Frederick Douglass's Women

Ida B. Wells, Part Four

 

For a long time, Wells thought of marriage and romantic relationships as oppressive, where women were expected to defer to men and flatter their vanity. But one day, she met a man who must have made her feel very differently, an attorney, writer, and fellow advocate for black rights named Ferdinand Barnett. She married him and they raised four children (Cools 3). She strived to balance caring for her family with her activism and her work as a probation officer in Chicago. As she aged, she devoted much of her time to African-American organization causes.

 

Wells-Barnett had been and continued to be indefatigable in her documentation of lynching.

 

Wells would do things like document every lynching in a year, breaking them down by cause and region. Through her research, she was able to demonstrate persuasively that many of these murders had nothing to do with rape, and many were perpetrated against the innocent, the insane, or the merely insolent.

 

Some of Wells’ methods of work recall today’s “digital media activists.” She circulated “pamphlets” of her own speeches about lynching. Later, when she couldn’t travel because she had a family (and changed her name to the very modern, hyphenated Wells-Barnett), she would… close-read the reportage of white newspapers to make her case. These papers “reported the deaths of [lynch victims] … black men in enthusiastic, almost pornographic detail, making Wells-Barnett’s case against mob violence for her.”

 

Wells even hired detectives to go on fact-finding missions for her when she couldn’t travel herself, either because of her family obligations or because of the many death threats that prevented her return to areas of the Deep South (Seltzer 1-2).

For many, including some of Well's liberal allies, it was a commonly held assumption that lynching resulted from anger about sexual attacks — but her analysis showed that less than a third of lynchings involved an accusation of rape. She also noted that sexual assault "committed by white men against Negro women and girls, is never punished by mob or the law."

Wells's work made it clear that lynching was being used to terrorize African Americans. Of course, some didn't want to listen to her facts — in an editorial about Wells's lectures abroad in 1893, the Washington Post noted she "studiously ignores the lynching of white men, and devotes all of her time to denunciation of the lynching of blacks."

In 1896, the Republican Women’s State Central Committee wanted the still-nursing Wells to travel and campaign for them across Illinois. To make the journey possible, they arranged for volunteers to take care of her firstborn everywhere she went.

Wells went on to have three more children, and would step back from some of her work in order to have more time for her family. But she'd demonstrated that combining marriage, children and a career wasn't impossible — and as she noted in her autobiography, which she started writing in 1928, "I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches" (Kettler 3-4).

In 1896, Wells-Barnett formed the National Association of Colored Women. In 1898, she led a protest in Washington, D.C., that called for President William McKinley to make reforms. She founded in Chicago the Ida B. Wells Club for Negro women and the more activist Negro Fellowship League. She published in 1900 her “Lynch Law of America” creed that argued that without representation in government, lawlessness against black Americans would continue to reign.

 

In 1908, the year after the occurrence of brutal assaults on the African-American community in Springfield, Illinois, Wells “attended a special conference for the organization that would later become known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Though she is considered a founding member of the NAACP, Wells later cut ties with the organization; she explained her decision thereafter, stating that she felt the organization, in its infancy at the time she left, lacked action-based initiatives” (Biography 5).

 

In January 1913, she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first such group for black women in Illinois. It would be for Ida the prelude to a major event in Washington, D.C. March 3, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inaugural.

When Washington, D.C.'s first suffrage parade was organized, for 1913, lead planner Alice Paul, a young Quaker woman, expressed concern that white women wouldn’t show up if they knew they had to march alongside black women. “As far as I can see, we must have a white procession, or a Negro procession, or no procession at all,” she reasoned. Wells-Barnett was told that the historic march was segregated and she would have to walk with an all-black group (Dionne 3).

Ida had brought members of the Alpha Suffrage Club to march. “The organizers of the march asked that they walk at the end of the parade.  She tried to get the White Illinois delegation to support her opposition of this segregation, but found few supporters.  They either would march at the end or not at all” (Wilson and Russell 1).

 

By the beginning of the 20th century,… many middle-class white people embraced the suffragists’ cause because they believed that the enfranchisement of “their” women would guarantee white supremacy by neutralizing the black vote (Williams 1).

 

5,000 women marched. One of the women, Mary Wilson, described what she saw.

 

“The violence erupted minutes after the parade began. The crowd broke through steel cables and spilled into the street. Men, many of them drunk, spit at the marchers and grabbed their clothing, hurled insults and lighted cigarettes, snatched banners and tried to climb floats. Police did little to keep order. Observed one of Paul’s supporters, ‘I did not know men could be such fiends.’”

 

By the end of the day, 100 marchers were taken to the local emergency hospital and “Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, responding to a request from the chief of police, authorized the use of a troop of cavalry from nearby Fort Myer to help control the crowd.”

 

The protesters had to have known the risk before they left the safety of their homes for Washington. But women, black and white, traveled across the country anyway to make their voices heard (Bernard 3-4).

 

Ida Wells-Barnett refused to march at the back of the parade with an all-black delegation. She noted, "If the Illinois women do not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost" (Kettler 5).  As the parade progressed, emerging from the crowd, she joined the White Illinois delegation, situating herself between two White supporters.

 

She continued to fight for African-American equality. “Working on behalf of all women, as part of her work with the National Equal Rights League [she] called for President Woodrow Wilson to put an end to discriminatory hiring practices for government jobs. She created the first African-American kindergarten in her community” … (Biography 6).

 

In 1917, a group of black soldiers were court-martialed after being involved in a riot in Texas; 13 of them were hanged before they could appeal their death sentences. Wells felt these soldiers were martyrs — willing to defend their country, then killed without due process — and had buttons made to commemorate them.

This drew the attention of government agents, who came to ask Wells to stop distributing the buttons. She refused, but the interaction was added to an intelligence file about her. In 1918, Wells was selected to be a delegate to the peace conference at Versailles that followed World War I. However, she wasn't able to go — considered "a known race agitator," the U.S. government denied her a passport (Kettler 6).

Wells-Barnett went on to serve as secretary of the National Afro-American Council. She founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League. Nevertheless, during the last decade of her life … she found herself pushed to the sidelines by the emerging Negro leadership, having alienated many people with her confrontational style and her difficult personality (Banes 2).

  

In 1930, Wells made an unsuccessful bid for the Illinois state senate. Health problems plagued her the following year.

 

Ida B. Wells died of kidney disease March 25, 1931, at the age of 68, in Chicago, Illinois. She left behind an impressive legacy of social and political heroism. With her writings, speeches and protests, Wells fought against prejudice, no matter what potential dangers she faced. She once said, "I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap" (Biography 9).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Banes, Mary Jo. “First Things: Ida Wells-Barnett.” Boston College Magazine. Summer 2004. Web. <http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/summer_2004/c21_wellsbarnett.html>.

 

Bernard, Michelle. “Despite the Tremendous Risk, African American Women Marched for Suffrage, Too.” The Washington Post. March 3, 2013. Web.  <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/03/03/despite-the-tremendous-risk-african-american-women-marched-for-suffrage-too/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a6ac17a81f55>.

Cools, Amy. ““Happy Birthday, Ida B. Wells!”  Ordinary Philosophy. July 16, 2017. Web. <https://ordinaryphilosophy.com/tag/ida-b-wells/>.

 

Dionne, Evette. “Women's Suffrage Leaders Left Out Black Women.” News and Politics. Aug. 18, 2017. Web. <https://www.teenvogue.com/story/womens-suffrage-leaders-left-out-black-women>.

 

“Ida B. Wells Biography.” Biography. The Biography.com Website. A&E Television Networks. January 19, 2018. Web. <https://www.biography.com/people/ida-b-wells-9527635>.

 

Kettler, Sara. “6 Fascinating Facts About 'Crusader for Justice' Ida B. Wells.” Biography.  July 15, 2017. Web. <https://www.biography.com/news/ida-b-wells-biography-facts>.

 

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

 

Williams, Yohuru. “Women Who Fought for the Vote.” History. Web. <https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/women-who-fought-for-the-vote>.

 

Wilson, Midge and Russell, Kathy. ““Black Women & the Suffrage Movement: 1848-1923.” Wesleyan University. Web. <http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/suffrage.html>.