by Mia Bay
With the city’s remaining blacks under siege in the days after the riot, one black woman wrote a desperate letter to President McKinley. Why was he leaving Wilmington’s loyal African Americans “to die like rats in a trap”?19 McKinley offered no response and extended no federal protection to Wilmington’s remaining black population. Nor did he respond to similar pleas from African Americans across the nation, including those issued by the members of the Afro-American Council, which reconvened on December 29, 1898, to show the world that in the absence of federal and state protection, “we (10,000,000) African Americans have decided by the assistance of God to help ourselves.”20
Although dedicated to black self-protection, the council rejected Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of substituting economic self-help for political agitation. The Wilmington race riot underscored the dangers of such an approach. The city was home to a hardworking black middle class, whose economic achievements had not earned them the white respect that Booker T. Washington claimed would come with wealth. On the contrary, Wilmington’s most prosperous African Americans were leading targets of the rioters’ assault. And blacks throughout the city had been completely unable to protect the fruits of their labor in the face of the political violence that stripped them of their property and their citizenship rights.
Horrified by events in Wilmington, Afro-American Council secretary Ida B. Wells-Barnett gave a powerful and widely quoted speech on “Mob Violence and Anarchy,” which criticized both Booker T. Washington and President McKinley. The former, she said, had “made the great mistake of imagining that the black people could gain their rights merely by making themselves factors in industrial life”; while the latter was “much too interested…in the decoration of Confederate graves to pay any attention to Negro rights.” Now an opponent of McKinley’s imperialist Spanish-American War, she also noted: “We are eternally opposed to expansion until this nation can govern at home.”21
Wells-Barnett’s comments at the Afro-American Council meeting presaged a growing disaffection with the Tuskegee principal’s accommodationist course, which would soon divide and destroy the organization. Harsher than Ida’s were the words of John P. Green, a delegate who maintained that McKinley had not spoken out on the riots only “because he was advised to remain silent by certain ‘colored men’ whose names he could give.” There were enough Washington loyalists on the council to ensure that Green’s thinly veiled critique was greeted with “hisses, groans and boos.”22 But disaffection with Washington only escalated in 1899, dividing the council into “radicals” who opposed him and “conservatives” who supported him. Still on the fence about Washington’s leadership, Wells-Barnett spoke at a pro-Washington rally in Boston earlier that year. But by the time the council met again in August 1899, she had joined the ranks of his opponents.
Wells’s final break with Washington followed the lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia that spring. A young black farmer in Palmetto, a farming community just outside Atlanta, Hose allegedly shot and killed his employer, the white landowner Alfred Cranford, after the two men fought over a debt on April 13, 1899. Also accused of raping the farmer’s wife, Mattie Cranford, and injuring the couple’s infant son, Hose received no mercy when he was captured and delivered into the hands of a white mob ten days later. He was burned alive before two thousand white people, who “fought over pieces of his flesh for souvenirs.”23
When Hose’s charred knuckles appeared on display in an Atlanta store owner’s window, Atlanta University scholar W.E.B. Du Bois turned aside from scholarship in favor of activism. Thirty-one years old and en route to the offices of The Atlanta Constitution with a cautiously worded letter protesting Hose’s lynching, the Harvard-educated scholar was stopped short by his chance encounter with this gruesome trophy of a black life cut short. Raised in Massachusetts and prepared to spend a life challenging racism from within the groves of academia, Du Bois realized, after seeing Sam Hose’s knuckles on display, that “one could not be a calm, cool and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.”24
Hose’s lynching had a different but equally lasting effect on activists such as Wells-Barnett and her pastor Reverdy Ransom, who presided over Chicago’s Bethel Church. Although inured to lynchings, both were appalled when Booker T. Washington refused to issue any public comment on Hose’s death. By 1899, Washington was the best-known black leader in America. But when white reporters “questioned [him] regarding the Georgia lynching he had nothing to say.” His “position and hopes in the interest of the Tuskegee Institute,” he told them, made him feel constrained to keep silent. “I think I can be of more service to the race,” he added, by “helping to lay the foundation for an education which will be a permanent cure for such outrages.” Moreover, although Washington stated that he was opposed to “mob violence under all circumstances,” he also described the lynch mob’s black victims as sexual predators, explaining, “as a rule the men guilty of these outrages are ignorant individuals who have had no opportunity to secure an education and moral restraint.”25
Both Washington’s failure to denounce the Hose lynching and his assumption that Hose was in fact guilty of the crimes with which he had been charged were deeply disappointing to Ida. Moreover, an investigation into Hose’s death sponsored by Wells-Barnett, Ransom, and other blacks in Chicago soon called the dead man’s guilt into question. Louis Levin, the white private detective they hired, reported in June that Hose had killed Cranford only after his employer had drawn a gun on him during their quarrel. He also noted that Hose had fled the scene after exchanging shots with Cranford, rather than going to assault Mrs. Cranford and her infant son. Hose was not guilty of rape or any crime against Cranford’s family.
“Sam Hose was burned to teach Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must not resist,” Wells-Barnett wrote in Lynch Law in Georgia (1899), a pamphlet she published that month, which reprinted Levin’s report. Hastily put together, it chronicled both Hose’s lynching and those of eleven other men lynched in Georgia between March and April 1899—including Elijah Strickland, a black preacher, lynched one day after Hose for alleged but unspecified “complicity in his [Hose’s] crime.” Ida’s pamphlet used prose condensed from The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution to both describe the crimes and illustrate white Southern attitudes toward lynching. Both papers reported the deaths of Hose and the other black men in enthusiastic, almost pornographic, detail, making Wells-Barnett’s case for her. Subtitled “A Six-Weeks’ Record in the Center of Southern Civilization, as Faithfully Chronicled by the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution,” her pamphlet contained few words by Wells-Barnett other than a preface imploring her readers to “Consider the Facts.”26
In June 1899, Washington finally broke his silence. In a letter published in The Birmingham Age-Herald and several other newspapers, he denounced the recent lynchings in the South as bad for both blacks and whites. The letter pointed out that most lynchings were not linked to rape allegations, but still counseled African Americans to repudiate the Negro rapist as a “beast in human form.”27 Not surprisingly, Wells-Barnett lost all faith in Washington after that. Intent on establishing an antilynching bureau at the August 1899 meeting of the Afro-American Council in Chicago, she issued no public critique of Washington then. But a letter reporting on the council’s meeting that she wrote for The New York Age contained a disparaging reference to Washington. Whatever she said was suppressed by the paper’s editor, T. Thomas Fortune, who told Washington that he had “a sassy letter” of complaint from Wells-Barnett. Ida, Fortune noted dismissively, was like “a bull in a China shop.”28
Fortune’s derisive dismissal underscored the vast personality difference between Wells-Barnett and Washington. A shrewd manipulator of his public image, Washington rose to power by carefully appealing to American whites. Although never as apolitical as he seemed, he maintained his white Southern support by avoiding public agitation of any kind. Relentlessly up-beat about the futu
re of race relations in the South, “he seldom even referred to race prejudice,” which he described as “something to be lived down rather than talked about.”29 Even Washington’s involvement with the Afro-American Council took place behind the scenes, since he was unwilling to advertise his involvement with an organization he did not fully control. Although in Chicago when the council met there in 1899, Washington did not attend any of its sessions—lest he end up associated with radical resolutions or speeches that might alienate his white supporters. Instead, Washington met privately with council president Bishop Alexander Waters and some of the organization’s more conservative members in his hotel room. Washington would become ever more two-faced over the course of his career, balancing his public accommodationism with secret support for legal challenges to disenfranchisement and segregation.
By contrast Wells-Barnett remained blunt and outspoken, rarely concealing her opinions for long, even when she had considerable incentive to do so. While not unlike that of her mentor Frederick Douglass, Wells-Barnett’s forthright political style was increasingly anachronistic next to the accommodationist approach perfected by Booker T. Washington. Driven out of the South for speaking too freely, Wells-Barnett, with her assertive temperament, proved a liability even in the largely Northern organizations she helped to found. Both black and female, she was expected to be cautious, deferential, and discreet, and consistently failed on all counts. In 1898, for example, she delivered a blistering critique of Governor John R. Tanner of Illinois for failing to protect the black strikebreakers brought into the Illinois coal mining towns of Virden and Prana. Delivered in Chicago’s Quinn Chapel, her speech startled many of her listeners, since her husband, for all practical purposes, worked for the governor—who had the power to oust Ferdinand Barnett from his lucrative position as Illinois’s first black assistant state’s attorney. Barnett managed to keep his job, but the Illinois Record reported that during Wells-Barnett’s speech, “Barnett, her husband, was twitching and pulling his whiskers as she spoke,” while other listeners whispered, “‘Oh! his job…is gone.’”30
Likewise, Wells-Barnett’s gender made it hard for her to maintain her influence in the Afro-American Council. During the organization’s early years, Ida ran the council’s antilynching bureau and served as the council’s national organizer, a position she used to protest lynching and organize against the disenfranchisement schemes used by white Southerners. But in 1900 she also began to critique Booker T. Washington, who had preempted W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1899 attempt to establish a National Negro Business Bureau within the Afro-American Council by establishing his own National Negro Business League. The Atlanta University professor did not respond to the slight himself. On the job market at the time, and willing to believe the rival organization was T. Thomas Fortune’s idea, he hoped to have Washington’s support in finding a new post. But Wells-Barnett was far less cautious. Washington was unwilling to support any movement he “did not inaugurate,” Ida charged in an article published in the Conservator. Never in favor of supporting council initiatives that he could not control, the Alabama educator had stolen Du Bois’s idea, establishing an “organization of which he will be president, moderator and dictator.” Washington responded with equal, if far more covert hostility. “Miss Wells is fast making herself so ridiculous that everyone is getting tired of her,” he noted in a private letter to his secretary, Emmett Scott.31
Wells-Barnett’s open defiance of Washington marked the beginning of the end of her influence within the Afro-American Council. She was unable to attend the 1901 meeting because she would soon deliver her third child—her daughter Ida, who was born shortly after the council met. But that meeting saw Washington and his supporters taking advantage of her absence. Wells-Barnett was not reelected to her position as the organization’s national organizer; since Du Bois was also absent, Emmett Scott replaced him as head of the National Negro Business Bureau—which he went on to merge with Washington’s National Negro Business League. Reporting on the meeting’s events, Scott flatly asserted he was “glad Mrs. Barnett was not there to complicate the situation.”32
Still, for a time, the council’s antilynching bureau provided support for Wells-Barnett’s ongoing crusade against mob violence, allowing her to set up an office on Princeton Avenue and publish another antilynching pamphlet. Titled Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), it solicited support for antilynching work from “friends and members” of the council and highlighted the July 26 massacre of Robert Charles, a black laborer in New Orleans. Originally from rural Mississippi, Charles had settled in New Orleans in 1896, arriving in the city at a time of heightened racial tensions.33 In the economic depression that followed the Panic of 1893, many local employers had replaced white workers with poorly paid rural blacks and Italian immigrants, making both groups unpopular in the always color-conscious city.
On July 23, 1900, Charles was accosted by three members of the New Orleans police with explosive results. A thirty-four-year-old man, Charles was sitting on a stoop with his roommate Leonard Pierce. The two men had tried to pay a call to a couple of women Charles knew. Finding them either unavailable or not at home, they were waiting to try their luck one more time when they were spotted by several patrolmen, who began to interrogate them “as to who they were, what they were doing, and how long they had been there.”34 Literate and politically active, Robert Charles followed the news in his region closely. In 1898 Louisiana legislators had passed a new state constitution that included demanding new educational and property qualifications for voting, which were largely limited to black men as a result of a “grandfather clause” that protected the voting rights of men whose fathers and grandfathers had been eligible to vote in 1867.35 Moreover, the brutal lynching of Sam Hose in 1899 had infuriated Charles; he had begun to consider moving to Liberia to escape the political discrimination and racial violence that plagued blacks in the United States.
A disaffected man who was acutely aware of the injustices faced by his race, Charles refused to answer the barrage of questions he and Pierce received from New Orleans police, at which point the officers decided to arrest both men. When Charles objected, one officer began to beat him with a billy club and all three policemen drew their guns. Armed himself, Charles drew his own gun and returned fire after one of the officers shot him in the leg. He then escaped, having shot and wounded the man who had shot him. Tracked down at his home later that day, Charles defied the officers again, shooting two dead and once again eluding arrest. With two officers killed and one wounded, the New Orleans Police Department was offering a $250 reward for the apprehension of Charles “dead or alive.”36 The result was a massive four-day manhunt that ended with a mob of twenty thousand armed whites laying siege to Charles, who had holed up in a downtown New Orleans house. Defiant to the end, Robert Charles held off the mob for “several hours,” picking off his would-be captors from a second-story window with his Winchester as they tried to enter the building. An excellent marksman, he killed seven white men and wounded twenty, leaving his hiding place only after the mob set fire to the house. Charles died in a fusillade of bullets that left him “perforated from head to foot,” while several other New Orleans blacks also perished in the manhunt that led to his death. Anxious to punish someone for Charles’s defiant behavior, white New Orleans terrorized the city’s African American population as long as Charles remained at large, lynching seven black people at random and wounding many more.37
Despite the carnage, Charles was celebrated as a hero among New Orleans blacks, who respected his decision to “die with his face to the foe.” Without funds to hire a detective to investigate the events that led to Charles’s death, Wells-Barnett put together Mob Rule in New Orleans using the same techniques she had used to produce Lynch Law in Georgia. Much of the pamphlet was drawn from local press accounts, and it included detailed accounts of the deaths of the black New Orleanians who were murdered as the mob searched for Charles, crimes that went unpunished and were reported without censu
re or regret. Among the dead was a seventy-five-year-old man who was shot on his way to work and a woman who died in her bed when the mob peppered her family’s house with bullets. Simply by their blatant siding with the lynch mob rather than its victims, Southern reporters supplied Ida with a critique of lynching. The beating of “Esther Fields…a Negro washerwoman” who “ran into the arms of the mob, and was beaten into insensibility in less time than it takes to tell it” could not be pinned on Charles.38 Rather, it showed that white violence against black people was indiscriminate and largely unprovoked.
When it came to defending the actions of Robert Charles himself, however, Ida sought out evidence. Outnumbered and outgunned, Charles had fought white authorities with far deadlier force than any other black victim of a Southern lynch mob and was described in the white press as a “Negro desperado,” a “ravisher,” and “a fiend in human form.”39 Faced with these stereotypes, Ida wrote to Charles’s former friends and associates in an attempt to understand the man who had defied the power of the New Orleans police. What she learned was that Charles had no criminal record, and was described by his friends as a “law-abiding, quiet, industrious, peaceable man.”40