June 4, 2018 • 37 mins
Ida B. Wells-Barnett connects to a lot of episodes in our archive. She fought against lynching for decades, at a time when it wasn’t common at all for a woman, especially a woman of color, to become such a prominent journalist and a speaker.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I to
b Wells Barnett, one of those figures who connects to
(00:21):
a lot of our past episodes. She's mentioned in our
podcast on Frederick Douglas and the two of them were
colleagues and friends. In our show in the Night of
Terror at the Aquaquon Workhouse, we talk about her refusing
to march in a segregated section of the nineteen thirteen
Woman's Suffrage Progression, instead saying and I am refusing to
(00:42):
play by that racist rule and marching with the Illinois
contingent with everyone else. She investigated the death of Robert
Charles in New Orleans and nineteen hundred and the racist
violence that surrounded that, and then the discussion of lynching,
and our two partner on the Wilmington's que was also
informed by her investigative reporting in her anti lynching campaign.
(01:05):
Idabe Wells Barnett fought against lynching for decades, and this
on its own would be remarkable, but she also lived
at a time when it was not common at all
for a woman, especially a woman of color, to become
a prominent journalist and speaker in this way, and then
doing this work also meant that she had to speak
out very candidly about violence and about rape. Discussing rape
(01:29):
at all was a huge taboo, but it was especially
taboo coming from a woman, and for a substantial part
of her career she was an unmarried woman, so it
was even more taboo. And that is all why we
are talking about her today. Ida b Wells Barnett was
born Ida Bell Wells in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July six,
(01:50):
eighteen sixty two. She was the oldest child of James Wells,
who was known as Jim, and Elizabeth Warrenton, who was
known as Lizzie, and they were both enslave, so Ida
was enslaved from birth. Jim and Lizzie both worked for
a man named Spiers Bawling. Jim was owned by another man,
but had been hired out to Bawling for an apprenticeship
(02:12):
in carpentry. The American Civil War was ongoing when Ida
was a baby, and the part of Mississippi where she
and her parents lived was no stranger to raids and skirmishes.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January one of eighteen
sixty three, and while it technically freed her family and
everyone else who was enslaved in Mississippi, slavery persisted until
(02:34):
Mississippi surrendered on May fourth of eighteen sixty five, and
probably beyond that point really um as word reached more
outlying areas of what had happened. Once they were able
to do so, Jim and Lizzie Wells made their marriage legal.
The young Ida Wells was too young to remember the
earliest years of reconstruction, but in general life was really
(02:56):
difficult for the freed people. It was also chaotic as
politicians and social reformers tried to work out what to
do about the formerly enslaved population and the social and
economic conditions that slavery had caused. But the Wells Is
had a couple of advantages. Jim's owner had also been
his father, and Jim had no siblings, and being his
(03:18):
owner's only child came with some privileges, including an education.
For a time after the end of the war, the
Wells has continued to work for Spires Bowling, but then
Bawling told Jim to vote for the Democratic candidate in
the upcoming election, and Jim had no intention of doing this.
As we've talked about before, the Democratic Party at this
(03:38):
point was mostly made up of wealthy, white slave owners.
He intended to vote for the radical Republican candidate. He
came back from the polls to find that his employer
had locked him out of the workplace. The fact that
Jim and Lizzie Wells were skilled workers rather than manual laborers,
made it easier for them to find other work. Lizzie
and her children also enrolled in school. The family also
(04:02):
became politically active, and Ida's father became a member of
the board at Rust College, then known as Shaw College,
where Ida would go on to study. Ida learned quickly,
and she read voraciously, including reading the Bible all the
way through, which was the only reading that was allowed
in the Wells home on Sundays. In eighteen seventy eight,
(04:23):
Idawell's life changed dramatically. She went to visit her grandparents
on their farm, and while she was away from home,
a yellow fever epidemic spread to Memphis. At first, when
they heard about this outbreak, Ida and her grandparents weren't
particularly concerned. Memphis had dealt with yellow fever before, and
outbreaks had never made it as far from there as
Holly Springs, which was roughly fifty miles or eight kilometers away.
(04:48):
People also blamed yellow fever on miasma's or bad swamp
are so they thought Holly Springs was protected by being
on the highest ground in the area. So instead of
calling for a core, teen officials in Holly Springs offered
refuge to Memphis residents who were fleeing the illness. But
yellow fever is really transmitted by mosquitoes, not by swamp vapor,
(05:12):
so once people arrived in Holly Springs carrying the illness,
it spread rapidly. Holly Springs had a population of about
three thousand, five hundred people, and more than fourteen hundred
of them contracted the disease. More than three hundred people died.
This included both of Ida's parents, and as soon as
she and her grandparents learned what had happened, she took
(05:34):
a freight train back to Holly Springs. She went against
the advice of basically everyone. Everyone was telling her that
it was way too dangerous. There were not even any
passenger trains that were running, which was why she was
on a freight train in the first place, but there
was nobody else to look after her siblings, and by
the time she got back home, her baby brother had
also died. Ida's father had been a Mason, in his
(05:56):
Masonic brothers came to the family's aid. They start to
talking about dividing up the Wells children, sending them to
live with other families in ones and two's. I'da's sister,
Eugenia was of special concern. She was paralyzed from the
waist down due to severe scoliosis. Ida was in the
room for this conversation, but she wasn't really consulted about
(06:18):
these decisions, and she finally told her father's Masonic brothers
that they were not going to send any of her
siblings anywhere, that her parents would be spinning in their
graves if they heard that their children had been split up.
She said that if the Masons helped her find a job,
that she would look after all of her siblings. With that,
she became both the breadwinner and the head of household.
(06:40):
She and her siblings had two legal guardians, but I'da
got a job as a teacher so that she could
raise and support her five younger siblings, and she was
only sixteen at this point. Ida B. Wells kept up
her studies while she worked as a teacher and raised
her siblings. Her job was at a rural school, so
she had to travel back in four to it by mule.
(07:01):
She also started taking college courses at Rust College, although
she was expelled from the school in eighteen eighty one
or eighteen eighty two. The details of exactly why are
not known, but she wrote about losing her temper with
the teachers and speaking to them with hateful words. In
eighteen eighty one, when she was nineteen, one of Welles's
aunts invited her and her two youngest sisters to move
(07:24):
to Memphis. By this point, her brothers had both been
placed in apprenticeships and Eugenia had gone to live with
another aunt. And this offer gave the Wells sisters the
chance to move to a bigger city with more opportunities,
and it gave Item more freedom to pursue her own
education and career since her aunt would be helping to
look after her sisters. It was in Memphis that she
(07:46):
really started to become politically active, which we will talk
about after a sponsor break. After moving to Memphis I
to be. Wells continued to work as a teacher. She
had a job in Woodstock, Tennessee, which was not all
that far away. She traveled back and forth to it
(08:07):
by train. She was very carefully trying to build a
middle class life for herself and her sisters, stretching her
teacher's pay to cover things like nice dresses and a
comfortable place for them to live. And one of the
things that she spent her money on was on first
class tickets in the ladies car whenever she traveled by train.
The ladies car was more comfortable than the second class cars,
(08:29):
which were called smokers. The Lady's car was quieter and
it had more comfortable seats, and since she was a young, petite,
attractive woman traveling alone, it was also just safer. She
had been going back and forth from Memphis to Woodstock
for two years without incident in the ladies car, and
then in three she was traveling back to Memphis from
(08:51):
Holly Springs on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwest Railroad. The
conductor came to take her ticket and told her that
she would have to move to the mooker's car. Wells refused.
She had bought a ticket, and she was, as was
clear by her dress, her demeanor and behavior, a lady.
The conductor insisted that she would have to move, and
(09:12):
even went so far as to move her luggage and
belongings into the forward car, expecting her to follow them.
When she stayed where she was, he came back and
attempted to remove her bodily from her seat. She once
again refused to move. She was, as we said, a
petite woman. She braced herself against the seat to keep
(09:34):
this man from dragging her away, and when he kept
man handling her, she bit him. Ultimately, Wells was forcibly
removed from the train with both sleeves torn out of
her linen duster, and when she got back to Memphis,
she filed suit against the railroad. She was removed from
the ladies car a second time before that suit had
even been settled, so she filed another one. This is
(09:57):
kind of on a cusp of seig sigation by race
on railroads, like it was a lot more common to
have a ladies car that women could pay additional, you know,
in an upgraded fair to sit in, and all the
cars were all the other cars were just kind of
a mix, and it was becoming more formalized to instead
have have train cars segregated by race, since this was
(10:20):
sort of in the interim of that that changeover happening.
So a circuit court found in I. Toby Wells favor
under the Civil Rights Act of eighteen seventy five, and
she was awarded five hundred dollars in the first case
and two hundred dollars in the second case. But the
railroad appealed the decision and the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned
(10:41):
that ruling in seven. The Supreme Court's assertion was that
Wells had only filed the suit in the first place
to harass the train company, and that her actions were
quote not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat
for a short ride. That is infuriating. Uh. Wells was devastated,
and it wasn't just the loss of the case, it
(11:02):
was what that laws signified, especially since she had been
taking this legal action pretty much on her own, without
the help of any civil rights organizations or the greater
Black community of Memphis. Her case wound up being one
of the ones on the road to Plessy versus Ferguson,
which we have covered on the show before in which
the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was constitutional.
(11:25):
This whole experience inspired Wells to become more politically vocal.
While she was still working as a teacher, she started
working as a journalist as well, under the pen name
of Iola. She wrote about civil rights, and she wrote
about social issues, and she was eventually nicknamed Iola, Princess
of the Press. By the end of the eighteen eighties,
(11:47):
Wells had already written a prolific body of newspaper columns.
She also purchased a one third share in the Memphis
Free Speech and Headlight in eighteen eighty nine, and eventually
she and one of the other co owner, J. L. Fleming,
bought out their third partner and they owned and ran
the Free Speech together. In one Wells wrote an article
(12:08):
that was critical of the Memphis school Board, and her
teaching contract was not renewed. She then turned her attention
to journalism full time, and soon the focus of her
journalism turned to lynching. The catalyst was the May ninth
lynching of Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Henry Stewart in Memphis.
(12:29):
They had been arrested and charged with maintaining a public
nuisance while trying to defend themselves and a grocery store
called the People's Grocery from an armed white mob. McDowell
was the store's manager, Stewart was the clerk, and Moss
was the president of the joint stock company that owned
the store. This incident started with a group of black
(12:49):
and white children playing marbles near the store. A fight
broke out after a black child won all the marbles.
A white man came out and beat the child who
had won the game, and a group of black men
attempted to intervene. A white mob formed in retaliation bent
on destroying the People's Grocery. One of the white instigators
(13:11):
actually owned a competing grocery store. Yeah, they definitely had
it in their minds to run this grocery store out
of business and to hurt or kill its owners. So
after McDowell, Moss, and Stewart were jailed on the public
nuisance charged, an armed militia of black men tried to
stand guard outside of the jail. Was a known risk
(13:32):
if a black man was in jail for something that
a white mob could come and take him out of
that jail and harm him. So they were standing guard,
but eventually the sheriff ordered them to disperse and confiscated
all of their weapons. After they were gone, a crowd
of white men, as they had feared, came to the jail.
They took McDowell, Moss, and Stewart to a field outside
(13:53):
of town and shot all of them. Wells knew all
of these men. She would friends with Tom Moss, and she,
along with the rest of the black population, was terrified,
especially since the sheriff secured a court order authorizing him
to shoot any black person who seemed to be causing
trouble on site, even though Memphis had passed a law
(14:17):
banning the sale of firearms to its black population. Wells
bought a pistol, and she carried it in her purse,
but she also recognized that that pistol was only going
to go so far to defend her and the pages
of the free speech. She became one of the many
black voices urging the rest of the black population to
leave Memphis. There was actually a mass exodus out of
(14:39):
Memphis was big enough that it set off an economic
crisis as black business owners and laborers fled the city.
After this incident, Wells began researching, investigating, and writing about lynching.
This was the work that she would pursue for most
of the rest of her life. Almost immediately this work
led to Wells being threatened with lynching herself. One two
(15:04):
she published an article in the Free Speech that started
out with a statement that eight men had already been
lynched in the span of just a week, five of
them had been accused of rape. She went on to write,
quote nobody in this section of the country believes the
old threadbare lie that negro men rape white women. If
Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves,
(15:25):
and public sentiment will have a reaction. A conclusion will
then be reached which will be very damaging to the
moral reputation of their women. This was basically the same
argument that would appear in the Wilmington's Daily Record in
that these rape allegations were stemming from consensual relationships between
(15:45):
black men and white women. That was the article that
was used as justification for the Wilmington's coup and the
mass racist violence that followed it, and Wells's article sparked
similar outrage, although it did not launch a massacre. A
few days later, a white paper called the Daily Commercial
responded to wells article, and here's a quote quote the
(16:08):
fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and
utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of
evidence as to the wonderful patients of Southern whites. But
we have had enough of it. Similar sentiments ran in
other papers, and a mob of people convened at the
Cotton Exchange Building in Memphis, intending to lynch both co
(16:32):
owners of the Free Speech. But Wells had gone to
Philadelphia to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Churches General Conference,
and from there she went on a trip to New
York rather than returning to Memphis. J. L. Fleming had
also left town for fear of his life. While Wells
and Fleming survived, the Free Speech didn't. The mobs sacked
(16:53):
its offices and destroyed all of their equipment and furniture.
After this incident, Wells followed her own advice and she
left Memphis. She didn't even go back to try to
get her belongings. We will talk about her life after
leaving Memphis after a sponsor break. Even though I to
(17:15):
b Wells left Memphis behind, she did not back down
in her writing against lynching. After all of this happened,
she published a response to what had happened in the
New York Age on June, and then a lot of
that response became her pamphlet Southern Horrors Lynch Law in
all its phases. This pamphlet is one of the most
(17:37):
well known of her many, many written works. It started
with a letter of praise from Frederick Douglas saying of
his own efforts related to lynching, quote, I have spoken,
but my word is feeble in comparison to quickly recamp.
Lynching is the extra judicial murder of someone who has
been accused of a crime or other wrongdoing. Between eighteen
(18:01):
eighty two and nineteen sixty eight, there were more than
four thousand recorded lynchings in the United States. More than
seventy percent of the victims were black, and many of
the white victims were civil rights workers or other people
who tried to defend black citizens. Most of these happened
in the South, and they were away to terrorize the
black community and violently reinforced white supremacy. By the time
(18:26):
I'd be Wells started her anti lynching work, a false
idea had been well established within the white community, and
that idea was that black men were raping white women
and that lynching was necessary to discourage these rapes. Wells
tackled this idea head on, countering that there were consensual
(18:46):
relationships between black men and white women like we alluded
to before the break. She wrote, quote, hundreds of such
cases might be cited, but enough have been given to
prove the assertion that there are white women in the
South who loved the Afro Americans company, even as there
are white men notorious for their preference for Afro American women.
(19:09):
She also documented multiple instances of the same pattern, a
black man accused of a crime then removed from his
jail cell by a white mob who murdered him and
desecrated his body. She wrote about the disenfranchisement of the
black population in the South through racist voting laws and
how that was contributing to the problem, and she picked
(19:30):
apart how white newspapers were participants in this violence as well,
repeating the same unproven and sometimes completely fabricated allegations about
the victims of lynching as though they were fact, often
using racist and sensationalized language to do it, and Southern horrors.
Wells also wrote about the need for the black community
(19:51):
to protect itself since no one else was willing to
do it, writing quote, the lesson this teaches, and which
every Afro American should ponder well, is that 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. She made the point that this
(20:11):
wasn't about the law. The people who carried out these
lynchings were not interested in punishing all alleged rapists, only
the black ones. Lynch mobs weren't operating within any kind
of legal framework, and they were celebrating the murders they
committed with things like postcards depicting the hanged and desecrated
bodies of the victims. After the publication of Southern Horrors,
(20:35):
Wells spent some time in New York City, and then
she went to the United Kingdom for an anti lynching
lecture tour. She wrote about her travels in a dispatch
called inter Ocean, including how, for the first time, en
route to Britain, white passengers treated her with quote the
courtesy they would have offered to any lady of their
own race. But she also remarked that some of them
(20:57):
seemed to be courteous to her and ordered who shocked
the other white people around them. Wells returned from the
United Kingdom to take part in a boycott and protest
of the World's Columbian Exposition in eighteen nine three, also
known as the Chicago World's Fair. As we've talked about
on the show before, these fairs were celebrations of a
(21:17):
very particular aspect of American progress, that being white progress.
The Chicago World's Fair left Black Americans almost entirely out
of its exhibitions, and what representations there were were demeaning. Also,
apart from janitors, porters, and laborers, the fair only had
two black employees, both of them were clerks. So I
(21:40):
to B. Wells, Frederick Douglas, F. L. Barnett, and Jay
Carlin Penn published a pamphlet called The Reason Why the
Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, which
was basically an explainer written for fair attendees, with an
introduction in English, French, and German. It walked through a
many social and political issues affecting the black population, and
(22:04):
then it detailed a lengthy back and forth with organizers
basically going back and forth about including black people in
the fair that showed discrimination against the black community at
every step. Ferdinand Lee Barnett, co author of this pamphlet,
attorney and founder of Chicago's first black newspaper, would go
(22:25):
on to be Wells's husband. It's not clear exactly when
they met or how their courtship began. Wells had from
her teenage years had lots of suitors, and by her
thirties she was frustrated that she was not yet married,
and the fact that she wasn't caused a lot of
suspicion about her morals. Black women were heavily stereotyped as promiscuous,
(22:46):
and Wells's work meant she was often in the company
of men, so she had to constantly defend herself against
malicious gossip. Some of those was like malicious gossip published
in newspapers as fat It wasn't just people talking about
her behind her back. For a time, this courtship was
long distance. Wells returned to the UK and eighteen and
(23:09):
eighteen ninety four to continue her anti lynching tour. She
was really finding a much more receptive audience to her
work in the UK than in the US, she helped
found the British Anti Lynching Committee, which started launching other
anti lynching groups and working with British clergy to get
their American colleagues on board. Ida b. Wells and Ferdinand
(23:31):
Barnett married on June when Wells was thirty two. She
was so well known by this point that The New
York Times mentioned her wedding in a small feature at
the bottom of the front page. That's suspicion and criticism
of her personal life that had been going on while
she was single didn't really stop after Wells Barnett's marriage,
(23:52):
though other activists, including Susan b. Anthony, criticized her for
getting married. Susan b. Anthony bassedly told her she shouldn't
be messing around with some man when she had important
work to do. But unlike a lot of the white
women who were activists and were choosing not to marry,
Wells Barnett did not come from money or have other
family to help support her and her work. She also
(24:15):
just wanted to be married and to have children. She
and Frederick had each found in one another a partner
that they could trust and who could work with and
support the other. And the civil rights work that they
were both doing, and their marriage was not exactly conventional.
Wells Barnett hyphenated her last name rather than taking her husband's,
(24:36):
and her work and travel did slow down a little
bit as she raised children. She and Ferdinand had four
kids together, and he had too from his marriage to
his late first wife, but she did not stop working,
and sometimes she traveled to speaking engagements with the babies
and a nurse. Wells Barnett continued her anti lynching campaign
for much of the rest of her life, and she
(24:58):
also advocated for other causes. She called for a kindergarten
in Chicago that wouldn't roll black children. She was part
of the movement for women's suffrage, and in addition to
investigating and spreading awareness of the lynching of black men,
she did the same for lynching, rape, and sexual assault
of black women. She also butted heads with a lot
(25:19):
of other leaders in these spaces. She was described as difficult, headstrong, stubborn, temperamental,
and prickly. She helped found multiple civil rights organizations, but
she often didn't become an ongoing member. In the face
of these personality conflicts, many of which were likely due
to the fact that she was not behaving as was
expected of a woman gets pretty well agreed upon that
(25:43):
if she had been a man, a lot of the
things that people criticized her for would have instead been
seen as assets. She also called out both black and
white activists for their complicity or their missteps. This included
ongoing disagreements with Booker T. Washington, whose work was a
lot more focused on the idea of giving black citizens
(26:04):
the tools and education to help themselves, not on advocating
for changes to the law or aggressively fighting back against injustice.
She really saw his approach as to conciliatory and too
tolerant of white racism, and she finally cut ties with
him after he refused to denounce a particularly horrifying lynching.
(26:25):
She also called out past podcast subject Jane Adams. On
January third, nineteen o one, Adams published an essay in
The Independent called Respect for the Law. This essay clearly
and definitively condemned lynching, but it also gave the people
perpetrating these crimes a lot of the benefit of the doubt.
(26:45):
She wrote, quote, let us assume that the Southern citizens
who take part in and a bet the lynching of
negroes honestly believed that it is the only successful method
of dealing with a certain class of crimes, and later
she went on to write, quote, let us give the
Southern citizens the full benefit of this position and assume
that they have set aside trial by jury and all
(27:06):
processes of law, because they have become convinced that this
brutal method of theirs is the most efficient method in
dealing with a peculiar case of crime committed by one
race against another. Jane Adams in a lot of ways
when it came to to to racism and racial discrimination,
like a lot. In a lot of ways, she was
really progressive, and this was not a case where she
(27:28):
was really progressive, and you know, I'd be Wells Barnett
knew her and worked with her. They were both living
in Chicago. She published a rebuttal on May sixt So
Wells Barnett started out by praising Jane Adams and saying
that she was reluctant to diminish the impact of what
Adams had done. Adams was a well known, well respected
(27:49):
white woman who was condemning lynching, and she was doing
so with a dispassionate and logical argument. So this just
was not something that most white leaders in the United States.
We're doing so Wells Barnett made it clear that if
every white activist wrote a similar essay, the nation would
be in a much better place. But from there, Wells
(28:11):
Barnett directly criticized the assumptions that Adams had rested her
argument on. She pointed out that giving the perpetrators of
lynching the benefit of the doubt as quote doing what
was best was dangerous and damaging. She also picked apart
once again the idea that the victims of lynching had
committed rape, using the Chicago Tribunes annual lynching statistics to
(28:33):
back up what she was saying. Wells Barnett was present
at the founding of the a c P and at
its first meetings she gave a talk called Lynching Our
National Crime, which incorporated her, at that point, almost twenty
years of research and advocacy. To sum it up, quote, first,
lynching is color line murder. Second, crimes against women is
(28:57):
the excuse, not the cause. And third, it is a
national crime and requires a national remedy. So although she
did continue to participate in the double a CPS work
at various points. She wasn't listed as an official founder,
and she eventually distanced herself from that organization. In spite
(29:18):
of Wells Barnett's lifelong work, there was no national remedy
for lynching. Although some states passed laws against lynching, Southern
Democrats blocked efforts to pass laws at the national level.
The protections Wells Barnett was fighting for We're finally included,
at least on paper, in the Civil Rights Act of
nineteen sixty four. By that point, Wills Barnett had been
(29:42):
dead for more than thirty years. She died on March
thirty one, at the age of sixty nine. At the
time of her death, she had been working on her autobiography,
which she started on about three years before. She was
motivated in part to write this autobiography by attending a
New Ego History Week event in Chicago. They were discussing
(30:03):
a book by Carter G. Woodson, who was one of
the first scholars of black history like that was becoming
a field, and he's recognized as is one of the
first people doing this work. His book that he had
written on a topic made no mention of her anti
lynching work at all, and she realized that if she
wanted her life and work to be documented, she was
(30:25):
going to have to do it herself. Her youngest daughter, ALFREDA. Duster,
edited this autobiography, which is called Crusade for Justice, and
it was published in nineteen seventy and the book came
out just as there was an increasing focus on both
black history and women's history in the United States. It
helped bring Wells Barnett's work and accomplishments back to the
(30:47):
forefront of the national consciousness. Yeah, and those decades between
her death and when the book came out, she she
kind of faded in the background. She wasn't included in
a lot of discussion about black history. Today, there is
an to B. Wells Barnett Museum at the Spiros Bowling House.
The I. T. B. Wells Barnett House in Chicago is
a private residence, but it's also a National Historical Landmark.
(31:09):
And the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is
a memorial to the victims of lynching and racist terror,
opened on April ten in Montgomery, Alabama. And we will
end with a quote that sums up both what made
her such a force to be reckoned with and why
people describe her with words like prickly. That makes me angry,
(31:31):
But I also know that people describe me with words
like prickly, so I feel like a tiny bit of
kinship with her, although she is far beyond my abilities Anyway,
In nineteen o nine, a man had been lynched in Cairo, Illinois,
and according to a nineteen o four Illinois in Illinois law,
(31:52):
a sheriff whose prisoner was lynched had to be removed
from his position and then he had to apply for reinstatement.
So the share of who was involved with this lynching,
I don't know if he was directly involved, but the
man had been taken from his jail while he was
the person in charge. Uh he had applied for reinstatement,
and Wells Barnett went to Cairo and successfully got that
(32:15):
application for reinstatement denied. So the Springfield Forum had this
to say on December eleventh of that year. Quote Ida
Wells Barnett is to be highly lauded for her courage
and magnanimity. She towers high above all of her male
contemporaries and has more of the aggressive qualities than the
(32:36):
average man. It belittles the men to some extent to
have a woman come forward to do the work that
is naturally presumed to be that of men. But Mrs
Barnett never shrinks or evades. She is a heroine of
her age and the nation is better off for her
having lived in it. Long live Mrs Ida b Wells Barnett.
(32:58):
I love that quote. Uh. Do you also love listener mail?
I do love listener mail. Let's listener mail just came
in this morning and it is a correction. Uh. It
is about our episode about the niss A in World
War Two, and it is from Brian and Bryan's Dear
Tracy and Holly, thank you very much for your podcast
on the Japanese American units who participated in the U. S.
(33:21):
Arm Services during World War Two, despite many of these
soldiers families being incarcerated in concentration camps. I had one
uncle who served as a combat medic with the four
forty two r CT, while another uncle served in the
m I S and the Pacific. There were, however, several
corrections that I wanted to address. The quote that the
Japanese Americans who served in the Military Intelligence Service helped
(33:44):
shorten the war by two years should be attributed to
General Charles Willoughby, who was General MacArthur's chief of Staff
of Intelligence, not McArthur himself. The one battalion in the
fifth U S Army were not successful in taking Monte
Casino from the Germans. After being stalemated, General Mark Clark
decided to bypass the abbey and take a sea route
(34:07):
to land in anzio By on the way to Rome.
Polish and British Commonwealth divisions did overtake the enemy on
Montexino several months later. Lastly, the four forty second r
CT did not enter Rome. The four r ST landed
at Cevita Vecchia, where the one battalion joined the regiment.
The regiment then went north, with the one the battalion
(34:29):
going to Liverono on the Lagurian coast. You both do
such a fantastic job with your historical subjects, be at
people events, et cetera. I'm especially pleased that you devote
time to reminding us that America is made up of
many ethnic groups who have contributed to this country, even
under dire circumstances. If either or the both of you
or in San Francisco, it would be a pleasure for
(34:51):
me to be your docent at the Military Intelligence Service
Historic Learning Center in the Presidio, the first m I
S School your loyal listener, Brian. Thank you, Brian. The
first of these corrections about who the quote should be
attributed to, I realized I messed up, um after a
person came onto our Facebook page to make some like
(35:11):
thinly veiled racist comments, UM. And I googled that quote
and then was like, oh, I said the completely wrong
thing in the episode. Uh. And then I think most
of what is there relating to where the units were
going in relation to Rome was just me misinterpreting what
(35:32):
was an incredibly complicated campaign. UM. I I enjoy doing
the some of the military history episodes where we talk
about battles, UM, but that was one of the trickiest
ones to try to put together, like there was just
a whole lot going on. So thank you so much, Brian.
(35:53):
Brian also sent sources for all of the corrections that
he was making, which I very much appreciated because occasionally
we will get emails that say historians agree that blah
blah blah is not true, but like they don't really
say where that information came from, and I can't find
what historians they are talking about, So I very much
appreciated the helpful sources and links that Briant provided. Thank
(36:16):
you so much, Brian. I apologize for making those errors.
If you would like to write to us where History
podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're also all
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history dot com and you will find an archive of
(36:38):
all the episodes that we have ever worked on and
uh show notes for all the episodes Holly and I
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Apple podcasts, Google Play, or wherever else you find podcasts
(36:59):
for We're on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how staff works dot com. M m HM
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I to
b Wells Barnett, one of those figures who connects to
(00:21):
a lot of our past episodes. She's mentioned in our
podcast on Frederick Douglas and the two of them were
colleagues and friends. In our show in the Night of
Terror at the Aquaquon Workhouse, we talk about her refusing
to march in a segregated section of the nineteen thirteen
Woman's Suffrage Progression, instead saying and I am refusing to
(00:42):
play by that racist rule and marching with the Illinois
contingent with everyone else. She investigated the death of Robert
Charles in New Orleans and nineteen hundred and the racist
violence that surrounded that, and then the discussion of lynching,
and our two partner on the Wilmington's que was also
informed by her investigative reporting in her anti lynching campaign.
(01:05):
Idabe Wells Barnett fought against lynching for decades, and this
on its own would be remarkable, but she also lived
at a time when it was not common at all
for a woman, especially a woman of color, to become
a prominent journalist and speaker in this way, and then
doing this work also meant that she had to speak
out very candidly about violence and about rape. Discussing rape
(01:29):
at all was a huge taboo, but it was especially
taboo coming from a woman, and for a substantial part
of her career she was an unmarried woman, so it
was even more taboo. And that is all why we
are talking about her today. Ida b Wells Barnett was
born Ida Bell Wells in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July six,
(01:50):
eighteen sixty two. She was the oldest child of James Wells,
who was known as Jim, and Elizabeth Warrenton, who was
known as Lizzie, and they were both enslave, so Ida
was enslaved from birth. Jim and Lizzie both worked for
a man named Spiers Bawling. Jim was owned by another man,
but had been hired out to Bawling for an apprenticeship
(02:12):
in carpentry. The American Civil War was ongoing when Ida
was a baby, and the part of Mississippi where she
and her parents lived was no stranger to raids and skirmishes.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January one of eighteen
sixty three, and while it technically freed her family and
everyone else who was enslaved in Mississippi, slavery persisted until
(02:34):
Mississippi surrendered on May fourth of eighteen sixty five, and
probably beyond that point really um as word reached more
outlying areas of what had happened. Once they were able
to do so, Jim and Lizzie Wells made their marriage legal.
The young Ida Wells was too young to remember the
earliest years of reconstruction, but in general life was really
(02:56):
difficult for the freed people. It was also chaotic as
politicians and social reformers tried to work out what to
do about the formerly enslaved population and the social and
economic conditions that slavery had caused. But the Wells Is
had a couple of advantages. Jim's owner had also been
his father, and Jim had no siblings, and being his
(03:18):
owner's only child came with some privileges, including an education.
For a time after the end of the war, the
Wells has continued to work for Spires Bowling, but then
Bawling told Jim to vote for the Democratic candidate in
the upcoming election, and Jim had no intention of doing this.
As we've talked about before, the Democratic Party at this
(03:38):
point was mostly made up of wealthy, white slave owners.
He intended to vote for the radical Republican candidate. He
came back from the polls to find that his employer
had locked him out of the workplace. The fact that
Jim and Lizzie Wells were skilled workers rather than manual laborers,
made it easier for them to find other work. Lizzie
and her children also enrolled in school. The family also
(04:02):
became politically active, and Ida's father became a member of
the board at Rust College, then known as Shaw College,
where Ida would go on to study. Ida learned quickly,
and she read voraciously, including reading the Bible all the
way through, which was the only reading that was allowed
in the Wells home on Sundays. In eighteen seventy eight,
(04:23):
Idawell's life changed dramatically. She went to visit her grandparents
on their farm, and while she was away from home,
a yellow fever epidemic spread to Memphis. At first, when
they heard about this outbreak, Ida and her grandparents weren't
particularly concerned. Memphis had dealt with yellow fever before, and
outbreaks had never made it as far from there as
Holly Springs, which was roughly fifty miles or eight kilometers away.
(04:48):
People also blamed yellow fever on miasma's or bad swamp
are so they thought Holly Springs was protected by being
on the highest ground in the area. So instead of
calling for a core, teen officials in Holly Springs offered
refuge to Memphis residents who were fleeing the illness. But
yellow fever is really transmitted by mosquitoes, not by swamp vapor,
(05:12):
so once people arrived in Holly Springs carrying the illness,
it spread rapidly. Holly Springs had a population of about
three thousand, five hundred people, and more than fourteen hundred
of them contracted the disease. More than three hundred people died.
This included both of Ida's parents, and as soon as
she and her grandparents learned what had happened, she took
(05:34):
a freight train back to Holly Springs. She went against
the advice of basically everyone. Everyone was telling her that
it was way too dangerous. There were not even any
passenger trains that were running, which was why she was
on a freight train in the first place, but there
was nobody else to look after her siblings, and by
the time she got back home, her baby brother had
also died. Ida's father had been a Mason, in his
(05:56):
Masonic brothers came to the family's aid. They start to
talking about dividing up the Wells children, sending them to
live with other families in ones and two's. I'da's sister,
Eugenia was of special concern. She was paralyzed from the
waist down due to severe scoliosis. Ida was in the
room for this conversation, but she wasn't really consulted about
(06:18):
these decisions, and she finally told her father's Masonic brothers
that they were not going to send any of her
siblings anywhere, that her parents would be spinning in their
graves if they heard that their children had been split up.
She said that if the Masons helped her find a job,
that she would look after all of her siblings. With that,
she became both the breadwinner and the head of household.
(06:40):
She and her siblings had two legal guardians, but I'da
got a job as a teacher so that she could
raise and support her five younger siblings, and she was
only sixteen at this point. Ida B. Wells kept up
her studies while she worked as a teacher and raised
her siblings. Her job was at a rural school, so
she had to travel back in four to it by mule.
(07:01):
She also started taking college courses at Rust College, although
she was expelled from the school in eighteen eighty one
or eighteen eighty two. The details of exactly why are
not known, but she wrote about losing her temper with
the teachers and speaking to them with hateful words. In
eighteen eighty one, when she was nineteen, one of Welles's
aunts invited her and her two youngest sisters to move
(07:24):
to Memphis. By this point, her brothers had both been
placed in apprenticeships and Eugenia had gone to live with
another aunt. And this offer gave the Wells sisters the
chance to move to a bigger city with more opportunities,
and it gave Item more freedom to pursue her own
education and career since her aunt would be helping to
look after her sisters. It was in Memphis that she
(07:46):
really started to become politically active, which we will talk
about after a sponsor break. After moving to Memphis I
to be. Wells continued to work as a teacher. She
had a job in Woodstock, Tennessee, which was not all
that far away. She traveled back and forth to it
(08:07):
by train. She was very carefully trying to build a
middle class life for herself and her sisters, stretching her
teacher's pay to cover things like nice dresses and a
comfortable place for them to live. And one of the
things that she spent her money on was on first
class tickets in the ladies car whenever she traveled by train.
The ladies car was more comfortable than the second class cars,
(08:29):
which were called smokers. The Lady's car was quieter and
it had more comfortable seats, and since she was a young, petite,
attractive woman traveling alone, it was also just safer. She
had been going back and forth from Memphis to Woodstock
for two years without incident in the ladies car, and
then in three she was traveling back to Memphis from
(08:51):
Holly Springs on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwest Railroad. The
conductor came to take her ticket and told her that
she would have to move to the mooker's car. Wells refused.
She had bought a ticket, and she was, as was
clear by her dress, her demeanor and behavior, a lady.
The conductor insisted that she would have to move, and
(09:12):
even went so far as to move her luggage and
belongings into the forward car, expecting her to follow them.
When she stayed where she was, he came back and
attempted to remove her bodily from her seat. She once
again refused to move. She was, as we said, a
petite woman. She braced herself against the seat to keep
(09:34):
this man from dragging her away, and when he kept
man handling her, she bit him. Ultimately, Wells was forcibly
removed from the train with both sleeves torn out of
her linen duster, and when she got back to Memphis,
she filed suit against the railroad. She was removed from
the ladies car a second time before that suit had
even been settled, so she filed another one. This is
(09:57):
kind of on a cusp of seig sigation by race
on railroads, like it was a lot more common to
have a ladies car that women could pay additional, you know,
in an upgraded fair to sit in, and all the
cars were all the other cars were just kind of
a mix, and it was becoming more formalized to instead
have have train cars segregated by race, since this was
(10:20):
sort of in the interim of that that changeover happening.
So a circuit court found in I. Toby Wells favor
under the Civil Rights Act of eighteen seventy five, and
she was awarded five hundred dollars in the first case
and two hundred dollars in the second case. But the
railroad appealed the decision and the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned
(10:41):
that ruling in seven. The Supreme Court's assertion was that
Wells had only filed the suit in the first place
to harass the train company, and that her actions were
quote not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat
for a short ride. That is infuriating. Uh. Wells was devastated,
and it wasn't just the loss of the case, it
(11:02):
was what that laws signified, especially since she had been
taking this legal action pretty much on her own, without
the help of any civil rights organizations or the greater
Black community of Memphis. Her case wound up being one
of the ones on the road to Plessy versus Ferguson,
which we have covered on the show before in which
the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was constitutional.
(11:25):
This whole experience inspired Wells to become more politically vocal.
While she was still working as a teacher, she started
working as a journalist as well, under the pen name
of Iola. She wrote about civil rights, and she wrote
about social issues, and she was eventually nicknamed Iola, Princess
of the Press. By the end of the eighteen eighties,
(11:47):
Wells had already written a prolific body of newspaper columns.
She also purchased a one third share in the Memphis
Free Speech and Headlight in eighteen eighty nine, and eventually
she and one of the other co owner, J. L. Fleming,
bought out their third partner and they owned and ran
the Free Speech together. In one Wells wrote an article
(12:08):
that was critical of the Memphis school Board, and her
teaching contract was not renewed. She then turned her attention
to journalism full time, and soon the focus of her
journalism turned to lynching. The catalyst was the May ninth
lynching of Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Henry Stewart in Memphis.
(12:29):
They had been arrested and charged with maintaining a public
nuisance while trying to defend themselves and a grocery store
called the People's Grocery from an armed white mob. McDowell
was the store's manager, Stewart was the clerk, and Moss
was the president of the joint stock company that owned
the store. This incident started with a group of black
(12:49):
and white children playing marbles near the store. A fight
broke out after a black child won all the marbles.
A white man came out and beat the child who
had won the game, and a group of black men
attempted to intervene. A white mob formed in retaliation bent
on destroying the People's Grocery. One of the white instigators
(13:11):
actually owned a competing grocery store. Yeah, they definitely had
it in their minds to run this grocery store out
of business and to hurt or kill its owners. So
after McDowell, Moss, and Stewart were jailed on the public
nuisance charged, an armed militia of black men tried to
stand guard outside of the jail. Was a known risk
(13:32):
if a black man was in jail for something that
a white mob could come and take him out of
that jail and harm him. So they were standing guard,
but eventually the sheriff ordered them to disperse and confiscated
all of their weapons. After they were gone, a crowd
of white men, as they had feared, came to the jail.
They took McDowell, Moss, and Stewart to a field outside
(13:53):
of town and shot all of them. Wells knew all
of these men. She would friends with Tom Moss, and she,
along with the rest of the black population, was terrified,
especially since the sheriff secured a court order authorizing him
to shoot any black person who seemed to be causing
trouble on site, even though Memphis had passed a law
(14:17):
banning the sale of firearms to its black population. Wells
bought a pistol, and she carried it in her purse,
but she also recognized that that pistol was only going
to go so far to defend her and the pages
of the free speech. She became one of the many
black voices urging the rest of the black population to
leave Memphis. There was actually a mass exodus out of
(14:39):
Memphis was big enough that it set off an economic
crisis as black business owners and laborers fled the city.
After this incident, Wells began researching, investigating, and writing about lynching.
This was the work that she would pursue for most
of the rest of her life. Almost immediately this work
led to Wells being threatened with lynching herself. One two
(15:04):
she published an article in the Free Speech that started
out with a statement that eight men had already been
lynched in the span of just a week, five of
them had been accused of rape. She went on to write,
quote nobody in this section of the country believes the
old threadbare lie that negro men rape white women. If
Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves,
(15:25):
and public sentiment will have a reaction. A conclusion will
then be reached which will be very damaging to the
moral reputation of their women. This was basically the same
argument that would appear in the Wilmington's Daily Record in
that these rape allegations were stemming from consensual relationships between
(15:45):
black men and white women. That was the article that
was used as justification for the Wilmington's coup and the
mass racist violence that followed it, and Wells's article sparked
similar outrage, although it did not launch a massacre. A
few days later, a white paper called the Daily Commercial
responded to wells article, and here's a quote quote the
(16:08):
fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and
utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of
evidence as to the wonderful patients of Southern whites. But
we have had enough of it. Similar sentiments ran in
other papers, and a mob of people convened at the
Cotton Exchange Building in Memphis, intending to lynch both co
(16:32):
owners of the Free Speech. But Wells had gone to
Philadelphia to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Churches General Conference,
and from there she went on a trip to New
York rather than returning to Memphis. J. L. Fleming had
also left town for fear of his life. While Wells
and Fleming survived, the Free Speech didn't. The mobs sacked
(16:53):
its offices and destroyed all of their equipment and furniture.
After this incident, Wells followed her own advice and she
left Memphis. She didn't even go back to try to
get her belongings. We will talk about her life after
leaving Memphis after a sponsor break. Even though I to
(17:15):
b Wells left Memphis behind, she did not back down
in her writing against lynching. After all of this happened,
she published a response to what had happened in the
New York Age on June, and then a lot of
that response became her pamphlet Southern Horrors Lynch Law in
all its phases. This pamphlet is one of the most
(17:37):
well known of her many, many written works. It started
with a letter of praise from Frederick Douglas saying of
his own efforts related to lynching, quote, I have spoken,
but my word is feeble in comparison to quickly recamp.
Lynching is the extra judicial murder of someone who has
been accused of a crime or other wrongdoing. Between eighteen
(18:01):
eighty two and nineteen sixty eight, there were more than
four thousand recorded lynchings in the United States. More than
seventy percent of the victims were black, and many of
the white victims were civil rights workers or other people
who tried to defend black citizens. Most of these happened
in the South, and they were away to terrorize the
black community and violently reinforced white supremacy. By the time
(18:26):
I'd be Wells started her anti lynching work, a false
idea had been well established within the white community, and
that idea was that black men were raping white women
and that lynching was necessary to discourage these rapes. Wells
tackled this idea head on, countering that there were consensual
(18:46):
relationships between black men and white women like we alluded
to before the break. She wrote, quote, hundreds of such
cases might be cited, but enough have been given to
prove the assertion that there are white women in the
South who loved the Afro Americans company, even as there
are white men notorious for their preference for Afro American women.
(19:09):
She also documented multiple instances of the same pattern, a
black man accused of a crime then removed from his
jail cell by a white mob who murdered him and
desecrated his body. She wrote about the disenfranchisement of the
black population in the South through racist voting laws and
how that was contributing to the problem, and she picked
(19:30):
apart how white newspapers were participants in this violence as well,
repeating the same unproven and sometimes completely fabricated allegations about
the victims of lynching as though they were fact, often
using racist and sensationalized language to do it, and Southern horrors.
Wells also wrote about the need for the black community
(19:51):
to protect itself since no one else was willing to
do it, writing quote, the lesson this teaches, and which
every Afro American should ponder well, is that 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. She made the point that this
(20:11):
wasn't about the law. The people who carried out these
lynchings were not interested in punishing all alleged rapists, only
the black ones. Lynch mobs weren't operating within any kind
of legal framework, and they were celebrating the murders they
committed with things like postcards depicting the hanged and desecrated
bodies of the victims. After the publication of Southern Horrors,
(20:35):
Wells spent some time in New York City, and then
she went to the United Kingdom for an anti lynching
lecture tour. She wrote about her travels in a dispatch
called inter Ocean, including how, for the first time, en
route to Britain, white passengers treated her with quote the
courtesy they would have offered to any lady of their
own race. But she also remarked that some of them
(20:57):
seemed to be courteous to her and ordered who shocked
the other white people around them. Wells returned from the
United Kingdom to take part in a boycott and protest
of the World's Columbian Exposition in eighteen nine three, also
known as the Chicago World's Fair. As we've talked about
on the show before, these fairs were celebrations of a
(21:17):
very particular aspect of American progress, that being white progress.
The Chicago World's Fair left Black Americans almost entirely out
of its exhibitions, and what representations there were were demeaning. Also,
apart from janitors, porters, and laborers, the fair only had
two black employees, both of them were clerks. So I
(21:40):
to B. Wells, Frederick Douglas, F. L. Barnett, and Jay
Carlin Penn published a pamphlet called The Reason Why the
Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, which
was basically an explainer written for fair attendees, with an
introduction in English, French, and German. It walked through a
many social and political issues affecting the black population, and
(22:04):
then it detailed a lengthy back and forth with organizers
basically going back and forth about including black people in
the fair that showed discrimination against the black community at
every step. Ferdinand Lee Barnett, co author of this pamphlet,
attorney and founder of Chicago's first black newspaper, would go
(22:25):
on to be Wells's husband. It's not clear exactly when
they met or how their courtship began. Wells had from
her teenage years had lots of suitors, and by her
thirties she was frustrated that she was not yet married,
and the fact that she wasn't caused a lot of
suspicion about her morals. Black women were heavily stereotyped as promiscuous,
(22:46):
and Wells's work meant she was often in the company
of men, so she had to constantly defend herself against
malicious gossip. Some of those was like malicious gossip published
in newspapers as fat It wasn't just people talking about
her behind her back. For a time, this courtship was
long distance. Wells returned to the UK and eighteen and
(23:09):
eighteen ninety four to continue her anti lynching tour. She
was really finding a much more receptive audience to her
work in the UK than in the US, she helped
found the British Anti Lynching Committee, which started launching other
anti lynching groups and working with British clergy to get
their American colleagues on board. Ida b. Wells and Ferdinand
(23:31):
Barnett married on June when Wells was thirty two. She
was so well known by this point that The New
York Times mentioned her wedding in a small feature at
the bottom of the front page. That's suspicion and criticism
of her personal life that had been going on while
she was single didn't really stop after Wells Barnett's marriage,
(23:52):
though other activists, including Susan b. Anthony, criticized her for
getting married. Susan b. Anthony bassedly told her she shouldn't
be messing around with some man when she had important
work to do. But unlike a lot of the white
women who were activists and were choosing not to marry,
Wells Barnett did not come from money or have other
family to help support her and her work. She also
(24:15):
just wanted to be married and to have children. She
and Frederick had each found in one another a partner
that they could trust and who could work with and
support the other. And the civil rights work that they
were both doing, and their marriage was not exactly conventional.
Wells Barnett hyphenated her last name rather than taking her husband's,
(24:36):
and her work and travel did slow down a little
bit as she raised children. She and Ferdinand had four
kids together, and he had too from his marriage to
his late first wife, but she did not stop working,
and sometimes she traveled to speaking engagements with the babies
and a nurse. Wells Barnett continued her anti lynching campaign
for much of the rest of her life, and she
(24:58):
also advocated for other causes. She called for a kindergarten
in Chicago that wouldn't roll black children. She was part
of the movement for women's suffrage, and in addition to
investigating and spreading awareness of the lynching of black men,
she did the same for lynching, rape, and sexual assault
of black women. She also butted heads with a lot
(25:19):
of other leaders in these spaces. She was described as difficult, headstrong, stubborn, temperamental,
and prickly. She helped found multiple civil rights organizations, but
she often didn't become an ongoing member. In the face
of these personality conflicts, many of which were likely due
to the fact that she was not behaving as was
expected of a woman gets pretty well agreed upon that
(25:43):
if she had been a man, a lot of the
things that people criticized her for would have instead been
seen as assets. She also called out both black and
white activists for their complicity or their missteps. This included
ongoing disagreements with Booker T. Washington, whose work was a
lot more focused on the idea of giving black citizens
(26:04):
the tools and education to help themselves, not on advocating
for changes to the law or aggressively fighting back against injustice.
She really saw his approach as to conciliatory and too
tolerant of white racism, and she finally cut ties with
him after he refused to denounce a particularly horrifying lynching.
(26:25):
She also called out past podcast subject Jane Adams. On
January third, nineteen o one, Adams published an essay in
The Independent called Respect for the Law. This essay clearly
and definitively condemned lynching, but it also gave the people
perpetrating these crimes a lot of the benefit of the doubt.
(26:45):
She wrote, quote, let us assume that the Southern citizens
who take part in and a bet the lynching of
negroes honestly believed that it is the only successful method
of dealing with a certain class of crimes, and later
she went on to write, quote, let us give the
Southern citizens the full benefit of this position and assume
that they have set aside trial by jury and all
(27:06):
processes of law, because they have become convinced that this
brutal method of theirs is the most efficient method in
dealing with a peculiar case of crime committed by one
race against another. Jane Adams in a lot of ways
when it came to to to racism and racial discrimination,
like a lot. In a lot of ways, she was
really progressive, and this was not a case where she
(27:28):
was really progressive, and you know, I'd be Wells Barnett
knew her and worked with her. They were both living
in Chicago. She published a rebuttal on May sixt So
Wells Barnett started out by praising Jane Adams and saying
that she was reluctant to diminish the impact of what
Adams had done. Adams was a well known, well respected
(27:49):
white woman who was condemning lynching, and she was doing
so with a dispassionate and logical argument. So this just
was not something that most white leaders in the United States.
We're doing so Wells Barnett made it clear that if
every white activist wrote a similar essay, the nation would
be in a much better place. But from there, Wells
(28:11):
Barnett directly criticized the assumptions that Adams had rested her
argument on. She pointed out that giving the perpetrators of
lynching the benefit of the doubt as quote doing what
was best was dangerous and damaging. She also picked apart
once again the idea that the victims of lynching had
committed rape, using the Chicago Tribunes annual lynching statistics to
(28:33):
back up what she was saying. Wells Barnett was present
at the founding of the a c P and at
its first meetings she gave a talk called Lynching Our
National Crime, which incorporated her, at that point, almost twenty
years of research and advocacy. To sum it up, quote, first,
lynching is color line murder. Second, crimes against women is
(28:57):
the excuse, not the cause. And third, it is a
national crime and requires a national remedy. So although she
did continue to participate in the double a CPS work
at various points. She wasn't listed as an official founder,
and she eventually distanced herself from that organization. In spite
(29:18):
of Wells Barnett's lifelong work, there was no national remedy
for lynching. Although some states passed laws against lynching, Southern
Democrats blocked efforts to pass laws at the national level.
The protections Wells Barnett was fighting for We're finally included,
at least on paper, in the Civil Rights Act of
nineteen sixty four. By that point, Wills Barnett had been
(29:42):
dead for more than thirty years. She died on March
thirty one, at the age of sixty nine. At the
time of her death, she had been working on her autobiography,
which she started on about three years before. She was
motivated in part to write this autobiography by attending a
New Ego History Week event in Chicago. They were discussing
(30:03):
a book by Carter G. Woodson, who was one of
the first scholars of black history like that was becoming
a field, and he's recognized as is one of the
first people doing this work. His book that he had
written on a topic made no mention of her anti
lynching work at all, and she realized that if she
wanted her life and work to be documented, she was
(30:25):
going to have to do it herself. Her youngest daughter, ALFREDA. Duster,
edited this autobiography, which is called Crusade for Justice, and
it was published in nineteen seventy and the book came
out just as there was an increasing focus on both
black history and women's history in the United States. It
helped bring Wells Barnett's work and accomplishments back to the
(30:47):
forefront of the national consciousness. Yeah, and those decades between
her death and when the book came out, she she
kind of faded in the background. She wasn't included in
a lot of discussion about black history. Today, there is
an to B. Wells Barnett Museum at the Spiros Bowling House.
The I. T. B. Wells Barnett House in Chicago is
a private residence, but it's also a National Historical Landmark.
(31:09):
And the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is
a memorial to the victims of lynching and racist terror,
opened on April ten in Montgomery, Alabama. And we will
end with a quote that sums up both what made
her such a force to be reckoned with and why
people describe her with words like prickly. That makes me angry,
(31:31):
But I also know that people describe me with words
like prickly, so I feel like a tiny bit of
kinship with her, although she is far beyond my abilities Anyway,
In nineteen o nine, a man had been lynched in Cairo, Illinois,
and according to a nineteen o four Illinois in Illinois law,
(31:52):
a sheriff whose prisoner was lynched had to be removed
from his position and then he had to apply for reinstatement.
So the share of who was involved with this lynching,
I don't know if he was directly involved, but the
man had been taken from his jail while he was
the person in charge. Uh he had applied for reinstatement,
and Wells Barnett went to Cairo and successfully got that
(32:15):
application for reinstatement denied. So the Springfield Forum had this
to say on December eleventh of that year. Quote Ida
Wells Barnett is to be highly lauded for her courage
and magnanimity. She towers high above all of her male
contemporaries and has more of the aggressive qualities than the
(32:36):
average man. It belittles the men to some extent to
have a woman come forward to do the work that
is naturally presumed to be that of men. But Mrs
Barnett never shrinks or evades. She is a heroine of
her age and the nation is better off for her
having lived in it. Long live Mrs Ida b Wells Barnett.
(32:58):
I love that quote. Uh. Do you also love listener mail?
I do love listener mail. Let's listener mail just came
in this morning and it is a correction. Uh. It
is about our episode about the niss A in World
War Two, and it is from Brian and Bryan's Dear
Tracy and Holly, thank you very much for your podcast
on the Japanese American units who participated in the U. S.
(33:21):
Arm Services during World War Two, despite many of these
soldiers families being incarcerated in concentration camps. I had one
uncle who served as a combat medic with the four
forty two r CT, while another uncle served in the
m I S and the Pacific. There were, however, several
corrections that I wanted to address. The quote that the
Japanese Americans who served in the Military Intelligence Service helped
(33:44):
shorten the war by two years should be attributed to
General Charles Willoughby, who was General MacArthur's chief of Staff
of Intelligence, not McArthur himself. The one battalion in the
fifth U S Army were not successful in taking Monte
Casino from the Germans. After being stalemated, General Mark Clark
decided to bypass the abbey and take a sea route
(34:07):
to land in anzio By on the way to Rome.
Polish and British Commonwealth divisions did overtake the enemy on
Montexino several months later. Lastly, the four forty second r
CT did not enter Rome. The four r ST landed
at Cevita Vecchia, where the one battalion joined the regiment.
The regiment then went north, with the one the battalion
(34:29):
going to Liverono on the Lagurian coast. You both do
such a fantastic job with your historical subjects, be at
people events, et cetera. I'm especially pleased that you devote
time to reminding us that America is made up of
many ethnic groups who have contributed to this country, even
under dire circumstances. If either or the both of you
or in San Francisco, it would be a pleasure for
(34:51):
me to be your docent at the Military Intelligence Service
Historic Learning Center in the Presidio, the first m I
S School your loyal listener, Brian. Thank you, Brian. The
first of these corrections about who the quote should be
attributed to, I realized I messed up, um after a
person came onto our Facebook page to make some like
(35:11):
thinly veiled racist comments, UM. And I googled that quote
and then was like, oh, I said the completely wrong
thing in the episode. Uh. And then I think most
of what is there relating to where the units were
going in relation to Rome was just me misinterpreting what
(35:32):
was an incredibly complicated campaign. UM. I I enjoy doing
the some of the military history episodes where we talk
about battles, UM, but that was one of the trickiest
ones to try to put together, like there was just
a whole lot going on. So thank you so much, Brian.
(35:53):
Brian also sent sources for all of the corrections that
he was making, which I very much appreciated because occasionally
we will get emails that say historians agree that blah
blah blah is not true, but like they don't really
say where that information came from, and I can't find
what historians they are talking about, So I very much
appreciated the helpful sources and links that Briant provided. Thank
(36:16):
you so much, Brian. I apologize for making those errors.
If you would like to write to us where History
podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're also all
over social media as a missed in History. That's where
our our Facebook, and our interest in, our Instagram, and
our Twitter, all our our website is that missed in
history dot com and you will find an archive of
(36:38):
all the episodes that we have ever worked on and
uh show notes for all the episodes Holly and I
have worked on. You can do all that and a
whole lot more at our website, which is missing history
dot com. And you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcasts, Google Play, or wherever else you find podcasts
(36:59):
for We're on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how staff works dot com. M m HM
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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