Frederick Douglass's Women

Ida B. Wells -- Part Two

 

In 1893, Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition (forerunner of the World’s Fair) to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World.  The exposition featured exhibits from 46 countries, displayed new technologies, and introduced to the public many new consumer products.

African Americans wanted to be employed at the exposition.  They also wanted their racial achievements showcased.  Few acquired jobs and no exhibit spaces were allocated.  Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells published a pamphlet titled “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.”  The pamphlet, Wells later wrote

was a clear, plain statement of facts concerning the oppression put upon the colored people in this land of the free and home of the brave. We circulated ten thousand copies of this little book during the remaining three months of the fair. Every day I was on duty at the Haitian building, where Mr. Douglass gave me a desk and spent the days putting this pamphlet in the hands of foreigners (Chicago 1).

Wells reported that more than 20,000 people at the fair received copies.

For additional information about Frederick Douglass’s and Ida Wells’s involvement at the Columbian Exposition, read these posts:

“At the Fair” January 24, 2018, and “Activist Fervor Revived” January 31, 2018 -- http://authorharoldtitus.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2018-02-24T13:11:00-08:00&max-results=7

After the exposition, Wells chose to stay in Chicago rather then return to New York.  She worked at and contributed articles for the Chicago Conservator, the oldest African-American newspaper in the city. 
 

Later that year (1893), accepting the invitation of Catherine Impey, an English Quaker, she toured England, Scotland, and Wales for two months speaking to the British public about lynching practices in America.  “The lynching of black men and women seemed to have become a sport among Southern white mobs — reaching a peak of 161 deaths in 1892” (Fields-White 1).  She displayed during her speeches a photograph of a white mob and grinning white children positioned near a hanged black man.  Her speeches created a sensation, although some listeners remained skeptical of the veracity of her accounts.
 

I turn now to Ida Wells’s beliefs regarding race, injustice, and lynching based on the extensive research she had conducted prior to her 1893 and subsequent 1894 United Kingdom tours.

Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, 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 Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee Stewart had been lynched in Memphis, one of the leading cities of the South, in which no lynching had taken place before, with just as much brutality as other victims of the mob; and they had committed no crime against white women.  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.”   I then began an investigation of every lynching I read about (Curry 4).

 

She understood that race was used as a stratagem of order.  She abhorred the practice of white women being forced to declare falsely that they had been raped.   “The only rapist driven by racial antipathy are the ‘majority of the superior white men who are the fathers of mulatto children.’"  In instances in which a black man and a white woman had consensual intercourse, the white woman “was a willing partner in the victim's guilt, and being of the superior race must naturally be more guilty" (Curry 5).

 

She spoke of white women’s sexual interest in black men.  … White men constantly express an open preference for the society of black women.  But it is a sacred convention that white women can never feel passion of any sort, high or low, for a black man.  Unfortunately, facts don’t always square with the convention; and then, if the guilty pair are found out, the thing is christened an outrage at once, and the woman is practically forced to join in hounding down the partner of her shame.  Sometimes she rebels, but oftener the overwhelming force of white prejudice is too much for her, and she must go through with the ghastly mockery.  “What!” cried out one poor negro at the stake, as the woman applied the torch, egged on by a furious mob, headed by her relatives, “have you the heart to do that, when we have been sweethearting so long?”  It was this specific argument she [Ida Wells] made — lynching is punishment for the bare fact of white women’s sexual desire for black men — that brought her under constant threat of lynching herself.

“It may be remarked here in passing that this instance of the moral degradation of the people of Mississippi did not excite any interest in the public at large,” she wrote of one horrible lynching in which the victims were innocent.  “American Christianity heard of this awful affair and read of its details and neither press nor pulpit gave the matter more than a passing comment” (Seltzer 3-4)

Ida Wells “understood that the immorality of whites meant they would not be moved by the suffering they committed against Blacks. The gun as an instrument of self-defense has a special place in her political philosophy: a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has ‘to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched’” (Curry 6).

 

“While self-defense would arrest assault by lynchers, by itself it would not vitiate the cultural and civilizational motif of white supremacy that justified lynching. To do this,” Wells intended “to ‘shame’ and display as inferior the brutish civilization of white America to the world.”  She “was not swayed by the illusion of change in whites' hearts and minds.”  She “held that cultural and/or civilizing change must come from those other than the voiceless victims of white supremacy.”  A vigorous campaign against lynching would compel governors of states, newspapers, senators and representatives, and bishops of churches to declare one way or another their position regarding her and others’ condemnation of racial barbarism in America.
 

 

What Wells saw in Britain “was a disposition already formed against lynching stemming from Britain's abolition of slavery in the early 19th century. Like a good agitationist sociologist, she believed her tour in Britain could motivate the English to sanction and condemn the actions of America and expose the horrors of lynching the United States continued to deny internationally.  Wells … saw the receptivity of Britain to be linked with their economic stake in maintaining trade and imperial prestige, not some unrequited moral compassion for the Negro's humanity.  … By appealing to Britain's interest in being the world superpower, Wells … was able to effectively conduct her assault against the United States' image and negate its claim to a superior government

and democracy.  … Britain's receptivity to her plight could be used against white Americans as proof of Britain's moral and civilizational superiority and white Americas lawlessness” Curry 7-8).
 

 

Works cited:

Curry, Tommy J.  “T. Thomas Fortune’s Philosophy of Social Agitation as a Prolegomenon to Militant Civil Rights Activism.”  TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY.  Vol. 48, No. 4 ©2012 .  Indiana University Press.  Media.  http://thomasfortunehouse.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/4/8/25484353/thefortuneofwells.pdf

 

Monee Fields-White, “The Root: How Racism Tainted Women's Suffrage.”  Opinion Hosted by NPR.  March 25, 2011.  Media.  https://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134849480/the-root-how-racism-tainted-womens-suffrage

 

“Ida B. Wells: African Americans at the World's Columbian Exposition.”  Encyclopedia of Chicago.  Media.  http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1495.html

Seltzer, Sarah, “Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Crusader, Was the Godmother of the Social Justice Internet.”  Flavorwire.  November 24, 2014.  Media.  http://flavorwire.com/489781/ida-b-wells-anti-lynching-crusader-was-the-godmother-of-the-social-justice-internet