Ida A Sword Among Lions Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching Paula J. Giddings To my mother, Virginia Iola Giddings, always… and to the late Alfreda M. Duster, a daughter who kept the memory of Ida B. Wells alive My soul is among lions; and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword. —PSALM 57:4 Contents Epigraph Acknowledgments Introduction: Sword Among Lions Prologue Chapter One Holly Springs Chapter Two The New City and the Ladies’ Car Chapter Three A Breath of Life, A Winter of Discontent Chapter Four Love and Trouble Chapter Five A Race in My Arms Chapter Six City of the Three Murdered Men Chapter Seven Exodus Chapter Eight “The Truth About Lynching” Chapter Nine The Loveliest Lynchee Was Our Lord Chapter Ten Light from a Human Torch Chapter Eleven St. Joan and Old Man Eloquent Chapter Twelve Exile No More Chapter Thirteen “Let Us Confer Together” Chapter Fourteen Undivided Duty Chapter Fifteen Mobocracy in America Photographic Insert Chapter Sixteen Bull in the China Shop Chapter Seventeen Chicago and the Wizard Chapter Eighteen Calls Chapter Nineteen Smoldering Bridges Chapter Twenty The Ladies’ Band Chapter Twenty-One The Alpha Suffrage Club Chapter Twenty-Two Unsafe for Democracy Chapter Twenty-Three Known Race Agitator Chapter Twenty-Four Prisoners of War Chapter Twenty-Five Unfriendly Takeovers Chapter Twenty-Six The Price of Liberty Notes Selected Bibliography Searchable Terms About the Author Praise Other Books by Paula J. Giddings Credits Copyright About the Publisher Acknowledgments L ike many others who surrounded her, I was deeply inspired by the late Alfreda M. Duster, who encouraged me to write this biography of her mother and assisted my efforts even while she was hospitalized by a stroke. Her children, Benjamin C. Duster, Donald L. Duster, Troy S. Duster, and Alfreda Duster Ferrell, provided invaluable information, support, friendship—and patience— while I worked on this manuscript. Without the meticulous research of Dr. Otis Maxwell, who is also a descendant of the Wells family, I would not have had access to much of the family’s genealogical information and photographs. His support and companionship were also welcome when we explored many dusty archives together in Mississippi and Memphis. Special thanks to Charles F. Harris, a publisher, and a friend of many years, whose confidence in me and in this project is a major reason it has come to fruition. Writers need good and caring neighbors like Sandra Kelley; and loving friends who keep the faith, tolerate periods of inattention, and who provide consolation and insight. I thank Leon Dash, Jewell Jackson McCabe, David Levering Lewis, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall for being my constant stars. I have also been fortunate to have had a brilliant array of friends and colleagues who read the manuscript in various stages and/or helped me understand what needed to be done. Toni Morrison—who put me on a particular path when she made the deceptively simple statement, “You know, Ida B. Wells is important”—did both. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Milly Hawk Daniel, David Levering Lewis, John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, Ann Firor Scott, John Bracey, Sidney Offit, Kevin Quashie, and Clay Goss made important contributions at different stages of the manuscript. I also benefited greatly from Joan Benham’s editorial guidance. Michael Anderson’s expert eye and sage advice were invaluable. Many people provided important aspects of my research: Mary Helen Washington, Houston Baker, Patricia LaPointe, Hubert McAlexander, Linda Seidman, Charles Cooney, Erik Ludwig, Helen Hwang, Jill Petty, Sara Duckworth, Kenneth Janken, William Greaves, Deborah Willis, Christina Morgan, A’Lelia Bundles, Jewell Jackson McCabe, Wilson Moses, Sherrill Redmon, and Kimberle Crenshaw. Welcome institutional support for this book includes the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, where I did most of my research; the Guggenheim Foundation; and support in various forms from colleagues and administrators at Rutgers, Duke, and Princeton Universities; and Spelman and Smith Colleges. Last but not least, I thank my literary agent, Lynn Nesbit; and especially my editor, Dawn Davis, who stood by Ida when she needed it most. I NTRODUCTION Sword Among Lions Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) I da B. Wells was in New York City when she heard the terrible news. Back home in Memphis, the office of her newspaper, the Free Speech, had been gutted; J. L. Fleming, her partner and co-owner, had been run out of the city upon the threat of being hanged and castrated; and a former owner of the paper, Reverend Taylor Nightingale, had been pistol-whipped and forced to recant the words of the May 1892 editorial that had detonated the violent response in Memphis. Ida learned that she herself had been threatened with lynching. She was receiving urgent telegrams telling her that whites were posted at the railway station waiting for her return. Ida did not return. Going home would only mean more bloodshed, she decided, after hearing that black men had vowed to protect her. The southern city had been in an unsettled state since March, when three black men, including a close friend of Wells’s, had been lynched, and she had urged thousands of black Memphians to leave a city that would not give them justice. Her May editorial, published just before a long-planned trip East, was a response to another paper’s assertion that the spate of recent lynchings in the South had been triggered by the increasing occurrences of rape perpetrated by black men upon white women. In her riposte, Wells challenged the charge, and insinuated that cries of rape often followed the discovery of consensual relationships between black men and white women. Wells’s short editorial had been written hastily, but not without forethought. Since the Memphis murders, she had begun investigating lynchings by interviewing eyewitnesses and relatives of the victims, and had analyzed the Chicago Tribune’s annual lynching statistics, which included the putative motives for them. In June of 1892, Wells, now an exile, wrote a long exposé for the New York Age, a black weekly with a substantial white readership. Later published as a pamphlet, Southern Horrors, it was the first study of lynching and Wells’s initial attempt to show how this particular form of racial violence said more about the cultural failings of the white South than of blacks; how not only race, but attitudes toward women and sexuality, instigated it; and that lynching represented the very heart, the Rosetta Stone, of America’s troubled relationship with race. Wells believed that lynching was the central issue that defined blacks as the nation lurched toward the twentieth century, and one that demanded new strategies that included self-defense and civil disobedience. Her determination to follow the logic of lynching into the modern age also demanded that she, in advance of most of her peers, male and female, shed the confines of Victorian attitudes. The origin of the term “lynching,” according to James E. Cutler, author of Lynch-Law (1905), the first scholarly text on the subject, is attributed to Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace (and brother of the founder of Lynchburg). Lynch established informal, extra-legal citizen juries during the Revolutionary War years when official courts were few and traveling to them through British- occupied territories was perilous. The common sentence for those found guilty— mostly horse thieves and Tories—was thirty-nine lashes with a whip. By the 1830s, when southern abolitionism reached its height, lynching was associated more with those who threatened the slave order. Following the Civil War, the practice became more murderous with the bloody struggle for power among northern federalists, Confederates, and newly enfranchised black men. However, it wasn’t until 1886, when increasing numbers of rural blacks migrated to southern cities, that the number of African Americans lynched exceeded that of whites: a trend that continued even as blacks became