Ida B Wells, Journalist Who Exposed Horrors of Lynching

Today we will learn and reflect on courageous reporting by Ida B
Wells on the evils of lynching.
We often encounter whites who contest the history of lynchings
and race riots, who believe that the history of lynchings is
radical-left communist propaganda that has no basis in fact. To
counter this, we offer the history and reporting of Ida B Wells, a
brave black woman of modest circumstances who chose to
crusade against the evils of lynchings and murders of blacks that
go unpunished, brave because she risked death at the hands of
white supremacists who detested the truths she was printing in
the newspapers of her day.

We will periodically pause the reports of gruesome, grisly,
gory lynchings, which are necessary to acknowledge that
they really did happen, and could happen again, with
essays on Civil Rights topics by Ida B Wells.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for
this video. Feel free to follow along in the PowerPoint
script we uploaded to SlideShare. Please, we welcome
interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn and
reflect together!

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Ida B Wells, Journalist, Anti-Lynching Activist
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Ida B Wells was born in Mississippi during the Civil War, which
means she would not have remembered when she was freed by
the Emancipation Proclamation by the end of the war. Her
father, Jim Wells, was active in the Mississippi Republican Party,
braving the KKK vigilante justice that discouraged blacks from
voting and participating in politics. Her parents encouraged her
to stand up for her rights. The childhood memories of Ida B Wells
included her mother pacing the floor at night when her father
was at a political meeting, wondering and praying, would he
arrive home alive?

Freedmen voting
in New Orleans,
1867

The young adult pictures of Ida B Wells look like the pictures of a
teenager, and she was forced to grow up and start working very early.
When she was sixteen and out-of-town visiting her grandparents, yellow
fever struck, and both her parents passed away from the plague. She
rushed back home when she heard the news, only to find out that her
father’s Masonic Lodge brothers were planning to divvy up her siblings
among several families.
Ida B Wells, although she was only sixteen at the time, firmly stated that
she would do everything she could to keep the family together. She had
not even finished the equivalent of high school, but she had her dress
lengthened, lied about her age, and took a job as an elementary school
teacher. She was underqualified, and she had to study herself to
complete her education.

To earn more money, she got a job teaching school in Memphis,
Tennessee, and soon started working for local black newspapers.
She wrote biting articles and editorials under the penname of
Iola, the Princess of the Press, she became the newspaper’s
editor and publisher as well as a writer, and in 1889 became co-
owner of the black newspaper, Memphis Free Speech and
Headlight. She married fellow journalist and attorney Ferdinand
Lee Barnett, they had five children together.

Attorney Ferdinand Lee Barnett
married Ida B Wells in 1895.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her children, 1909

IDA B WELLS, HER CAREER AS A JOURNALIST
Ida B Wells risked her life by reporting on the racial violence in the Deep
South. In early March, 1892, three black businessmen, including Thomas
Moss, a close friend, were the victims of a lynching incident. The initial
incident was a squabble between white and black boys over a game of
marbles, one of the white fathers whipped one of the black boys, and
black men protested the whipping. That night a white mob stormed the
blacks who hung out at the People’s Grocery Store and were met with
gunfire from blacks who were guarding the store. The next day the white
mob returned, threw thirty blacks in jail, looted the store, and terrorized
the neighborhood blacks. Another white mob raided the jail, and
lynched the three black businessmen, whose store successfully
competed against another white grocery store nearby.

The People's Grocery near Memphis, TN was a successful African American cooperative.
The 1892 lynchings of its owners led Wells' to begin her investigations of lynching.

Historically, lynchings were justified by the myth that black men
were eager to rape white women, and that white womanhood
needed to be protected. Spurred by her knowledge of the details
of this lynching of a dear friend, Ida B Wells started to research
the history of other lynchings, discovering that for most
lynchings had no connection to any intimate acts, and where
there was intimacy, the white woman consented, which was so
repugnant that it enraged white men of the day.

Ida B Wells reported on this lynching and three
other lynchings of eight black men in one week in
late May, 1892, five for rape, though as Ida B
Wells wrote, “Nobody in this part of the country
believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men
rape white women.” Ida B Wells recalls that her
business partner had to leave town to escape the
mob that ransacked the office and destroyed the
building, and that “letters and telegrams sent to
me in New York where I was vacationing advised
me that bodily harm awaited my return. Creditors
took possession of the newspaper office and sold
the outfit, and the ‘Free Speech’ was as if it had
never been.” The sheriff did nothing, the courts
did nothing, and even if the case had made it to
the courts, no jury would convict white men for
crimes committed against blacks.

Ida B Wells moved north to Harlem, accepting a
position with the newspaper, New York Age, and
continued her anti-lynching campaign in articles and
editorials. Was she able to move her possessions to
New York? We hope so, Dr Wikipedia does not
mention a mob destroying her house in Memphis.

Soon afterwards she gives a speech to the
National Press Association, she proclaims, “The
lyncher has become so bold, he has discarded his
mask and the secrecy of night, has left the out-of-
the-way village, and invaded the jails and
penitentiaries of our largest cities, and hung and
tortured his victims on the public streets. Not
content with this, Arkansas furnishes the spectacle
of a woman vindicating her honor by setting fire to
a living being, who, as the flames lick his burning
flesh, dies protesting his innocence to the crowd
of five thousand who looked on and applauded
the act in ghoulish glee.”

Ida B Wells has more examples of lynchings:
“A fifteen-year-old girl in Louisiana, suspected
of poisoning a whole family is promptly hung
on that suspicion; three reputable citizens of
Memphis were taken from the jail and shot to
death for prospering too well in business and
defending themselves and their property; one
of the journals which was a member of your
organization has been silenced by the edict of
the mob which declared there shall be no
such thing as ‘Free Speech’ in the South.”

MORE MEMPHIS LYNCHINGS
The Reconstruction Era had ended, the federal
troops had left the South, and since the southern
sheriffs and police were now in charge, ever year
their outrages against blacks became more and more
brazen.

How many blacks were lynched and murdered during and after the Civil
War? Studies of newspapers and other sources estimate that up to 6,400
Americans were lynched, past studies estimate about 4,500 total deaths,
about three quarters black. It is unclear whether this includes the
number of blacks who died in race riots around the early twentieth
century, but this does not include other reports of mass graves of blacks
worked to death as convict laborers in the mines and on especially cruel
plantations. Although we have not found any speculation of the true
numbers of blacks who died, likely the true numbers of blacks who were
lynched and murdered are in the range of ten thousand souls to twenty
thousand souls or more.

Lynching of William Jones
in Greenwich Village
during the Draft Riots in
New York, 1863. "A
crowd of rioters met a
colored man returning
from a bakery with a loaf
of bread. They instantly
set upon and beat him,
and after nearly killing
him, hung him to a lamp-
post. His body was left
suspended for several
hours. A fire was made
underneath him, and he
was literally roasted as he
hung, the mob reveling in
their demonic act.”

Ida B Wells sensed this sliding into the abyss: “Lynchers
belong to the race which holds Negro life cheap, which owns
the telegraph wires and newspapers. They write reports
justifying lynching by painting the Negro as black as possible,
and those reports are accepted by the press association and
the world without question or investigation. The mob spirit
has increased with alarming frequency and violence.” “Over
a thousand men, women and children have thus been
sacrificed the past ten years. Masks have long since been
thrown aside and the lynchings now take place in broad
daylight. The sheriffs, police and state officials stand by and
see the work well done. The coroner’s jury is often formed
among those who took part in the lynching and a verdict,
‘Death at the hands of parties unknown to the jury’ is
rendered. As the number of lynchings have increased, so has
the cruelty and barbarity of the lynchers.”

The abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, wrote a
letter of encouragement to Ida B Wells in late 1892,

“Dear Miss Wells,
Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch
abomination now generally practiced against colored people in
the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing
power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison.”
“BRAVE WOMAN! You have done your people and mine a
service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If
American conscience were only half-Christianized, if American
moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of
outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror,
shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your
pamphlet shall be read.”
“But alas! Even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its
own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by earth and Heaven, yet we must still
think, speak and work, and trust in the power of a merciful God for final deliverance.”

Though he had limited education, Frederick Douglass
proved to the world that even an ex-slave could be a
spell-binding orator and master of the English
language if given the chance and the freedom to
read and study, he was a best-selling author, his
most famous work was his slave autobiography,
which updated with his subsequent experiences as
an abolitionist leader in another best-selling
autobiography many decades later.

AN ARKANSAS LYNCHING
Ida B Wells tells us a story about a lynching that was put into
motion by a theft by a white man that was enabled by the
courts. “Hamp Biscoe was a hard-working, thrifty farmer,
who lived near England, Arkansas, on a small farm with his
family.” A white man then tried to collect on a fictional debt
of a hundred dollars, a large sum for those days. “Biscoe
refused to pay the demand. The white man brought suit,
obtained a judgment for the hundred dollars and Biscoe’s
farm was sold to pay the judgment.”
“The suit, judgment and subsequent legal proceedings
appear to have driven Biscoe almost crazy and brooding over
his wrongs he grew to be a confirmed lunatic. He would allow
but a few men, white or colored, to come upon his place, as
he suspected every stranger to be planning to steal his farm.”

His neighbor then tore down his fence, Biscoe threatened
him, and his neighbor then secured a warrant for his arrest.
Lawmen came, guns drawn, guns were fired, shooting both
Biscoe and his wife. When the neighbors heard the news, of
course a small mob gathered, coming to guard the guilty
family. Afterwards the young son explained what happened
next: “He saw a tall young man shoot his father and another
man shot his pregnant mother. After they had killed them,
his mother’s shooter pulled off her stockings and took two
hundred dollars she had hid there.”
After the article was published, an investigator wrote to find
out what had been done in the matter, received this answer
from the sheriff: “The parties who killed Hamp Biscoe have
never been arrested. The parties are still in the county. It was
done by some of the citizens, and those who know will not
tell.”

IDA B WELLS AND WEB DUBOIS CRITICIZE BOOKER T WASHINGTON
In 1904 Ida B Wells joined WEB DuBois in denouncing Booker T
Washington in a symposium on “The Negro Problem from the Negro
Point of View.” Washington was known as an accommodationist, but as
the decades past many other black leaders complained that he was too
accommodating, many started to wonder if he was more a part of the
problem of continuing racists attitudes than part of the solution.
WEB Dubois is known for his groundbreaking history, Black
Reconstruction, which documented how ex-slaves were an important
part of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

In an essay afterwards, Ida B Wells concedes that the
supporters of Booker T Washington “cherish the
most tender memories of the northern teachers
who endured ostracism, insult and martyrdom, to
bring the spelling-book and Bible to educate those
who had been slaves,” founding many black schools.
“Without these schools,” including Booker T
Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, “Negroes would
have been in a hopeless position; with their aid our
race has made more remarkable intellectual and
material progress in forty years than any other race
in history.”
Class in Tuskegee Institute, Alabama
“They have given us thousands of teachers for our black schools in the South, physicians
to heal our ailments, druggists, lawyers and ministers. They have given us over two
thousand black college graduates, over half of whom own property worth over one
thousand dollars per capita.”

But they also note that Washington’s
emphasis on providing trade education for
blacks can limit the aspirations of blacks and
give whites the wrong impression that a trade
education is all that should be provided for
blacks. Ida B Wells opines that: “Industrial
education for the Negro is Booker T
Washington’s hobby. He believes that for the
masses of the Negro race an elementary
education of the brain and a continuation of
education for the hand is not only the best
kind of education, but he knows it is the most
popular with the white South.
He knows also that the Negro is the butt of ridicule with the average white American,” who
always enjoys a “joke that portrays the Negro as illiterate and improvident; a petty thief or a
happy-go-lucky inferior.”

Ida B Wells may be exaggerating when she
says that “some will say Mr Washington
represents the masses and seeks to depict
the life and needs of the black belt. There is
a feeling that he does not do that when he
will tell a cultured body of women like the
Chicago Women’s Club the following story:
‘Well, John, I am glad to see you are raising
your ow hogs.’
‘Yessir, Mr Washington, ebber sence you
done tole us bout raisin our own hogs, we
niggers round here hab resolved to quit
stealing hogs ad gwinter raise our own.’” To
be sure you do not miss the point of the
joke, she adds, “The inference is the
Negroes of the black belt were hog thieves
until the coming of Tuskegee.”

As we discussed in our video on Booker T Washington, there will always be a necessary tension
between the schools of the accommodationist Booker T Washington and the activist WEB DuBois,
and Ida B Wells necessarily was solidly in the activist camp. Washington in his autobiography does
indeed condemn lynchings and supports black suffrage, but you also can find quotes by him
elsewhere on these sensitive topics that are embarrassingly accommodating. The problem was
that when he founded Tuskegee the only job blacks with a liberal education could find were as
teachers or Pullman Railroad Porters, and the only other jobs whites would entrust to blacks
were in agriculture or in the trades. From the very beginning his schools were heavily dependent
on giving from white philanthropists, including many robber barons seeking to redeem
themselves through their charity, and Booker T Washington was really a salesmen, spending
decades patiently calling on these wealthy individual year after year after year coaxing their
donations. If Booker T Washington had shifted gears towards activism later in his life, and he lived
into his nineties, these spigots of cash would have quickly turned off.
MORE GRUESOME, GORY, GRISLY LYNCHINGS

Ida B Wells tells of an especially
brutal lynching where the black Sam
Hose was accused of murdering his
boss and assaulting his wife. There
was no trial. As she reports, “a white
man had been killed and a white
woman was said to have been
assaulted. That was enough. When
Hose was found he had to die.”

The newspaper offered a five-hundred-dollar
reward for his capture. Ida B Wells reports, “After
he had been apprehended, it was publicly
announced that he would be burned alive.
Excursion trains were run, and bulletins were put
up in the small towns.”
“Many fair ladies drove out in their carriages to
witness the torture and burning of this human
being. Sam Hose’s ears were cut off, then his toes
and fingers, and passed round to the crowd. His
eyes were put out, his tongue torn out and flesh
cut in strips with knives. Finally, they poured coal
oil on him and burned him to death.”

HOW BLACK ENFRANCHISMENT PREVENTS
LYNCHINGS
Ida B Wells has more research and stories to press
home the fact that black enfranchisement would be
the only enduring solution to the problem of
lynching and racial violence, that even when blacks
have a small minority of public offices, this is enough
to at least publicize any acts of barbarity and cruelty.

Ida B Wells explains, “With no sacredness of the ballot
there can be no sacredness of human life itself. For if the
strong can take the weak man’s ballot, when it suits his
purpose to do so, he will take his life also. Having
successfully swept aside the constitutional safeguards to
the ballot, it is the smallest of matters for the South to
sweep aside its own safeguards to human life. Thus ‘trial
by jury’ for the black man has become a mockery, a
plaything of the ruling classes and rabble alike. The mob
says, ‘This people has no vote with which to punish us or
the consenting officers of the law, therefore we indulge
our brutal instincts, give free rein to race prejudice and
lynch, hang, burn them when we please.’ Therefore, the
more complete the disenfranchisement, the more
frequent and horrible have been the hangings, shootings,
and burnings.”

MORE GRUESOME, GORY, GRISLY LYNCHINGS
Ida B Wells has a section where she retells
many tales of how lynched Negroes were
burned alive. She reports that “in 1891 Ed
Coy was burned to death in Texarkana,
Arkansas. He was charged with assaulting a
white woman, and after the mob had tied
him to a tree, the men and boys amused
themselves for some time sticking knives into
Coy’s body and slicing off pieces of flesh.
When they had amused themselves
sufficiently, they poured coal oil over him and
the woman in the case set fire to him. It was
said that fifteen thousand people stood by
and watched him burn. This was on a Sunday
night, and press reports told how the people
looked on while the Negro burned to death.”
1893 lynching of
black teenager
Henry Smith in
Paris, Texas
The lynching of
Will James in
Cairo, Illinois, on
November 11,
1909. Thousands
watched the
lynching.

Ida B Wells also reports that “in July
1893, in Bardwell, KY, CJ Miller was
burnt to ashes. Since his death this
man has been found to be
absolutely innocent of the murder
of the two white girls with which he
was charged. But the mob would
wait for no justification. They
insisted that, as they were not sure
he was the right man, they would
compromise the matter by hanging
him instead of burning. Not to be
outdone, they took the body down
and made a huge bonfire out of it.”
A scene from the 1915 movie, The Birth of a Nation, showing an
African-American character, Gus (played by white actor Walter
Long, in blackface), about to be killed by the Ku Klux Klan

RACE RIOTS
The number of lynchings did gradually decrease over the years, perhaps
partially as a result of the bright lights of constant publicity shone on this
evil. During World War I many black men volunteered to serve in the
military, and when they returned home, they expected progress in
improving their civil rights, progress that was not forthcoming in a
Wilson administration that had deeply racist attitudes. Perhaps
individual lynchings declined since these returning black veterans were
not only armed but knew how to use their arms. Instead, the white rage
erupted in many race riots where the colored sections of many cities
were burned down, with again no justice for the black man.

-
Ida B Wells reports, “A peaceful law-abiding
hard-working group of about two hundred
blacks gathered in their church at Hoop Spur,
Alabama, to attend a lodge meeting” in the
year 1919. “Suddenly at 11 PM, without
warning, a volley of shots are fired into this
free assembly. The lights go out and those
who are not killed or wounded get away as
quickly as possible. One white man, WA
Adkins, is killed out in front of this church,
whether by the men he is with or the guards
out front will probably never be known.”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 1922
-
“No one knows how many of these
peaceable unoffending Negroes were killed
by this volley as the person who did this
dastardly deed burned the church down
the next day so no bullet holes in walls,
broken windows or dead bodies of Negroes
would show the conspiracy of whites to kill
black people.”
“It is because that one white man was
killed in front of the Negro church that
night that a dozen Negroes are in the
Arkansas penitentiary condemned to die.”

Ida B Wells reported that the cotton crop had been brought in, some of
the share-cropping Negroes did not want to be cheated, they were
negotiating too sharply to maximize their fair share of the crop. With the
men in prison the mobs descended on their family’s houses, with
nobody to protect them, their wives and children were driven out, all
their clothing and possessions were seized, and they were both
husbandless and homeless, depending on public charity. This story goes
on for fifteen pages.
We reviewed a very similar story in our video on the story in the 1619
Project, where a black man was murdered, the family business, home,
and savings were stolen from his widow, and his family was forced to
flee, simply because his business had become too successful, which
meant he had become too uppity, in the words of local whites.

Sharecroppers
on the
roadside after
eviction (1936)

Ida B Wells also reports on the East St Louis, Illinois, 1917 race
riot that raged for a full day. More than a hundred Negroes were
killed, thousands were driven from their homes, more than sixty
Negro homes were burned, with half a million dollars in fire
damages. Rather than putting down the riot, whites in the
National Guard and the police department participated in the
riot, sparking a Congressional investigation into this horrible
event. She describes the events with multiple eyewitness that go
on for forty ugly pages of evil callousness and uncaring cruelties
against the blacks of the city.

Left: Political cartoon about the East St. Louis riots of
1917. Original caption reads "Mr. President, why not
make America safe for democracy?“
Below: Fire during St Louis Race Riot

GATOR BAITING WITH YOUNG BLACK TODDLERS
Lynching was all too common, but how about gator baiting? Was gator baiting a real
thing? Gator baiting is when white hunters hunting gators use black toddlers as bait,
tying them to a log near a swamp full of gators, and if they fuss and cry, so much the
better, because such a ruckus will attract the gators much quicker. Dr Wikipedia says
that “although scattered references to the supposed practice of gator baiting
appeared in early 20th-century newspapers, there is no credible evidence that the
stereotype reflected an actual historical practice,” but if you click on the footnote
for the Scopes article, Snopes does reference credible evidence that gator baiting
was a real thing, or at least was widely discussed, as we have postcards with little
black babies with grinning gators. We all hope that this would happen rarely, what a
horrible thought! We know that lynchings and murders of blacks were rarely
prosecuted and tried, but we would hope that the rare Southern sheriff and jury
would provide justice in a gator baiting case.

Snopes even has a copy of a grotesque lullaby written to sing babies to
sleep, and the title of lullaby is Mamy’s Little Alligator Bait!!!
Which starts out:
Hush-baby, don’t yo’ cry,
mammy’s little piccaninny’s gwine to get a present mighty soon.
And ends with:
Go to sleep, don’t yo’ peep,
listen to me tell yo’,
yo’s mammy little alligator bait.
How is a baby supposed to go to sleep thinking about how they is going
to become alligator bait? This shows how callous whites were to blacks.

Hush-baby, don’t yo’ cry,
mammy’s little piccaninny’s gwine to get
a present mighty soon,
When de stars am a-peepin’ and de
moon it am a-creepin’
den yo’ mammy’s gwine to sing ‘dis tune,
Shut yo’ eye bye and bye,
mam will whip yo’ if yo’ cry,
Someone am a-comin’ thro’ de gate;
Go to sleep, don’t yo’ peep,
listen to me tell yo’,
yo’s mammy little alligator bait.

US CONGRESS FAILS TO PASS ANTI-LYNCHING BILL
We will conclude with this section from our video/blog on how the
Nazi lawyers found precedents for drafting the Nuremberg Jewish
Race Laws from the Jim Crow segregation codes in the Deep South
before the Civil Rights era.
Mine eyes were opened when I first read about the history of the
defeat of the anti-lynching bill in 1938. Eleanor Roosevelt and the
black leaders were pushing FDR and Congress to pass the anti-lynching
bill when the entire world was witnessing the horrors of the Nazi
persecutions of the Jews.

FDR was sympathetic, he explained to a
colleague that “the southerners by reason
of the seniority rule in Congress are
chairmen of the key Congressional
committees. If I come out for the anti-
lynching bill, they will block every bill I ask
Congress to pass to keep America from
collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.” So,
FDR had a choice, he could fight the
Nazis, or he could fight lynching, but he
could not do both. And, defeating the
Nazis was an attainable goal.
FDR signing the declaration of war
against Germany, 1941

Eleanor persisted in public
speeches and her newspaper
column in support of the anti-
lynching campaign, constantly
badgering her husband. Once she
asked FDR, “Do you mind if I say
what I think?” FDR replied, “You
can say anything you like. I can
always say, ‘Well, that is my wife;
I can’t do anything about her.’”
This supposed conflict was a
good political way to push for
civil rights without unduly
antagonizing the powerful Deep
South Senators and
Congressmen.

What is distressing about this history was that the bill was not
against lynching itself, but it put legal pressure on Southern
judges and policemen to enforce the law and punish those
who were guilty of lynching, instead of just ignoring the crime.

SOURCES:
Our main source is this excellent compilation of the writings of Ida B
Wells, plus some good biographical information in the introductions in
the beginning of the book and starting each chapter. Her writing style is
similar to the style of Frederick Douglass, she can be rather long-winded
but is also very eloquent, and very thorough in her reporting.

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Ida B Wells, Journalist Who Exposed Horrors of Lynching

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