by Mia Bay
NO LONGER AT THE HELM OF THE CONSERVATOR OR WRITING regularly for any other paper, Ida Wells-Barnett hoped to make motherhood her primary occupation as the nineteenth century came to a close. But with mob violence continuing to take the lives of African Americans, Ida never managed to remain home long. Over the new century’s first decade Wells-Barnett would have two more children and would embrace a vision of motherhood that accommodated work outside the home. A “mother,” she would begin to insist, “should teach her sons to cook” so that they “could have a dinner while mother was taking care of the business of the world.”1 Ida’s approach to motherhood underscored that even a growing family would not distract her from the terrible problems that black Americans faced during a time now known as “the Nadir” of African American history.2
A pioneering black historian born during that era, Rayford Logan named the turn-of-the-century “the Nadir” because it marked the bitter end of the nation’s post–Civil War “road to reunion.” With the war long behind them, white Americans in the North and the South were content to reduce blacks to a second-class citizenship maintained by “Exploitation, Disenfranchisement, Segregation, Discrimination, Lynching, Contempt.”3 Decided in 1896, the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson ended African American hopes of federal action against the South’s separate-car laws. Instead, the high court sanctioned state laws providing blacks with “separate but equal accommodations.” The now famous ruling received little media attention at the time, since Plessy merely sanctioned what was already well established across the South. But Justice John Marshall Harlan, who dissented from the decision, predicted that it would “become quite as pernicious as the decision made by the tribunal in the Dred Scott case”—the 1856 Supreme Court ruling that held that blacks “had no rights which a white man is bound to respect.”4 His prediction proved accurate. Plessy v. Ferguson underscored that African Americans were no longer under the protection of the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments that had once given them the franchise and promised them “equal treatment” under the law. Not overturned until the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, for almost a half century Plessy provided powerful legal precedent for racial segregation not just on trains, but in schools, businesses, and a huge variety of other facilities throughout the South, and weakened black civil rights in the North as well.
Abandoned by the courts, by the late 1890s African Americans had also lost any claim on their onetime ally, the Republican Party. Republican support for racial justice had been declining since Reconstruction; by the 1890s, white Republicans did not even bother to protest the disenfranchisement measures enacted by Southern Democrats that all but eliminated the black vote throughout their region. Disenfranchisement, in turn, left African Americans unrepresented in the federal government, which lost its last black congressman in 1901.
As a result, African Americans entered the new century needing aggressive national representation more desperately than ever. The continuing racial violence and civil rights losses that African Americans suffered during the late 1890s exposed the futility of pursuing African American racial uplift through accommodation, as advocated by Booker T. Washington, the most widely recognized black leader of the Nadir. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, even white progressives had begun to question Washington’s lack of public support for black civil or voting rights. Meanwhile, African American agitators such as Wells-Barnett struggled to rally protection for black citizenship rights.
Not surprisingly, then, the new century’s first decade saw Ida consistently involved with African American attempts to organize national action against lynching and Jim Crow—even as she struggled to meet the demands of a growing family. Before the decade was half over her two boys would have two sisters, Ida and Alfreda. But even with four children at home, Wells-Barnett found public work impossible to avoid, given the climate of the Nadir. Both she and Ferdinand Barnett were increasingly anxious to see united action among African Americans across the nation to protect the interests of blacks as a group. Just as slavery had only been defeated through national action, the racial injustices of lynching and Jim Crow required a national response—and federal action. If nothing else, white Southerners’ reactions to Wells-Barnett’s antilynching campaign had underscored that white supremacy would never be reformed from within.
Accordingly, from 1898 onward the Barnetts worked with other black activists to challenge both federal inaction and Booker T. Washington’s leadership. Above all, these challenges took the form of a long struggle to establish a viable national civil rights organization, which finally culminated in the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP’s unsuccessful predecessors included the Afro-American Council, organized in 1898 and soon compromised by Washington’s powerful influence; and the Niagara Movement, founded in 1906 by a resurgent group of Washington opponents. Underfunded and internally divided, the Niagara Movement was also short-lived. But it did help give rise to a new alliance among former Niagara Movement members and white progressives: the NAACP.
Wells-Barnett was an active member of these organizations and a founding member of the NAACP—the only enduring civil rights organization to come out of these efforts. Yet she would not last long in any of these organizations, all of which brought together fragile coalitions of moderates and radicals. Uncompromising in her radical politics, she was also at a gender disadvantage when it came to navigating the highly contested black politics of the Nadir. One of the few black women involved in any of the early civil rights organizations, she found little room for herself in these male-dominated initiatives, which tended to set aside their leadership roles for men. Far too opinionated to play a purely supporting role in any organization, Wells-Barnett had an outspoken, aggressive personality that ran contrary to the womanly ideals of her day. Easily dismissed as a troublemaker, she was never fully appreciated for her political acumen and repeatedly edged out of any leading role in the civil rights initiatives that she helped launch. Among them was the NAACP, which went on to initiate a long fight for federal antilynching legislation that built directly on the antilynching tradition she had created.
In 1930, when Wells-Barnett wrote her autobiography, she wondered whether the NAACP would have become “a live active effort in the lives of our people” had she managed to stay active in it—a question that at once underestimated and overestimated her own powers of influence, while ignoring the growing power of the NAACP. Even though she sustained no enduring ties with the NAACP—or any of the national black civil rights organizations that emerged during her lifetime—Wells-Barnett would nonetheless help shape twentieth-century civil rights activism by pioneering a well-defined protest agenda of her own.
“The Protection of Washington”
The end of the nineteenth century saw Wells-Barnett continue to lobby for federal protection for black civil rights at a time when such protection seemed ever more elusive. The Republican Party had regained the presidency in 1896 with the election of William McKinley, whose victory initially seemed auspicious to the Barnetts and blacks who campaigned on his behalf. Critical of lynching during his campaign, McKinley had even deployed troops to prevent mob violence during his years as Ohio governor. However, once in the White House, McKinley provided no more support for black rights than his Democratic predecessor Grover Cleveland, as proved painfully evident in 1898, when McKinley failed to protest the lynching of one of his own appointees in South Carolina.
Initially, the new president seemed as if he might fulfill the hopes of his black supporters. During his first year in office, he appointed several black officeholders, including Frazier B. Baker, who became the postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina, in the fall of 1897. Patronage appointments, post office jobs were controlled by federal authorities and routinely used by both Republican and Democratic presidents to reward their party’s political allies. A sop to the North’s black voters for their loyalty in
the 1896 election, McKinley’s appointment of Baker was also designed to solidify African American support for his administration. South Carolina legislators objected, but since their state no longer had any white Republicans worthy of patronage, McKinley had no trouble ignoring their protests.5 Unfortunately, he also went on to ignore the assaults on Baker that followed, up to and including the one that took his life—issuing no public comment of any kind on the death of his appointee.
Lake City’s new postmaster was under attack from the moment he took his post. Local whites protested his appointment by riddling his house with buckshot and bullets shortly after he arrived. But Baker refused to be driven from his post: “being a government official, he felt confident in the protection of Washington,” he told reporters.6 His confidence was misplaced. On February 22, 1898, Baker was killed by a mob of one hundred white men who converged outside the small building that housed his home and the local post office. After torching the building, they opened fire on Baker, his wife, and their four children as the family fled the burning building. The volley of bullets that killed Baker also killed his youngest child, a three-year-old girl, who was in her mother’s arms; Baker’s wife, son, and two older daughters managed to survive, but only his son escaped crippling bullet wounds.
Clearly a political assassination designed to reject the appointment of an African American postmaster in the Palmetto State, Baker’s murder underlined the ever declining status of blacks in American politics. Along with Isaiah Loftin, another black postmaster shot in the arm in Hoganville, Georgia, the same month Baker was appointed, Baker was a victim of what The New York Times described as the South’s “war on Negro officials,” which Republican officials chose to ignore.7 “The Lake City Coroners’ Jury found that Postmaster Baker came to death at the hands of persons unknown to the jury,” reported the Chicago Tribune in April 1898, also noting: “That jury ought to take the day off and get better acquainted with the leading citizens of the town.”8
As a political supporter of McKinley and a mother of her own young children, Wells-Barnett was outraged by the lethal attack on Baker and his family. Even before the jury’s all too familiar conclusion was announced, she swung into action, mobilizing a mass meeting of Chicago blacks in March 1898 to protest Baker’s death and seek support for his surviving family members. At the meeting, Ida also raised money for a trip to Washington to pressure McKinley to initiate a federal investigation into the Lake City murders. Successful in doing so, she was soon on the road again, with another “nursing baby”—Charles’s younger brother, the five-month-old Herman Barnett.
As it became increasingly clear that McKinley would issue no public comment on Baker’s death, Wells-Barnett may well have rued ever campaigning for him. But once in Washington she was able to draw on her political connections to schedule a personal meeting with the president—which she attended in the company of seven Illinois congressmen and a state senator. By that spring, McKinley was recruiting both black and white Americans to fight in the Spanish-American War, in which the United States supported Cuba’s struggle to gain independence from Spain. Accordingly, Ida made the war the center of her argument. “Justice Like Charity” should “begin at home,” her petition to McKinley maintained: before the United States fights “barbarism in Cuba,” it should attend to the “slaughter” of African Americans at home by punishing Baker’s murderers and taking federal action against lynching.9
Ida’s petition did not secure justice for Baker and his family, but the relentless pressure she and other African Americans put on McKinley did result in the first federal proceeding against a lynch mob. In 1899, the federal court in Charleston, South Carolina, tried thirteen Lake City men for participating in a conspiracy to deprive Frazier Baker of his civil rights. Tried before an all-white jury, in a proceeding notable for witness perjury and the defense lawyer’s “naked appeal to the racist sensibilities of the…jury,” the case ended in a mistrial. But the federal prosecutor’s eloquent closing argument gave new hope to black activists. Lynching, he told the jury, “outraged justice”; if Southerners were going to embrace mob violence over sanctioned justice meted out to criminals in the courts, they might as well “shut down the school houses, burn the books, tear down the churches and admit that Anglo Saxon Civilization is a failure.”10
Beyond bearing testimony to the effectiveness of Wells-Barnett’s antilynching crusade, the federal prosecutor’s judgment against lynching had little practical consequence. The government did not retry the case, and black postmasters soon became “relics of another era, at least in predominately white communities.”11 Moreover, Wells-Barnett’s attempts to secure restitution for Baker’s widow and orphaned children also failed. A bill for a one-thousand-dollar grant to the family, introduced by Congress’s only remaining black legislator, North Carolina congressman George White, struck Wells-Barnett as far too little. But both White’s bill and Wells-Barnett’s efforts to secure a more adequate one were derailed when the United States declared war on Spain, giving Congress a new set of responsibilities.
However overshadowed by war, to Wells-Barnett and other black activists the shootings of the postmasters Loftin and Baker underscored that African Americans could not depend on the federal government to protect their rights. They must instead “organize for self protection,” making more necessary than ever the kind of national black civil rights organization envisioned by T. Thomas Fortune when he founded the Afro-American League in the 1880s. Accordingly, in 1898, both Barnetts supported the founding of the Afro-American Council—which sought to revive the league. And even before then, the Barnetts and other African American activists greeted the Spanish-American War as an opportunity for blacks to advance their national civil rights by serving their country in war.
Such hopes now seem quixotic. But as the Spanish-American War began, “blacks recalled that the fighting ability of the Black soldiers in the Union army had been a compelling reason for granting freedom and equality to blacks.”12 Another war might serve the same end. Blacks were among the first to volunteer to serve in Cuba, and both Barnetts supported such efforts. Ida “eagerly assisted” in the mobilization of the Eighth Regiment in Springfield, Illinois, even moving down to Springfield with her children to support the troops and staying with the regiment until “it was mustered in to service.”13
Likewise, Wells-Barnett did not let family obligations keep her from attending the September “race meeting” that founded the Afro-American Council. As Herman was now old enough to be weaned, she left both boys with their grandmother and traveled to Rochester, where the meeting was held. There she stayed with Susan B. Anthony and dutifully heard out the older woman’s strictures against the “divided duty” of motherhood. Very happy to be a mother, and used to disagreements with Anthony, Wells-Barnett ended up “not sorry that I had gone.”14 The meeting had brought together a group of black leaders—also assembled in Rochester for a ceremony to commemorate Frederick Douglass—and promised to fulfill black hopes for a strong national civil rights movement.
The gathering got off to a rocky start. Looking back rather than forward, a frustrated T. Thomas Fortune began by assailing the group for failing to support his previous attempts at a national civil rights organization. Plagued by health problems, family troubles, and financial woes, Fortune was also increasingly compromised by his friendship with Booker T. Washington—who had deep pockets. Although never entirely loyal to Washington, Fortune often served as his informant, and sided with the conservative black leader often enough to make his own politics increasingly unpredictable. Formerly a staunch radical, Fortune had become a loose cannon. Among the leaders of the group that gathered to found the new civil rights organization, he questioned whether African Americans were even “ready” for such an organization.15
Dismayed by her old friend’s attitude, Wells-Barnett moved to block Fortune from any leadership role in the Afro-American Council. She pressed him on whether he “planned to accept the presidency” of the new
organization, given his reservations about its prospects. Fortune demurred, and Wells-Barnett felt that she had made a crucial intervention. The A.M.E. Church leader Bishop Alexander Waters, who was an enthusiastic proponent of the new initiative, was elected president instead. And Wells-Barnett herself “was once again launched in public movements,” accepting the position of the new organization’s secretary and becoming deeply embroiled in its efforts to combat mob violence.16
Later that fall her work at the council was propelled into high gear by a race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina. One of the few remaining Republican strongholds in the South, Wilmington was an anachronism that the state’s Democrats could not tolerate. The city had elected a Populist and Republican coalition in 1896, preserving both Republican rule and black voting rights in North Carolina well into an era when both blacks and Republican officeholders were a thing of the past in much of the South. So, in the fall of 1898, North Carolina Democrats organized to drive “men of African origin” out of state politics. Across the state, white newspapers launched smear campaigns demonizing black men as rapists who preyed on innocent white women. When Alexander Manly, the editor of The Daily Record, North Carolina’s only black newspaper, contested these claims, he only added fuel to the fire. Like Wells-Barnett before him, Manly suggested that white women were not “any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men, than are white men with colored women.” Also like Wells before him, he was driven out of town. Moreover, Manly’s challenge to the sexual purity of white women became a rallying point for restoring white supremacy in Wilmington.17
That November saw the state legislature restored to the Democrats. Tactics included sending armed white men clad in red shirts through African American neighborhoods in southeastern North Carolina to suppress the black vote. North Carolina’s “Red-shirts” had embraced the campaign tactic first used by Senator Benjamin Davis Tillman to restore white supremacy in South Carolina in 1876. Moreover, after the election, a white mob rounded off the Democrats’ coup d’état by expelling the city’s Republican officials—who would not be up for reelection until the following year. They forced Silas P. Wright, the city’s white Republican mayor, to resign, along with the rest of the biracial city council. Led by Alfred Moore Waddell, a Democrat and former congressman who appointed himself the city’s new mayor, the mob also shot or drove out of town the city’s remaining black leaders. At the end of the day, ten African Americans were dead in a bloody race riot that mob leaders had delayed until after the election “so that their district would not lose its congressman as punishment.” Its “object lesson,” as one white observer noted, was crystal clear: the eradication of blacks from North Carolina politics.18