergartens.

  More controversial than it might seem, Wells-Barnett’s kindergarten initiative probably won her some enduring enemies. Many black Chicagoans rejected the idea of a segregated school of any kind, fearing it would block black children from admission to the Armour kindergarten. Although no foe of integration as a principle, Wells-Barnett had no patience with this argument. Her long experience teaching in black schools in the South had left her convinced that African Americans could and should take responsibility for educating their own children if need be. “Here were people so afraid of the color line that they did not want to do anything to help to supply the needs of their own people,” she said of the kindergarten’s detractors.88

  As strong-minded in motherhood as she had been before her children arrived, Wells-Barnett struggled with both her resolve to remain home and its consequences, finding herself on “divided duty”—much as Susan B. Anthony had predicted. At least in theory, the black women’s club movement offered her one venue where motherhood and activism were often combined. Founded on the motto “The battle for womanhood is the battle for race,” the NACW would place an increasing emphasis on “individual home life” and the belief that proper child care was the “chosen kingdom of women.”89 But Wells-Barnett’s interest in the club movement would diminish as the movement’s scope became more domestic. As much as she reveled in the experience of motherhood, Ida remained both unwilling and unable to limit her political concerns to the domestic realm. Always acutely conscious of the constraints of sexism as well as racism imposed on black women, she was not willing to leave political matters in the hands of the men of her race.

  Moreover, Wells-Barnett found no real place in the NACW, which held its second meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1897. The choice of venue effectively, if not deliberately, barred Wells-Barnett from attending—she was still unwelcome in Tennessee. And in 1899, when the NACW held its third meeting in Chicago, Wells-Barnett was not invited. Wells-Barnett would blame Terrell for this slight, but in fact it seems to have been initiated by Fannie Barrier Williams. A leading member of Chicago’s black elite, in 1893 Williams had supported Wells-Barnett’s pamphlet on the world’s fair. The two women had other connections as well, since Fannie Barrier Williams was married to S. Laing Williams, an attorney who was Barnett’s law partner throughout the 1890s. But the relationship between the Barnetts and the Williamses went downhill as the latter couple became increasingly closely affiliated with Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist politics won no favor with the Barnetts. As rival leaders within Chicago’s female black community, Fannie and Ida developed a deep personal enmity. Speaking in her official capacity as the leader of the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, Williams told Mary Church Terrell that Chicago women would not participate in the meeting if Wells-Barnett was invited.

  Portrait of Mary Church Terrell, c. 1900

  In a decision that Ida later described as “a staggering blow,” Terrell acquiesced, leaving the antilynching activist off both the NACW’s program and the local arrangements committee. Deeply hurt, Ida never forgave Terrell, even after Terrell explained that she had only omitted her name on the request of several “women in Chicago.” Suspicious of Terrell’s political ambitions, Ida remained convinced that Terrell had excluded her from the meeting’s activities in order to ensure her own reelection as president of the NACW—using “the narrow minded attitude of my own home women to ignore me lest I might become a contender for the position she wanted again.”90

  Although Terrell never saw Ida as a real challenger for her own position, in ousting Wells-Barnett she killed two birds with one stone. She placated Fannie Barrier Williams, who led a large group of Chicago club women, while also undermining Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s bid for the leadership of the NACW. The only leading club woman to display consistent public support for Ida in her battle with Frances Willard, Ruffin was the most serious challenger to Terrell’s reelection in 1899—she had the support of New England club women and would have had Ida’s support had Terrell not managed to keep Wells-Barnett from attending the meeting. Ruffin was troubled by the increasingly accommodationist and domestic tenor of the NACW under Terrell’s leadership, complaints which Wells-Barnett would surely have seconded. But in Ida’s absence, Ruffin had little support from women outside her own region, and Terrell won her reelection easily.91 Moreover, under Terrell’s leadership the NACW would continue to embrace a “politics of respectability” that marginalized activists such as Ruffin and the even more outspoken Ida B. Wells-Barnett—who both parted company with the NACW after 1899.

  When she discussed women’s suffrage with Anthony, Ida described women as “petty”—a comment that reflected how hard it was for her to marshal the patience, social background, or diplomatic skills necessary to flourish within the genteel world of female reformers.92 But personality was not the only issue. Ida’s political agenda also led her to seek out the masculine sphere of influence rather than limiting herself to the domestic sphere allotted to women.

  No matter the joys of motherhood, Wells-Barnett remained aware that women’s sphere had a very limited influence over the men who controlled the fate of black America. In contrast to Susan B. Anthony, who remained ever confident that “when the women get the ballot all that will be changed,”93 Wells-Barnett had little confidence that women had inherently better political values than men—an attitude that may have been reinforced by her experience in the NACW—and she understood the importance of masculine power in a society where male dominance was not limited to the political sphere, but extended into the home as well. Wells-Barnett supported women’s suffrage, but believed that women’s political influence would be limited by their preoccupation with the domestic sphere. “Many women would not vote,” she told her daughter, and those that did “would be influenced by their husbands.”94

  Accordingly, as the new century turned, Ida B. Wells-Barnett increasingly abandoned the black women’s club movement in favor of continuing to agitate against lynching with none of the delicacy or discretion
that the NACW deemed appropriate. Active in the short-lived Afro-American Council, which grew out of the ashes of the Afro-American League in 1898, Wells-Barnett was preoccupied with organizing that group’s 1899 meeting in Chicago, even as NACW members were scheming to limit her influence at their own.

  Succeeded by the Niagara Movement, the Afro-American Council was one of the precursors of the NAACP, and Wells-Barnett would be far more active in these efforts to create a national organization to protect black civil rights than she ever was in the NACW—becoming one of the founding members of the NAACP. But in the end neither Ida B. Wells-Barnett nor her husband would find a comfortable home in the black political world of early twentieth-century America. Consolidation of white political power in the New South combined with continuing racism in the nation at large to force African American leaders to tread an increasingly careful political path. But caution was never one of Wells-Barnett’s strong suits: she was always more successful as an agitator than as a leader. Instead, the turn of the century saw first Booker T. Washington and then the young W.E.B. Du Bois rise to power, eclipsing Ida’s brief moment of national leadership.

  7

  Challenging Washington, D.C.— and Booker T.