Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), an American civil rights activist, wrote and spoke fearlessly against the evils of Jim Crow, particularly lynching. She was one of the founders of the NAACP. She also fought for the right of women to vote and ran for the state senate in Illinois. She knew both Susan B. Anthony and Marcus Garvey. She was opposed by Booker T. Washington.
She was born a slave in 1862 in Mississippi, not far from Memphis. At age three the slaves were freed. She went to school and did well. At sixteen her parents and youngest brother died of yellow fever. She took over the family, working as a school teacher. In time she moved to Memphis with her two youngest sisters. She went to Fisk and taught school in Memphis.
One time she bought a first-class ticket on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad and sat in the ladies car. The conductor told her to move to the car for coloureds. She refused. He took her arm, she bit him. He got help and they threw her off the train.
She took the company to court and was won a $500 settlement (back when very few made much more than a dollar a day). But then the decision was overturned. She learned that the law is not on the side of black people.
She wrote about the whole thing for a church newspaper. Soon her essays were appearing in black newspapers across the country. She wrote about how bad the black schools in Memphis were where she taught – and was fired. She wrote about white violence against blacks in Memphis – and had to leave town.
A friend of hers owned and ran a food store in Memphis with two other black men. Some whites did not like it and a fight broke out between whites and blacks. Shots were fired. The next morning the police arrested the owners and hundreds of black men. A few days later the owners were lynched: they were taken out of jail by angry whites and murdered.
That taught her that the lynchings in the South had very little to do with black men raping white women, like white people said. They had more to do with keeping black people down.
She looked into hundreds of cases of lynchings. She found that only in a third of them was anyone even accused of rape. And even in the cases of rape many of the white women were willing. They were hardly as pure as white men said they were.
She wrote about lynching and spoke out against it – one of the few who did. She spoke against it all across the north and the west and even in Britain.
While her fearlessness and outspokenness got her noticed and helped to get things like the NAACP off the ground, Booker T. Washington opposed her and limited her power in civil rights circles. He did not think speaking truth to power was the way to go.
See also:
- Ida B. Wells: The Red Record (1895) – one of her main works on lynching
- Jim Crow
- The pure white woman stereotype
- Booker T Washington
It’s interesting to know how often rape was used as a tool for oppressing people, or at least to hate a particular group.
“They raped our women” is one of the first things you hear in a war- so it’s interesting to view this situation as a “quiet” (or not so quiet) war between the races in America.
“They rape our women” is an accusation you made to an enemy, those who threaten you or something you believe it’s yours. It’s not really about women- or not just about women. “Women” in this case can be anything: our land, our pilitics, our way of life.
She found that only in a third of them was anyone even accused of rape. And even in the cases of rape many of the white women were willing.
As a female, I try not to ever doubt rape accusation. “She asked for it” doesn’t work for me; if I’m not going to trust a woman that she has been raped, if I start believing someone is able on such a lie- then what kind of woman, a human being am I?
However, I do believe not all of these women were raped; they had to lie. Not all of them- I guess some of them were raped and I am sorry for their misfortune- but yes, as horribly as this may sound, I do believe some of those women lied.
And why? If they were willing to have sex with black men, because they were in love, or at least they were attracted to them- why would they lie? Why didn’t they try to save their lovers?
Do you know what would happen to such a woman? (Would accusers kill her too? Were these women trying to save their own lives? Is that’s what’s going on?)
“While her fearlessness and outspokenness got her noticed and helped to get things like the NAACP off the ground, Booker T. Washington opposed her and limited her power in civil rights circles. ”
I often wonder if people will ever address the sexism that (exist)ed between people of color in the fight for equal rights.
The issue was rarely rape at all. White women would be forced by white men to launch claims of rape against black men, or white men would just make the charges up. Most often what was at issue was black economic competition. This was the case with Ida B. Wells’ friend. He ran a successful store right across the street from a white competitor. The competitor moved to put Wells’ friend out of business. Rape often served as a convenient excuse to eliminate successful black businesses run by African-American men.
See Davidson’s They Say, which details Well’s life before her international celebrity.
One of Wells’ most explosive articles actually pointed to the fact that many white women were not raped, but had sex willingly with African American men. This was when Wells was run out of Memphis and the printing press and offices of the newspaper she was working for were destroyed.
At this point, interracial sex and unions were against the law in Southern states. White women had considerably less power than their white male counterparts, who re-inforced these laws (of course primairly in terms of sexual unions between black men and white women) with guns. I am quite sure that there were reprecussions for a white woman, should she “soil” her white “ladyhood” by having consensual sex with a black man. It would be easier for her to claim she had been raped and save her social status, inheritance, etc. No African-American man, accussed of raping a white woman, in his right mind would argue, “She asked for it” during this time period. That is anachronistic. (1) He wouldn’t have time before the noose was around his neck and (2) if he did, that argument would have sealed his fate.
Moreover, while black men could be charged with the crime of raping a white woman, during slavery black women legally could not be raped and during Jim Crow African-American women were raped throughout the South, but their rapists were rarely prosecuted. White men did argue that black women asked for it. As a matter of fact, that was the common belief that underlay the lack of prosecution. Black women were often defined as wanton sexual creatures running around after white men. This ties into the stereotype of the black woman as a seductress or Jezebel. (It is important to recognize, however, that consensual unions did exist between black women and white men).
See Deborah Gray White’s Arn’t I a Woman?
There is also a great PBS documentary on Ida B. Wells.
A contingent of African-American women addressed the issue of sexism themselves at the time. A great anthology that shows this is Words of Fire.
Social scientists and activists continue to point this out today. One of the best known examples is the work done on Ella Baker and the ways in which MLK oppossed her during her work for the SCLC and SNCC.
LOL … This post is quite timely. I’ll be lecturing on Wells and African-American women’s responses to Jim Crow next week.
abagond,
Much of your Ida Wells story has the ring of apocrypha. A little truth and a lot of myth.
Furthermore, getting fired for writing a critical story about substandard schools in the Memphis school system where she was employed is hardly a surprise.
It is job suicide — today — to write and publish an article critical of your employer. Moreover, you can find yourself fighting a lawsuit claiming libel if you criticize a FORMER employer.
As for ths story about her lawsuit against the railroad, well, before I accept her version, I would have to read the court transcripts.
With respect to lynchings, there is no justification for any of them. However, do we know if the black shopkeepers were lynched? Or do we simply take her world for it? A lot of work has been done to identify victims. Are these two shopkeepers on the list?
Depending on the sources you read, there were between 3,500 and 4,500 lynchings from 1865 to 1965. Very few occurred after 1920. But it is fair to say that even if the crime of rape were committed by a black perpetrator, the was no legal basis for applying the death penalty.
Therefore, we can conclude that every lynching was itself an unjustified murder. But this is old news.
no_slappz, you should try reading her book The Red Record, where she explicitly names people who fell victim to the Lynch Law during the year of 1893. Her source, The Chicago Tribune.
Nowhere in her writings is she ever going off hearsay.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm
I’ll Give it a Try:
Thanks for the link to the “The Red Record”. I added it to the See Also section of the post.
Sexism: I think Booker T. Washington would have been against Wells even if she were a man. Their philosophies were too different. But that she never rose high in the NAACP despite being a founding member, that smells of sexism.
abagond,
How many women have risen to the upper levels of the NAACP? Or any other black organization. There NO women in the hierarchy of the Nation of Islam.
Sister Ava Muhammad…NOI
On a different tact is it not recently that the NACCP had its first Black President after so many years of being in existence??
Excellent post.
“She was opposed by Booker T. Washington”.
Seems like Washington pretty much didn’t like anyone who spoke out against racism. I know he did not like Garvey either.
I love your posts about Black women who were active in the Civil Rights movement. They show that Black women weren’t just following behind Black men, but that women played an integral role in the struggle for freedom.
Looking forward to more, more, more!!
Booker T. Washington opposed soooo many people … He was really much more interested in consolidating his personal power and influence amongst whites. During the “Age of Washington” (1895-1915), he wanted all black to toe his line.
Ida B. Wells paved the way for the modern Civil Rights Movement. Without her, we would have never have President Obama, no Civil Rights Act, no Voting Rights Act, no huge Black middle class as we know it today. Had Black leaders follow Booker T. Washington, all the gains we have today would be nonexistant.
Ida, Anita Hill, Lani Guinier, Angela Davis, Paula Giddings, and Michelle Obama stood their ground in the face of racist sexism and ought to be appreciated for their courage, not criticized.
La Reyna
la reyna, you wrote:
“Ida B. Wells paved the way for the modern Civil Rights Movement. Without her, we would have never have President Obama, no Civil Rights Act, no Voting Rights Act, no huge Black middle class as we know it today.”
Your statement is total fiction and an unfortunate example of the effects of mytholgizing the activitities of one person.
You wrote:
“Had Black leaders follow Booker T. Washington, all the gains we have today would be nonexistant.”
Comments like the preceding suggest that blacks support a single ideology and the person who represents it. In other words, it seems there is a willingness among blacks to accept a dictator in some form. The history of black nations confirms my observation.
You wrote:
“Ida, Anita Hill, Lani Guinier, Angela Davis, Paula Giddings, and Michelle Obama stood their ground in the face of racist sexism and ought to be appreciated for their courage, not criticized.”
Oh please. The list was looking weak until I got to Michelle Obama. Then I knew you were just joking. Michele got into Princeton for the usual Affirmative Action reasons and got into law school on the same basis. She ultimately became the highly overpaid employee of a healthcare company because she was the wife of a rising black politician.
Michelle may be a decent person, but she is nothing more than the beneficiary of the civil rights changes brought about by white voters.
As for Booker T Wahington
There is a tendency when we look at historical figures – and I have been ther eto- ha ha ha
that we often say we ‘like’ this or as the case may be we dislike a historical person.
Even historical figures that we do ‘like’ can be instantly dropped at an instance because we learn something new that they have breached our own ‘ethical stndards’
For ‘students’ of history once again the issues of ‘perspectives’ are important. Since some time you have to physically/mentally put yourself in the leaders ‘perspective’ to attempt to understand what is going on.
So for instance although Booker T had his problems with other Black US leaders regarding his ‘conservatism’. He nevertheless had a huge impact on perhaps the most prominent Black leader in the world viz. Marcus Garvey, who was a fan of Booker T.
I suppose I guess I am trying to say, is what Martin Luther King rightly touched upon:
“God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives. In the final analysis, God knows that his children are weak and they are frail. In the final analysis, what God requires is that your heart is right”.
I did a post about Ida Wells Barnett and her husband Ferdinand Barnett Sr.
http://blackmenandblackwomen.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/black-couples-in-history-ferdinand-and-ida-wells-barnett/
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