Sensational

by Kim Todd

  In Memphis in March 1892, three men were lynched on the outskirts of town, and Wells covered it for her paper. One of the murdered men was her friend, the congenial postal carrier and grocery store owner Thomas Moss, father of her goddaughter. It was clear to Wells that the killers were prompted by economic interest—they wanted to shut down a competing grocery store. Out of her grief, Wells used her newspaper, the Free Speech, to suggest Black Memphis citizens should abandon the city, turning their backs on “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.” Many agreed and moved to Oklahoma, leaving white business owners with lost revenue and resentment. Aware of the swirling anger, hers and others’, she bought a gun.

  Two months later, she wrote an even more forceful Free Speech editorial that detailed eight additional lynchings and called the repeated claims of Black men raping white women a “thread-bare lie.” While some in Lizzie Borden’s community couldn’t imagine a Christian white woman stepping outside the bounds of the law, Wells suggested that southern white women often slept with Black men willingly, because they desired them, and then lied about it. Interracial marriage was illegal, so when these women suspected a neighbor might have spotted their lover at the door or worried their child would have dark skin, they said they had been raped. Wells’s unsigned editorial warned that if white men kept obsessing about sex between Black men and white women, “a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

  The day the article ran, in the early summer of 1892, Wells was vacationing on the East Coast. Alarming reports from Memphis began to trickle in. A rival newspaper, the Scimitar, said the author of the Free Speech editorial should be tied to a stake, branded, and mutilated. She’d said what it was absolutely forbidden to say. Her business manager, warned of a gathering mob, had fled. Men were watching the train and her house, waiting, murderous, for her return. Her newspaper office had been destroyed—type smashed, chairs broken, a threatening note left in the wreckage. Telegrams and letters sent to her in New York carried the same message: if she valued her life, she shouldn’t come back. And these were the notes from friends. She was stranded.

  Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, who had been publishing her work for several years, told her: “Well, we’ve been a long time getting you to New York, but now you are here I am afraid you will have to stay.”

  So she did, writing for the New York Age, at first smaller pieces, and then, on June 25, 1892, putting together a lengthy article called “The Truth About Lynching,” elaborating on her claim that miscegenation laws and prejudice made it impossible for unions of mutual passion to be acknowledged. Based on extensive investigations of individual lynchings, Wells marshaled story after story to support her argument that, in many cases of supposed rape, white women were sleeping with Black men willingly. In one case, a woman said the man in her bedroom was only putting up curtains; in another, the woman insisted it wasn’t an interracial affair as she, too, was Black. In another, a minister’s wife declared her lover was actually her rapist. The offence lay not in the crime but in the race and sex of the participants, Wells argued. White men raped Black women with impunity. In addition: “They could and did fall in love with the pretty mulatto and quadroon girls as well as black ones, but they professed an inability to imagine white women doing the same thing with Negro and mulatto men.”

  From her May editorial onward, Wells discussed women’s bodies, capable of interracial lust and affection, in a way her opponents found intolerable. Her banishment from Memphis was devastating, exiling her from those she loved. But it was also liberating: “I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely.”

  Victoria Earle Matthews, a Brooklyn-based reporter who had been profiled along with Ida B. Wells in the Journalist’s 1889 feature on African American women, recognized Wells as a talented writer in desperate need of money and support. Matthews’s own work, to this point, had been in a different vein. She wrote, mostly under pseudonyms, for white-owned papers like the New York Times, the Herald, the Mail and Express, as well as Black-owned papers like the New York Age and the Washington Bee. Born into slavery to an enslaved mother, Matthews was roughly four years old at the end of the Civil War. Her mother fled north and arranged to bring her children after her, so she had grown up in New York. At nineteen, she married a coachman who, according to the census, couldn’t write. She sought out education wherever she found it. Peers described her as a “zealous, watchful spirit,” and there was no doubt she could get things done. “No writer of the race is kept busier,” noted the Journalist.

  One of her earliest journalistic efforts was modesty itself. As “editress” for the “Home Circle” feature of the Washington Bee, she filled her columns with housekeeping tips. Silk scarves placed on the mantel or a Japanese scrap basket decorated with a ribbon brighten the home. Reinforcing sock heels will mean they need less darning. But, unlike Bly or Banks, Matthews saw writing about domesticity as significant—a way for Black women to build a family home—something destroyed by generations of slavery. She hoped, too, these kinds of articles might lead to something else, both for her and others of her race. In her inaugural column, she urged women to overcome their reluctance to write: “I do not think our women will object when I say comparatively speaking, very little journalistic work has been done by us in the past; not due to a lack of ability, but a natural timidity, which I hope is dying out.” Like other women stepping into this new territory, she was wary to appear to be asking too much.

  Victoria Earle Matthews in the Journalist, January 26, 1889

  Victoria Earle Matthews portrait, Journalist, January 26, 1889 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

  But she’d begun to expand her scope, writing a “New York Letter” for the National Leader. She used her column to advocate for Black men to run for office, encourage the Empire Women’s Republican Club to discuss political issues, question why all the speakers at the unveiling of Boston’s Crispus Attucks monument had been white. “Peace and security are very good things to have,” she wrote, “but there are other things quite as necessary to the proper enjoyment of life.” What would happen, she wondered, if African Americans were given a platform, or took one?

  Seeing an opportunity to build just this kind of platform, Matthews gathered friends and acquaintances and organized a benefit for Ida B. Wells in October 1892.

  At Lyric Hall in Manhattan, Wells entered a room where every detail seemed crafted to demonstrate good feeling. Event programs looked like copies of her Free Speech newspaper, now defunct. Her pen name “Iola” was projected in lights on the stage platform. Organizers presented her with flowers, a pin in the shape of a pen, and $500 to underwrite a book of her lynching reporting: Southern Horrors, Lynch Law in All Its Phases.*

  After songs and speeches, it was her turn to speak. Wells left her handkerchief on her chair on the stage and rose to stand in front of the hundreds of supporters, mostly women, many very accomplished. Doctors, writers, assistant principals crowded the hall. It was a sea of strangers, welcoming in white sashes but strangers nonetheless. Wells had taught and written, but she hadn’t given a lot of lectures. Nervous, she kept the text of her speech in front of her, though she knew it by heart.

  She started in on the story of her friend, Thomas Moss, who owned the thriving People’s Grocery Company outside of Memphis, and the fight among boys playing marbles that turned into a fight among men, including the white owner of a rival store. After several days of threats, fearing an attack on the People’s Grocery, Moss and his co-owners posted guards at the back of the building, and the guards shot and wounded white men creeping in. The three grocery owners were arrested, along with many other Black men in town, alleged to be part of a conspiracy. As the men sat in jail, white-owned papers stoked anger, describing the store as fu
ll of criminals and gamblers. Just as it was announced that all the injured men would live, Moss, the grocery store manager, and a clerk, were torn out of jail, put on a train a mile out of town, and shot to death.

  As Wells talked, sadness overwhelmed her. Her Tennessee life had been yanked out from under her so suddenly. Relationships forged through time, over long evening walks and lively conversation, were gone. So was the printing press that had enabled her to publish her own thoughts on her own terms. Letters, type, cherished belongings, left behind, broken, or scattered. And there was no looping back. The only path was forward.

  Tears dripped down her face, though she kept her voice even. It was embarrassing—she wanted to do well by these esteemed women who went to all this effort to celebrate her—and here she was, weak.

  Without stopping, she reached behind her and gestured for help. Victoria Earle Matthews put a handkerchief in her hand. And Wells kept speaking.

  Chapter 10

  1892–1893

  Guilt and Innocence

  “Put a good woman on this!” shouts out the head editor to his assistant dozens of times a day.

  —The Living Age, 1898

  Through the rest of 1892 and into 1893, as Grover Cleveland won his rematch with Benjamin Harrison to take the presidency again, Nell Nelson reported from Europe on factory conditions in Berlin and Nuremberg, Winifred Sweet (now Winifred Black) solicited reader opinions on “Who Is the Greatest Woman Alive?,” and as Lizzie Borden paced in jail, awaiting trial, Elizabeth Jordan flourished at the World.

  She stayed up late nights, going into all kinds of New York City neighborhoods, undoing the good work of her convent education. The World still felt like the center of a bustling universe. In the paper’s tenth anniversary issue in 1893, an illustration touted “Public Services Rendered by The World.” These included: “Equal rights for poor and rich,” “Relief for the oppressed,” “Anti-Monopoly,” and “Exposure of Fraud.” Jordan’s reporting on a medical student who’d poisoned his secret wife and Nelson’s advocacy for female factory inspectors were also listed among the World’s decade of accomplishments, though neither woman was mentioned by name. But Pulitzer wasn’t resting on his laurels; the paper continued to innovate, installing a color printing press and publishing one of the first Sunday comics supplements, popping with scrappy characters in bright reds and blues.

  Jordan had proven her value as an editor as well as a writer but was still relatively new, garnering only the rare byline. So the assignment to cover the Borden murder trial was a coup; reporters all wanted to be on the train to New England in June 1893.

  In the months since the crime, the mystery had only deepened. However you looked at the case, Jordan wrote in one of her early articles, “you have to make up your mind to accept things which are wildly improbable on the basis of any past experience of human action.” It was impossible to imagine Lizzie Borden had committed the murders. It was impossible to imagine she hadn’t.

  The World, in a weekend feature, asked notable figures whether they thought Borden was innocent, revealing the depths of disagreement. Journalist Helen Watterson said she was guilty. Borden’s sex, and its relative powerlessness, was a motive, she suggested: “Many women—faithful daughters and wives—have lived out long lives of utter soul and mind starvation in so-called comfortable homes and in surroundings that outsiders might envy, simply because the unimaginative, sordid man who held the purse-strings did not think it necessary to countenance any display of ‘foolishness’ on the part of his women at the expense of his cash-box.” And Borden’s womanhood didn’t offer any defense: “The one thing to be said in rebuttal of the argument drawn from her character is that she is a woman. Which is really no defense at all. Because there may be an entire lack of moral fibre in a woman quite as certainly as in a man.” This contention, though not flattering, insisted that women were full, flawed, human beings rather members of some separate category.

  In contrast, Rev. Charles Parkhurst, head of New York’s Society for the Prevention of Crime, who had been conducting a campaign against police corruption and prostitution in the Tenderloin, came to Borden’s defense. He declared her upbringing—her environment and “Christian attributes”—incompatible with such viciousness, writing, “Angels, my friends say, do not become Frankenstein in an instant.”

  Like all the other reporters except Kate Swan McGuirk, Elizabeth Jordan couldn’t get an interview with the defendant. But there was plenty to observe in the courtroom as the Borden trial got underway. Bright sunshine streamed through courthouse windows on either side of the audience, bringing unbearable heat. The attorneys heaped their tables with evidence: a valise containing the skulls of the two murdered Bordens, a dress Lizzie might have worn, a bloody bandanna, a large selection of hatchets. Dozens of reporters perched on stools in front of the long wood shelves installed as communal desks, alongside sketch artists flecked with ink. Women from New Bedford and Fall River, fans in hand and lunches in their pockets, glowered at the defendant. Jordan found these women, who attended every day and formed “a self-constituted jury,” disconcerting, writing, “They sit and look at her with ghoulish eyes, and they have openly exulted with the prosecution on the rare occasions when a point has seemed to be scored.” Of course, she hoped her readers would exhibit the same lust for every gory detail, never missing a day, though at further remove.

  In full-page articles with ample pictures, she brought the courtroom as close as she could, occasionally slipping into the intimate tone of second person: “To-day, as yesterday, you squeezed your way when you entered the court-room past a blood-soaked sofa on which an old man sleeping securely in his own house at 11 o’clock in the morning, with members of his own family about him, was chopped to death by a murderer.”

  And, though she found the audience’s glares at Borden unseemly, no one observed Borden more closely than Elizabeth Jordan.

  Descriptions of women’s bodies and appearance were influential, Jordan knew, and she considered how to do it. To call a woman “pretty” was one way to create sympathy, deserved or not. And ugliness may be deemed to reflect sin. Jordan clearly found Borden unattractive, with sickly skin, doughy cheeks, a double chin, lips that she licked constantly, but she struggled not to make this a judgment. The defendant’s face, “plain to the point of homeliness” viewed straight on, was “not without womanly gentleness” in profile, Jordan wrote. The nape of her neck had a nice curve. And clutching a bouquet, a black fan in her black-gloved hands, with freshly curled bangs, Borden was at least very tidy. “She radiated cleanliness like an atmosphere,” Jordan concluded.

  Elizabeth Jordan

  Elizabeth Jordan, Tales of the Cloister, frontispiece, 1901 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

  But trial testimony about Borden’s body kept getting in the way of efforts to portray her as feminine. A bucket of bloody rags found in the cellar was explained away by the claim that Borden was menstruating. A spot of blood on her petticoat might have been from a fleabite. The prosecutor suggested she committed the murders naked, and that’s why her clothes remained clean. Her arms looked suspiciously strong. This all made her seem more bestial than angelic.

  On a good day for Borden (the headlines of Jordan’s articles were all from the perspective of the accused, like “Lizzie Borden Fatigued,” and “Going Lizzie’s Way,” implying a sympathy with her) the police contradicted themselves about where they’d found a hatchet handle. Maybe it was on the box in the cellar, next to the hatchet head. Or maybe it was in the stove, where someone might have attempted to burn it. On a second day, her doctor described giving her morphine to calm her, a possible cause of her confused and contradictory testimony at the coroner’s inquest. On still a third day, the judge banned evidence from a drugstore clerk who said Borden tried to buy prussic acid, a poison, from him several days before the murders.

  But not everything went her way. On a bad day, a neighbor mentioned that she’d seen Borden burning a dress not long after the k
illings, one Borden claimed was ruined by paint.

  “I would not be seen doing that, Lizzie,” the neighbor had cautioned. She knew this was damning but didn’t go to the police for months. In another setback, the matron of the Fall River Central Police Station reported a fight between the Borden sisters.

  “You have given me away, but I will not yield an inch,” Lizzie Borden allegedly said.

  Nights, after Borden climbed into the carriage for the trip back to jail, and the lawyers returned to their desks to refine the next day’s orations, Jordan and other reporters gathered on the balcony of one of their hotel rooms, looking for a little relief from the humid air, and tried to make sense of what they’d heard. Perhaps the only logical explanation was some grim twist, like one might read in a Poe tale: a murder in a room with no escape route, a clue hidden in plain sight. The male reporters in her circle all considered Borden innocent, but Jordan felt the power of her words to sway readers one way or another. She kept her thoughts to herself.

  As the evidence unfurled, though, Jordan let her mask of impartiality slip. The police clearly conspired against the defendant, making even innocuous actions seem suspicious. The evidence was all circumstantial. When the jaw of Mr. Borden’s skull, waved around by the prosecution, fell open, like something out of a horror story, Jordan told a reporter friend from The Sun:

  “The old man is trying to testify.”