The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

by Various

  Those who are able ought to help the race by contributions to its literature; but the being able should mean not merely time and taste for writing but also something to say and a knowledge of how to say it. Too much sameness of subject is a fault to be deplored in our publications. Being Negroes does not prevent us from being also men and women, endowed with powers and inclinations similar to those of others. The race question is a very important question, but it is not the only one for us; nor are church affairs all that concern even church organs. There are political, social, moral, scientific, educational and economic problems which affect us as individuals and as a people. Why not show ourselves capable of aiding in their solution?

  This is but one phase of an important subject, and our silence at this time as to the other is no indication that we are either blind or unappreciative. “The Achievements of Negro Newspapers” is a theme worthy of discussion and prolific material. My preference for this topic which I have chosen is due to the fact that we are already recipients of too much praise from our friends and too little honest criticism. That vile vituperation of which the race is every day the victim, comes from the enemies and, in no sense, can be considered criticism. The path of the editor, and especially the Negro editor is thorny and far from being a path of pleasantness and peace. The ideal newspaper can never be realized but he who works in steady contemplation and pursuit thereof, works more worthily and achieves greater results than those without an ideal. It is encouraging to note that we have newspapers that are striving for dignity and elevation of tone and general excellence of character. Prominent among these are The Age, Detroit Plaindealer and the Cleveland Gazette, while several others might be mentioned. Let the Negro editor who feels himself in his proper sphere grow not discouraged because of imperfections, but persevere in his efforts to work out the salvation of his people.

  JOSEPHINE TURPIN WASHINGTON

  “Anglo Saxon Supremacy” (1890)

  SOURCE: Josephine J. Turpin Washington, “Anglo Saxon Supremacy,” New York Age, no. 48 (August 23, 1890).

  The Afro Americans attending the national Teacher’s Association, at St. Paul Minn., heard at least one very unpalatable address on the race problem.

  Had it been that the simple truth was told, however unpleasant, it could have been received with a certain degree of equanimity. It could have been swallowed as one takes bitter medicine from the physician, who is not mistaken as an enemy because his dose happens to be nauseous. From beginning to end, the address was one mass of misrepresentation, distorted facts and unjust assumptions with regard to the Negro. This is all the more dangerous because the speaker, Mrs. Helen K. Ingram of Jacksonville, Fla., assumed the guise of friendliness.

  Our Northern friends are not likely to be imposed upon by the utterances of the avowed Negro hater, who expresses himself with violence and frequently makes no other attempt towards argument than the shotgun. His assertions are disregarded or treated as the ravings of a rabid maniac. It is the man or woman of acknowledged respectability, of high moral and social standing, of expressed goodwill to the Negro, and of apparent fairness to him, who can do us real harm with those who are truly our friends, but who are not so situated as to have an opportunity of knowing us well.

  Such an enemy, in the garb of a friend, is evidently Mrs. Helen K. Ingram. The fact that she was “born, brought up and educated in New York State” and that for years her “nearest neighbors were the intimate friends of Gerrit Smith and William Lloyd Garrison and active, earnest officials in that mysterious transit line—the underground railway,” proves nothing. Does she mention these facts in her personal history because she thinks we must believe that one who lived so near to the friends of the Negro must be necessarily herself his friend? Or that one born and reared in a Northern State must perforce inspire confidence on this question? Mrs. Ingram is not the only Northerner with Southern principles and ideas. The South teems, in some sections, with Northern men who came South and out-Herod Herod himself in injustice to the Negro. The fear of being ostracized in social and injured in business circles, acts as a potent influence. Perhaps the most prejudiced town in the State of Alabama—certainly the only one I know which has separate coaches on its dummy line for white and colored passengers—is the Magic City of Birmingham, built up almost altogether by Northern capitalists. Nor is unfairness to the Negro confined to Northern men who come South to live. We have a prominent example of this in the recent assault, in New York city, on T. Thos. Fortune of The Age. On the other hand Cable of Louisiana and Blair of Virginia are Southerners, and yet just and fair in their views on this race question. We cannot with surety classify either our friends or our enemies by sections, but we recognize them when we find them.

  According to Mrs. Ingram, even the system of slavery itself cannot be deplored. The slave was happy, care-free, satisfied, “a slave in little but a name.” He “was a picturesque feature in our country,” “a favorite theme for poet romancers and song makers,” a being invested with imaginary ills by soft-hearted romantic folks who were too far off from him to know his real delightful condition. It does seem to me that listening to such a representation of the barbarous system that reduced men to the level of brutes, that maltreated and mangled and killed when it would the body, that warped and distorted and degraded the soul, that disregarded the family relation and set a premium on vice, that tore husbands from wives and mothers from children, that perpetrated all the evil which can be conceived when one human being is placed entirely within the power of another—it does seem to me that we should feel justified in distrusting any statement coming from one who could so seek to palliate the crimes of slavery.

  Nor is Mrs. Ingram’s representation of the Negro’s condition in freedom more reliable. She declares that “every avenue of trade is open to him;” that the South has given him “careful training in equal schools with her white population and she has given him equal opportunities for using that education;” that “not an occupation, trade profession, or business of any kind is barred to him.” She cites as if they were common occurrence, two isolated instances of his employment in Jacksonville, in one case as a clerk in a shoe-store where “a white man and a colored man stand side by side behind the counter and in the other where “the young man whose hair kinks to the skin and whose eyes and teeth shine like stars in a midnight sky” will fill your prescription in one of the oldest and wealthiest drug stores in the city. “In groceries, hardware stores, anywhere you choose, the same equal chance is given.” Can anything be farther from the truth? There was not one of those colored teachers who sat within hearing of his assertion that did not in his heart utter a denial; not one of the white people in the audience but knew it was false. There is no one so ignorant of the status of the negro in this country as not to be aware that neither North nor South are all employments open to him. A few remarkable exceptions only prove the rule of his general exclusion. Were his admission to all grades of employment for which he is fitted a matter of course, if would not excite such comment when it does occur.

  The Negro is not given an equal chance, Mrs. Ingram and others of her class to the contrary notwithstanding. A colored photographer may be so fortunate as to have “a conspicuous gallery in a central location on the principle street in Jacksonville,” but who does not know that colored professional men in the South, and to some extent in the North also, are daily refused offices in certain localities because neighboring white tenants would be offended? Who does not know that colored men of education, of refinements, of unimpeachable character, cannot rent or buy homes where they will? That colored photographer “cares not which race comes up his winding stair,” but I venture to say his work lies principally among his own people. The colored dentist was admitted to practice, but how many white patients will he have? Jacksonville is indeed an exception if “the finest schoolhouses in the city are those built for the use of the colored race.” Never having visited the city, I am not prepared to deny this. I
must say, however, that I cannot believe in the statement that 52.3 per cent. of Florida’s school fund goes to her colored pupils. If this is so, how is it that the colored schools are inferior to the white schools in number, in buildings, in educational appliances, and in the amount expended for teacher’s salaries? This is undeniably true of Pensacola, with which I am well acquainted.

  What has Mrs. Ingram to say of the refusal to the Negro of equal accommodations in hotels, theatres, and railway cars; of the race prejudice shown even in so-called Christian churches; of denials at soda water fountains, and proscriptions on the ocean beach? Then made the objects of such invidious distinctions, shown in these and a hundred other ways, are we given an “equal chance?”

  “Ninety-five per cent. of our criminals are Negroes!” This may be a startling statement, but it is not altogether discouraging to one who knows anything of what goes on behind the scenes. How many of these alleged criminals are really guilty, can never be known. In most cases they are tried, without adequate counsel, by judge and jury alike prejudiced. The trial is opened with the assumption that the fellow is an abandoned wretch because he is a “nigger.” The predominance of the accused’s own color on the jury is, in case of the Negro, a very unusual occurrence. In some parts of the South colored men are never put on the jury. Their names happen never to be reached. The colored judge is a phenomenon—too rare a genus to be considered. Negroes are arrested for offenses which white men commit with impunity. When the white man is brought before the bar of justice (?) money and influence frequently secure him an acquittal, regardless of his guilt. I do not believe that an impartial administration of the law would give ninety-five per cent. of Negro criminals even if under present circumstance it is true; but were we to grant for the sakes of argument, that this is the correct proportion of Negro to white criminals, could we not find another explanation than natural and incurable depravity of the Negro? What of heredity, of the transmission of traits acquired under unfavorable environment, of the influence of two hundred and fifty years of slavery? In this there is nothing to warrant despair. There is no reason to believe that the stain of the deplorable past is not eradicable.

  It matters little that Mrs. Ingram characterizes the Negro as “without dignity, sly, deceitful, improvident, simply imitative in small matters, self-sufficient and important,” while the Anglo-Saxons have always been “dignified, spirited, valiant, truthful, fearless, enterprising;” that she compares the one to the mule and the other to the horse in their respective capacities for improvement. Simple affirmations, from such a source and in such a cause are not convincing. We could speak of the Negro’s patient and forgiving spirit, of his faithfulness and devotion even to the owners who oppressed him, of his loyalty to the union, of his remarkable progress since the acquisition of freedom, in education, in culture, in wealth, in morality, in all that go to make the man. We could contrast these virtues with the selfish and grasping natures of those who held him in bondage, with the cruelty and brutality with which they exercised their power, with the unjust and barbaric treatment they now accord him; but we would not say, “Behold, these men are Anglo Saxons: such must be the character of all Anglo-Saxons.” Some Negroes are certainly what Mrs. Ingram says of the “the Negro,” but the description fits some white men as well.

  Apropos of this, soon after the late fruitless conference of able and learned white men who met to discuss the future of the Negro without having extended to any member of that race the courtesy of an invitation to be present and to participate in the discussion, the New York World published a short editorial in which it very pertinently remarks: “Negroes there are, but not ‘the Negro,’ a term which means, if it means anything, a certain type of persons, similarly circumstanced with identical characters and aspirations, whose case is to be dealt with by formulae, as is done with chemicals in the laboratory;” and adds further on, “The Negro race contains a great variety of individuals so unlike each other as to make generalization concerning them utterly absurd and misleading.”

  Mrs. Ingram says, furthermore, “All who have risen to any distinction among them (the Negroes) are nearly white.” This was clearly and emphatically refuted in the person of the well-known Negro orator, J. C. Price, in attendance on that very convention and one of the invited speakers of the occasion. It is further refuted in the persons of New York’s able counselor, T. McCants Stewart; Detroit’s eminent lawyer, D. Augustus Straker; Dr. Alexander Crummell, a renowned scholar and theologian; Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden, a celebrated linguist and scientist; Kelly Miller, Howard University’s brilliant young professor of mathematics, and many others. Suppose we were to admit that the majority who have risen to distinction among us are of mixed blood. It would not prove the natural superiority of the Anglo Saxon. It could be explained very simply on the ground that blood relationship to the Anglo-Saxon race, as the race which has had the hundreds of years of training, of education, and of culture of which we have been deprived, is fraught with some intellectual benefit to the offspring; and on the further ground that the unnatural fathers were, in some cases, moved to give to these children of illegitimate birth educational advantages superior to those within the reach of the unmixed black. Would this justify the assumption that the whites are naturally superior and will always maintain supremacy? By no means. A mere statement of superiority amounts to nothing. It must be proven. The Afro-American is doing his part in schools and colleges, in business and in professional life to confound the advocates of white superiority. Clement Morgans will multiply as the years go by. Let the good work progress. Time will solve the problem; and it is my prediction that despite race prejudice, despite injustice, despite oppression, despite cavillings over race supremacy, the solving will result in the peopling of America with “the man of the new race,” the “Minden Armais” of Dr. Jamieson.

  JOSEPHINE TURPIN WASHINGTON

  50

  IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT

  (1862–1931)

  Ida B. Wells-Barnett is well known to most readers of this anthology. Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, she had some of the least advantaged early years of the writers included here. Orphaned in 1878, she worked as a teacher to support five younger siblings left in her care. She moved with the two youngest to Memphis and briefly took classes at Fisk University in Nashville. In 1884 she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad car and was physically removed. Wells sued the Railroad and won, though the ruling was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. Wells began to write and, in 1889, was invited to join the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, a militant Memphis newspaper. After three friends were lynched, in 1892, her focus turned to anti-lynching efforts.

  A year before her death, Wells ran for state legislature, making her the first black woman to run for public office in the United States.

  The following selections showcase Wells’s range as an activist. Though known mostly for her campaign against lynching, Wells advocated for racial justice on all fronts. In “Our Country’s Lynching Record” and “Lynch Law and the Color Line,” Wells’s words meet their familiar target, while in “Our Women,” “The Ordeal of the ‘Solitary,’” and “The Requirements of Southern Journalism,” her attention turns elsewhere. No matter Wells’s subject, her rhetoric charges ahead, arguing for her audience’s immediate effort. Every act Wells encountered that proliferated white supremacy was called what it was: violence. And the protection she sought for American blacks gained her recognition by her contemporaries.

  “Our Women” (1887)

  SOURCE: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Our Women,” New York Freeman (January 1, 1887).

  The Brilliant “Iola” Defends Them from the Memphis Scimiter

  Among the many things that have transpired to dishearten the Negroes in their effort to attain a level in the status of civilized races, has been the wholesale contemptuous defamation of their women.

  Unmindful of the fact that our enslave
ment with all the evils attendant thereon, was involuntary and that enforced poverty ignorance and immorality was our only dower at its close, there are writers who have nothing to give the world in their disquisitions on the Negroes, save a rehearsal of their worthlessness, immorality, etc.

  While all these accusations, allowed as we usually are, no opportunity to refute them, are hurtful to and resented by us, none sting so deeply and keenly as the taunt of immorality; the jest and sneer with which our women are spoken of, and the utter incapacity or refusal to believe there are among us mothers, wives and maidens who have attained a true, noble, and refining womanhood. There are many such all over this Southland of ours, and in our own city they abound. It is this class who, learning of the eloquent plea in defense of, and the glowing tribute paid Negro womanhood, by G. P. M. Turner in the speech he delivered in the Bewden case, return him their heartfelt thanks and assure him that their gratitude and appreciation of him as a gentleman, a lawyer and a far seeing economist is inexpressible. Our race is no exception to the rest of humanity, in its susceptibility to weakness, nor is it any consolation for us to know that the nobility of England and the aristocratic circles of our own country furnish parallel examples of immorality. We only wish to be given the same credit for our virtues that others receive, and once the idea gains ground that worth is respected, from whatever source it may originate, a great incentive to good morals will have been given. For what you have done in that respect accept the sincere thanks of the virtuous colored women of this city.