by H. W. Brands
Democrats naturally opposed the Lodge bill—the Lodge “force bill,” they called it—on partisan grounds but also as federal coercion of the kind voters had rejected in terminating Reconstruction. Republicans of the GOP’s capitalist wing were lukewarm at best about the bill, fearing that restarting the old battles was a sure formula for losing elections. Some Western Republicans sided with Southern Democrats against the bill, in part to protest the dominance of the Northeast in the GOP, in part as payback for Southern support on silver, and in part from hope for Southern endorsement of an extension of Chinese exclusion. Lodge and his elections bill found allies among the democratic wing of the Republican party, the heirs of the conscience Radicals, but also among fretful, cynical conservatives who hoped to undermine the interracial alliance that was building among populist-minded Southerners.7
The Lodge bill passed the House in time for the 1890 elections, which the Republicans lost disastrously (for reasons besides the elections bill, in particular the tariff). Senate Democrats took heart and filibustered the bill for thirty-three days during the lame-duck session, till the Republicans conceded defeat and the measure died. Meaningful federal interest in civil rights died with it, not to be resurrected till the second half of the twentieth century. The capitalist wing of the Republicans solidified its grip on the party of Lincoln; the democratic wing declined still further. Race as an issue all but disappeared from national politics.
The Democrats chortled in triumph, and Southern Democrats declared open season on black voting rights. Heretofore diffident Southern states adopted discriminatory measures that had proven effective elsewhere; others enshrined in law practices that had evolved informally. Some states wrote new constitutions. “I told the people of my county before they sent me here,” a delegate to Virginia’s 1901 constitutional convention declared, “that I intended … to disfranchise every negro that I could disfranchise under the Constitution of the United States, and as few white people as possible.” When the Supreme Court nodded acceptance of the new regime in the South—asserting, for example, in 1898 that a Mississippi literacy test was not unconstitutional, because its language was race neutral—there was little to deter the disfranchisers, who worked quickly and efficiently. In Mississippi in the mid-1890s, fewer than 10,000 blacks were registered out of a black voting-age population of nearly 150,000. In Louisiana, black registration plummeted from 130,000 in 1896 to fewer than 2,000 eight years later. In Georgia, barely one black voter out of a potential twenty-five was registered. (In Texas, discriminatory laws targeted Mexican Americans as well as blacks, with similar effect.)8
The erosion of black political rights took place over a generation, but observers far less acute than Booker Washington could see where things were headed. And even one as congenitally optimistic as Washington could be forgiven for despairing of democracy as the path to black improvement. Battered by the Civil War and Reconstruction, discredited by the scandals at various levels of government, democracy had slipped into reverse gear; the train that had carried America toward ever greater political participation during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century was now rolling backward, at least on the Southern portions of the line. And there seemed little Washington or any other African Americans could do about it.
THE BIG STORY from Memphis in the spring of 1892 was supposed to be the opening of the new Mississippi Bridge. Memphis commerce had declined from the glory days of the Mississippi steamboats; even barge traffic had fallen off since railroads started moving goods and people more directly and less expensively than the waterways of the heartland. Memphis, the northern outpost of what inhabitants of the region called the Mississippi Delta, hoped to recapture some of that lost traffic when the new railroad and roadway bridge opened. It was the first bridge across the Mississippi below the Ohio, and it promised to make Memphis once more the business center it had been. Because the federal government had underwritten construction, a delegation from Washington was expected; the War Department, which had oversight of the project on account of the army’s expertise in construction and its interest in moving troops about the country, would send the secretary of war or a top assistant. Memphians liked to point out that their city stood where De Soto had first laid eyes on the mighty river and that in 1845 John Calhoun had predicted that a transcontinental highway would pass through Memphis; the city fathers hoped the new bridge would fulfill Calhoun’s predictions and recapture the primacy of the days of De Soto.9
But two months before the ribbon cutting, another story spoiled the affair. This story also involved commerce, yet of a more local variety. W. H. Barrett, a white man, had long operated a grocery store in a neighborhood called the “Curve” for a bend in the streetcar track at the corner of Walker Avenue and Mississippi Boulevard. The neighborhood was integrated, as was much of Memphis at this time. “We lived in patches,” one black resident of the city said later. “There was no big black belt, no solid black belt anywhere in this city.” Barrett for years had the only grocery store in the neighborhood, and he liked it that way.10
Unsurprisingly he grew upset when competition arrived in 1889. The People’s Grocery Company was a cooperative venture of some black businessmen who thought Barrett’s monopoly ought to be broken. Yet they appealed to more than their customers’ desire for lower prices; they called on Memphis blacks to show racial solidarity by patronizing the store. Barrett would have resented any rival; he resented this one particularly for playing race against him.
For a time he muttered quietly. But in early March 1892 a scuffle broke out among some boys in the neighborhood. A mixed group of youngsters had been shooting marbles, perhaps for money; a dispute led to curses and then to blows. The parents became involved; one white father, Cornelius Hurst, apparently whipped one of the black boys. Several angry black fathers congregated in front of Hurst’s house, which stood near the People’s Grocery. Someone notified the police that a riot was brewing in the Curve, but by the time officers arrived the crowd had dispersed.
Yet the matter wasn’t settled. Accounts differed as to what happened next, but Barrett apparently entered the People’s Grocery looking for the black men who had disappeared. Or he may simply have been looking for trouble. A black clerk at the store, Calvin McDowell, said Barrett brandished a pistol and then hit him with it. McDowell said he was defending himself. “Being the stronger, I got the better of that scrimmage,” McDowell explained. Barrett alleged that McDowell had jumped him. Whichever way it happened, Barrett wound up with a bloody face and a further grievance against his competitor. He persuaded a (white) county judge to issue an arrest warrant for McDowell, and a (white) grand jury to indict the owners of People’s Grocery for operating a public nuisance.
Black residents of the neighborhood called a meeting to protest what seemed the patent misuse of the legal system. Some at the meeting denounced Barrett as “white trash”; by at least one report dynamite was mentioned as a solution to the Barrett problem. Whether or not the threat was intended seriously, Barrett took it so when he heard of it. He went back to the judge and complained that a conspiracy against him existed; the judge issued more arrest warrants.
By now the dispute between Barrett and the People’s Grocery had thoroughly engaged the racial loyalties of the neighborhood. A band of armed white men accompanied the (white) deputies to serve the arrest warrants; a band of armed black men prepared to defend the People’s Grocery and its employees and patrons. By malevolent design or bureaucratic ineptitude, the confrontation took place on a Saturday night, when visibility was poor and liquor had been flowing; the result was a shootout in which three deputies were wounded and perhaps some civilians, though the latter fled without filing injury reports. The deputies called for reinforcements, who rounded up some dozen black men, including Calvin McDowell and a co-owner of the store named Will Stewart. Thomas Moss, the president of the People’s Grocery, was subsequently arrested.
The Memphis papers next day described the “bloody riot” and chara
cterized the People’s Grocery as a “nest of turbulent and unruly negroes.” Whites responded by looting the store while freshly deputized white men ransacked a hundred black homes in the process of arresting dozens more black men on charges of conspiracy.
The black community of Memphis knew what to expect next, and an African American state militia unit called the Tennessee Rifles ringed the jail to prevent the prisoners from being kidnapped from custody and executed. But the same judge who had handed down all the arrest warrants now ordered the militia—and the rest of the black citizenry—disarmed. The Tennessee Rifles protested but didn’t forcibly resist.
This development may have averted a bloodbath in Memphis, but it left the prisoners defenseless when whites indeed stormed the jail and seized Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Will Stewart. Conspicuously, of all the prisoners none had cleaner police records than these; Moss was both a federal employee and a Sunday school teacher. The one thing that distinguished them from the others was their connection to the People’s Grocery.
The kidnapping occurred at three in the morning; the prisoners were transported in the dark to a field a mile north of Memphis. The three were shot dead, and McDowell’s eyes were gouged out. The bodies were left in the field.11
The lynching embarrassed the respectable part of the white community even as it outraged the blacks. “The bad effect of the lynching on the reputation of Memphis is recognized and deplored by every decent citizen,” a local reporter writing for the New York Times asserted. The city fathers had hoped to draw attention to Memphis for the new bridge and the bright future it promised; now the only thing the nation heard from Memphis was a sordid tale of vigilante violence. The attorney general vowed to find the perpetrators and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. A grand jury was impaneled to weigh evidence and hear testimony.12
But days passed, and then weeks. A wall of silence descended on the white community, and the witnesses summoned by the grand jury professed to be unable to identify any of the perpetrators. The panel returned no indictments, and no one was ever tried for the murders.
The anger of the black community turned to dismay. Memphis had suffered lynchings before, but these latest murders targeted men whose sole offense was to challenge the monopoly of a white merchant. If they could be killed with impunity—as the failure of the grand jury to indict anyone made clear they could—no black person in Memphis was safe. “I was born and raised in Memphis,” Cash Mosby, a black man who had built a business guiding railroad tours up and down the Mississippi, told a reporter. “But I cannot live here any longer.” Mosby said he had sent his family north to Cincinnati and intended to follow them as soon as he could liquidate his holdings. “My house here cost me $3,200. The lot has a fifty-foot front. Anybody can have the whole business for $2,500.” Another black man, with a Main Street property for which he had been offered $15,000, said he’d take $9,000 to get out. A lawyer who doubled as a landlord offered a rental house, which yielded $360 annually, for $500. About the time the grand jury was discharged, a news article from Memphis stated, “Negroes are leaving this locality in large numbers for Oklahoma and other points, and a general exodus is apprehended.”13
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THE EXODUS INCLUDED Ida Wells. She knew Tom Moss and the murdered man’s widow, whom she called “the best friends I had in town.” Their daughter was her godchild. The personal loss she felt informed an angry editorial in the Free Press. “The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival,” she declared. “There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order was rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left that we can do: save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” Wells noted that many blacks had likened Memphis to hell; she thought they slandered hell. “Hell proper is a place of punishment for the wicked; Memphis is a place of punishment for the good, brave and enterprising.” She blamed the whites of Memphis for their racism and violence, but she also blamed the leaders of black Memphis for failing to defend the African American community. “Where are our ‘leaders’ when the race is being burnt, shot, and hanged? Holding good fat offices and saying not a word.… However much the Negro is abused and outraged, our ‘leaders’ make no demands on the country to protect us, nor come forward with any practical plan for changing the condition of affairs.”14
The Memphis murders caused Wells to examine the lynching phenomenon more generally. “Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South,” she wrote later, “I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed: that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching—that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.” But Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart hadn’t been accused of rape or any other crime against white women, and they had been murdered brutally anyway. “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was: an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’ ”15
Wells commenced her public campaign against lynching with an editorial that might have gotten her lynched had she been in Memphis when it appeared. In the May 21, 1892, issue of the Free Speech she reported several recent murders and drew an incendiary inference.
Eight negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech: one at Little Rock, Ark., last Saturday morning where the citizens broke (?) into the penitentiary and got their man; three near Anniston, Ala.; one near New Orleans; and three at Clarksville, Ga., the last three for killing a white man, and five on the same old racket—the new alarm about raping white women. The same program of hanging, then shooting bullets into the lifeless bodies was carried out to the letter.
Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.16
Whites responded with outrage to Wells’s suggestion that white women were having consensual relations with black men. “There are some things the Southern white man will not tolerate,” one white Memphis paper spluttered, “and the obscene intimations of the foregoing have brought the writer to the outermost limit of public patience.” Another paper, assuming that the editorial writer was Wells’s male partner, J. L. Fleming, was more direct: “If the negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.”
Wells was in New York at the time, but Fleming was in Memphis. When a white mob gathered at the Merchants Exchange and worked itself into a frenzy reviling the Free Speech, Fleming decided to flee the city. Wells briefly thought she might return to Memphis, as even an angry mob would hesitate to attack a woman. But inquiries to friends on the scene convinced her that her life would be in jeopardy should she appear in the city, and she stayed in New York. The Free Speech fell silent.17
But Wells didn’t. Exile simply amplified her voice. “We cannot see what the ‘good’ citizens of Memphis gained by suppressing the Free Speech,” a Minnesota paper remarked. “They stopped the papers of a few hundred subscribers and drove Miss Ida B. Wells to New York, and now she is telling the story to hundreds of thousands of readers.” The story she told was that of the noose—and the whip and the pistol and the other ins
truments of violence against blacks. The more she researched the subject of lynching, the more convinced she became that it had little to do with rape but much to do with sex. “The question must be asked,” she wrote in a widely distributed pamphlet entitled A Red Record: Lynchings in the United States, “what the white man means when he charges the black man with rape. Does he mean the crime which the statutes of the civilized states describe as such? Not by any means. With the Southern white man, any misalliance existing between a white woman and a colored man is a sufficient foundation for the charge of rape. The Southern white man says that it is impossible for a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored man, and therefore the fact of an alliance is a proof of force.” In this pamphlet and a second, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, Wells furnished examples of alleged rapes that proved to be consensual. Mrs. J. S. Underwood, the wife of an Ohio minister, charged a black man, William Offett, with rape. He escaped lynching but not the penitentiary, to which he was sentenced for fifteen years. Yet the woman’s conscience got the better of her, and she told the true story, which Wells repeated:
I met Offett at the Post Office. It was raining. He was polite to me, and as I had several bundles in my arms he offered to carry them home for me, which he did. He had a strange fascination for me, and I invited him to call on me. He called, bringing chestnuts and candy for the children. By this means we got them to leave us alone in the room. Then I sat on his lap. He made a proposal to me, and I readily consented. Why I did so, I do not know, but that I did is true. He visited me several times after that, and each time I was indiscreet. I did not care after the first time. In fact I could not have resisted, and had no desire to resist.