Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

By Paula Giddings (Author) March 2008 - Illustrated. 800 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers

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O Pioneer!

By Richard Lingeman/NYT Book Review - May 18, 2008

If slavery is America’s original sin, lynching is its capital crime. The historical memory dies hard: only last year, three nooses were hung from a schoolyard tree contested by white and black students in Jena, La.

The wave of mob killings of blacks in the South � by hanging, burning, shooting and torture � started after the end of Reconstruction. These public murders were carried out with the real purpose of keeping blacks in their place, economically and socially. The practice was supported by leading citizens and became a popular public spectacle, a carnival of cruelty that drew excited crowds.

According to “Rope and Faggot,” the 1928 study by the N.A.A.C.P. general secretary Walter White, between 1882 and 1927 there were 4,951 lynchings in the United States. About a third of them were aimed at whites, mainly in the West; 92 of the victims were women.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was one of the first African-Americans to raise an informed protest against this outrage. Paula Giddings’s devoted and scrupulous biography is not the first study of this pioneering woman, but it is a comprehensive work that attempts to portray her as part of the progressive movement that emerged among the black bourgeoisie in post-bellum America.

Wells-Barnett dedicated her life to bringing lynchings to the attention of America and the world. Determined, outspoken and fearless, an incendiary pamphleteer, she was politically astute, anticipating the tactics of the civil rights movement.

Giddings, a professor of African-American studies at Smith College and author of “Where and When I Enter,” a history of black women activists, brushes in the historical context of Wells-Barnett’s campaign ably, if in occasionally numbing detail.

Excavating scattered letters, fragmented diaries and second-hand references to her writings for short-lived African-American weeklies, Giddings aims, she writes, to uncover the achievements of a bold woman whose militancy and “dominating style” sometimes cost her allies in her own day and proper credit in the eyes of history.

Ida Bell Wells was born to slave parents in 1862 in Holly Springs, Miss. Her father, a skilled carpenter, and mother, a housekeeper, were struck down by yellow fever when Ida was 16. Giddings writes of this turning point: “Throughout the remainder of her life, she struggled to turn the negative emotions of abandonment into a righteous determination to reform herself and the society that had forsaken her race.”

A precociously mature, bright and pretty teenager, standing barely five feet, Wells took charge of the upbringing of her younger siblings with help from relatives. She got some higher education, became a voracious reader with a love of Shakespeare and showed a talent for writing.

She turned to teaching school to support her family, eventually moving in 1880 to Memphis. There she siphoned off some of her energy into journalism, turning out a column for a local African-American paper that regularly challenged the racist libels of the white press. Yet she remained very much the Victorian young lady who admired “noble true womanhood and perfect ladyship” and vowed to curb her “unfeminine” anger.

Her craving for “perfect ladyship” toughened into a demand for respect. Black women at the time were often demeaned as dusky temptresses, which presumably explained their illicit sexual attraction to so many white men. Wells lashed out against the “wholesale contemptuous defamation of black women” and the “refusal to believe there are among us mothers, wives and maidens who have attained a true, noble and refining womanhood.”

Her determination to be treated as a lady provoked her first clash with white supremacy, in 1883, when she violently resisted being ejected from the whites-only “ladies car.” She sued the railroad, but the Tennessee Supreme Court, in a preview of Plessy v. Ferguson, ruled she was no lady, merely a “mulatto passenger,” separable and unequal, whose intention wasn’t to ride comfortably but to “harrass” and litigate.

Wells’s anti-lynching crusade hinged on a word ladies did not utter: “rape.” Defenders of the Snopesian New South, fearing Northern capitalists would pull out investments, claimed that lynching was a necessary response to an epidemic of attacks on white women by ravening black men. Defying Victorian gentility, Wells debunked this propaganda with evidence that accusations of rape were a factor in less than one-third of lynchings.

The campaign that became her life’s work really started in 1892 with the murders of her friend Tommie Moss and two others by a Memphis mob. Moss’s offense had nothing to do with rape; he was defending the cooperative grocery of which he was president against a group of whites he believed were bent on destroying it. A solid citizen who also worked as a postman, Moss was captured with two others and jailed.

A mob abducted them and put them to a slow, painful death by gunshots. The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche boasted that the lynching was “one of the most orderly of its kind ever conducted.”

Wells, who had since moved to New York, was shocked by Moss’s death. It was “our first lesson in white supremacy,” she declared. Writing about the affair in Free Speech, the paper she began editing in 1889, she almost got herself lynched by daring to suggest that white men who “overreach” in charges of rape might end up being “very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” Infuriated whites trashed her newspaper office and would have killed her had she not been out of town.

Wells decided to stay in New York, and soon set down in an African-American paper a long article, “The Truth About Lynching,” expanding on her contention that some white women chose to consort with black men and that black women were exploited by white men. She called for boycotts and strikes by blacks to protest lynchings.

“The Winchester rifle,” she wrote, “should have a place of honor in every black home,” since government refused to protect them. She herself bought a gun, but investigative journalism was her primary weapon. From a variety of platforms, she broadcast authoritative facts, statistics and case histories.

One of her pamphlets was devoted to an 1899 auto-da-fé in Palmetto, Ga., where a laborer named Sam Hose was accused of killing his employer, raping his wife and throwing their baby onto the floor. (A private detective hired by Wells showed that the wife had never in fact accused Hose of rape.)

Hose was taken to the town square, tied to a tree and stripped naked. His ears, fingers and penis were sliced off, and then he was burned alive. Afterward, bits of charred bone, slices of liver and even parts of the tree were sold as souvenirs.

The tide of lynchings continued to terrorize Southern blacks well into the 20th century. Local authorities covered up for the mobs, while the federal government looked the other way. In the early 1920s the federal anti-lynching legislation Wells-Barnett had championed died in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Ida had in 1895 married a Chicago lawyer named Ferdinand Barnett, a feminist who contributed his legal skills to the cause, suing to enforce Illinois’s anti-lynching laws. She settled in Chicago and bore four children, even as she continued lecture tours and meetings and ran The Conservator, a black paper her husband owned.

Inspired by Jane Addams, she created programs for young black men and women patterned after those of Hull House. Susan B. Anthony endorsed her cause, and Wells joined the suffragists. But Anthony and others in the movement feared alienating their Dixie membership, so Wells concentrated on organizing black women to get out the vote for race candidates in local elections. Not long before her death in 1931, she ran unsuccessfully for state senator.

Ida Wells-Barnett was among the first to grasp that the battle against lynching was the moral cutting edge of African-Americans’ struggle for equality. In fighting words and brave personal witness, she exposed lynching as a crime against a people.