Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells

CRUSADE FOR JUSTICE

Ida B. Wells at the age of sixty-eight (1930). Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Ida B. Wells, journalist and civil rights activist. New York Public Library Digital Collections.

CRUSADE FOR JUSTICE

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF IDA B. WELLS

Edited by Alfreda M. Duster

New Foreword by Eve L. Ewing

New Afterword by Michelle Duster

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1970, 2020 by The University of Chicago

Foreword © 2020 by Eve L. Ewing

Afterword © 2020 by Michelle Duster

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Originally published 1970 in a series edited by John Hope Franklin

Second edition 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69142-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69156-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226691565.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1862–1931, author. | Duster, Alfreda M., 1904–1983, editor. | Ewing, Eve L., writer of foreword. | Duster, Michelle, writer of afterword.

Title: Crusade for justice : the autobiography of Ida B. Wells / edited by Alfreda M. Duster ; with a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing and a new afterword by Michelle Duster.

Description: Second edition. | Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019039068 | ISBN 9780226691428 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226691565 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1862–1931. | African American women—Biography.

Classification: LCC E185.97.B26 A3 2020 | DDC 323.092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039068

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Foreword by Eve L. Ewing

Foreword to the 1970 Edition by John Hope Franklin

Introduction by Alfreda M. Duster

Preface

1   Born into Slavery

2   Hard Beginnings

3   New Opportunities

4   Iola

5   The Free Speech Days

6   Lynching at the Curve

7   Leaving Memphis Behind

8   At the Hands of a Mob

9   To Tell the Truth Freely

10   The Homesick Exile

11   Light from the Human Torch

12   Through England and Scotland

13   Breaking the Silent Indifference

14   An Indiscreet Letter

15   Final Days in London

16   To the Seeker of Truth

17   Inter-Ocean Letters

18   In Liverpool

19   In Manchester

20   In Bristol

21   Newcastle Notes

22   Memories of London

23   You Can’t Change the Record

24   Last Days in Britain

25   A Regrettable Interview

26   Remembering English Friends

27   Susan B. Anthony

28   Ungentlemanly and Unchristian

29   Satin and Orange Blossoms

30   A Divided Duty

31   Again in the Public Eye

32   New Projects

33   Club Life and Politics

34   A Negro Theater

35   Negro Fellowship League

36   Illinois Lynchings

37   NAACP

38   Steve Green and Chicken Joe Campbell

39   Seeking the Negro Vote

40   Protest to the Governor

41   World War I and the Negro Soldiers

42   The Equal Rights League

43   East Saint Louis Riot

44   Arkansas Riot

45   The Tide of Hatred

46   The Price of Liberty

Afterword by Michelle Duster

Footnotes

Bibliography

Index

Campaign card (5.7 × 10.4 cm) of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Support for her candidacy is requested as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri (June 1928). Courtesy University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.

FOREWORD

EVE L. EWING

I suspect many readers may come to this book seeking something it cannot readily give. It remains unfinished, ending abruptly midnarrative. At its conclusion, Wells is in the midst of a complicated account involving fundraising by the American Citizenship Federation, an invitation for Robert Sengstacke Abbott (the famous publisher of the Chicago Defender) to dine at the Drake Hotel, and the invitation’s withdrawal for fear hotel staff would discriminate against him. The book’s final sentences read, "In a few days an item appeared in the Tribune stating that the two-million-dollar drive had been called off. I also received some beautiful letters from members of the board of directors thanking us for calling attention to what was go . . . ," and there it ends. Midstory, midsentence, midword. What could be more maddening? A century beyond the era of Ida B. Wells, we who so admire her, who so aspire to her legacy of politically transformative writing and organizing, are left grasping for something she wasn’t able to give us. In the corpus of memoirs and autobiographies left behind by luminaries of her caliber, this one stands apart. Largely missing are general observations about what constitutes a good life, admonitions about where and how to direct our energies toward achieving social change, and grandiose statements about the nature of blackness, or of womanhood, or of the American democratic project.

Instead, fittingly, Ida B. Wells has given us a record of her work. Indeed, the above passage about the Drake Hotel incident is typical. This is a woman who changed the world through meticulous fact-finding, who often established a record where there was none, using careful documentation when others were satisfied with hearsay or outright lies. Her autobiography is no different. Chapter by chapter, she spells out in detail all the messy facts that others would just as soon omit. Much of the book is dedicated to her travels throughout the United Kingdom:

I spoke in Pembroke Chapel the first Sunday night of my stay in Liverpool. The pastor of the church, Rev. C. F. Aked, presided. Last Sunday afternoon to an audience of fifteen hundred men in the Congregational church. Sunday night at the Unitarian church, Rev. R. A. Armstrong presided. The Lord Mayor of Liverpool is a member of this congregation and consented to preside at my meeting but was prevented at the last minute from doing so.

Roughly 140 pages of Crusade for Justice are filled with these details—the name of the meeting, the name of the city, the train she took to get there, the people who were the hosts, the newspaper that reported the convening, the discord or unplanned adjustments. For the reader eager to learn more about Ida B. Wells, legendary anti-lynching advocate, revolutionary, and iconic champion of justice, these lengthy accounts may be discouraging. But this is the book Wells set out to write. In the preface she tells of meeting a young woman who asked about her work and of realizing there was no record from which she could inform herself. I then promised to set it down in writing so those of her generation could know how the agitation against the lynching evil began, and the debt of gratitude we owe to the English people for their splendid help in that movement.

In the very minutiae of her narrative, Wells is teaching us something necessary yet easily forgotten about the work of social change. A project of this magnitude—battling against the frequent extrajudicial killing of Black people and the widespread casual view of such murder as socially acceptable—requires more than platitudes and easy pronouncements about hope. It is as mundane as it is taxing. It involves endless train rides alone to places where you are not wanted, figuring out how to breast-feed your child in a back room of a conference (I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches), and navigating the petty disputes and flaws of the people who are supposed to be your allies.

Rarely is this the story of political history we receive; our understanding overflows with larger-than-life tales of monumental men who, we are left to assume, changed the course of human civilization through sheer willpower. This book is not that. This is a book about a woman who sometimes did not have child care, who went on the road when she would rather have stayed home, who constantly fretted over fundraising, who sometimes offended people and sometimes was offended, who got seasick, who was told she would be nominated for a committee only to find out that W. E. B. Du Bois had removed her name from the roll without bothering to consult anyone. Ida B. Wells was a muckraker, and this is part of the muck.

Certainly, if we make our way between the dates and the dispatches, the trappings of a more orthodox autobiography are there. And there is so much that was remarkable about Ida B. Wells. More than a decade before Plessy v. Ferguson, she refused to move from a Whites-only train car, bit the conductor’s hand when he tried to forcibly remove her, and subsequently sued the railroad—a case that went to the state supreme court. She was a public intellectual by calling, beginning her work as an editor because she had an instinctive feeling that the people who had little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way. At a time when the YMCA and the settlement house movement failed to serve Black people, especially those newly arrived in Chicago from the South during the Great Migration, she cofounded a reading room and social center where newcomers could find employment; get counseling, clothes, and housing assistance; and have a safe place to read and to establish social networks.

The anti-lynching work for which Wells is most famous was hardly an abstract exercise. She was personally traumatized by the same violent White supremacist fervor that motivated her writing. In 1892 the lynching of a Black grocery store owner and his two employees stunned the people of Memphis. In response the Free Speech, the newspaper Wells co-owned, urged Black people to flee Memphis, a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons. Wells wrote missives encouraging Black residents to move west or, if they remained, to stop spending money in the city and to stop riding the streetcars.

For this Wells faced threats against her own life. While she was away from home, a mob destroyed the office of the Free Speech and ruined all the newspaper’s equipment, driving her business partner out of town. A warning appeared in the local White newspaper that anyone trying to publish the paper again [would] be punished with death. Wells’s loved ones wrote to alert her that her home was being watched by men who had pledged to kill her the moment she returned. Wells determined to carry on with as much vigor as ever. They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth. I felt that I owed it to myself and my race to tell the whole truth.

It was this principle that guided her in the years to come, even when telling less than the whole truth would have been safer and more convenient. Wells was critical of the widely beloved White Christian leaders of the temperance movement, considered moral exemplars in their time, because of what she saw as their approval of lynching and their claims that the practice was a reasonable response to the sexual threat that Black men posed to White women. During the fervor over the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, she worked with Frederick Douglass to publish a pamphlet criticizing the fair’s exclusion of Black Americans and circulated ten thousand copies to fair attendees from around the globe. She chastised Booker T. Washington for telling chicken-stealing stories on his own people in order to amuse his audiences and get money for Tuskegee. She directly questioned Susan B. Anthony’s tactic of excluding Black women from the suffrage movement in order to appease White southerners.

This dedication to telling the truth earned Wells plenty of challenges. One rival editor sent investigators to every town across the South where Wells had lived seeking information that could be used to disparage her character. She was publicly censured for choosing to marry, which was seen as a tacit abandonment of her work. Like many Black women who came before her and who have come since, she seemed so capable and so exceptional that those around her had no qualms about expecting superhuman feats from a very human person. In 1909 a Black man was brutally lynched in Cairo, Illinois—hanged, shot more than five hundred times, dragged through the streets for the amusement of onlookers, decapitated, and burned. Wells, by then the mother of four young children, at first refused to go and investigate. Her ten-year-old son awakened her in the middle of the night, saying her husband wanted her to get on the train. Mother, he said, if you don’t go nobody else will. Wells traveled to Cairo, unearthed the details of the incident, and appeared before the governor as the official representative of all the black people of Illinois to argue that the sheriff who permitted the gruesome event to happen should not be reinstated. She spoke against the sheriff’s attorney, who was a state senator, and stood toe-to-toe with the state’s attorney. With no formal legal training, she won the case.

Despite all this, when Wells was hospitalized and bedridden for several weeks in 1920, she felt dissatisfied when reflecting on her life. All at once the realization came to me that I had nothing to show for all those years of toil and labor. It is sobering to read this from someone who, by any imaginable measure, had accomplished a stunning amount in her life, not only for herself but for her people. And yet her sentiment is understandable. Generations after the passing of Ida B. Wells, her battle continues. We still fight in defense of Black people’s basic humanity, our right to a fair application of the laws of the land, and our right to not be brutally murdered in public. In light of this continued struggle, maybe we don’t need more moving oratory or another inspirational fable about mythological people. Maybe we just need the whole truth.

The Wells-Barnett family just before Ferdinand L. Barnett Jr. left for overseas duty in World War I. Standing: Hulette D. Barnett (wife of Albert G. Barnett), Herman Kohlsaat Barnett, Ferdinand L. Barnett, Jr., Ida B. Barnett, Charles Aked Barnett, Alfreda M. Barnett, and Albert G. Barnett; seated: Ferdinand L. Barnett Sr. (husband of Ida B. Wells), Beatrice Barnett, Audrey Barnett, Ida B. Wells-Barnett; foreground: Hulette E. Barnett, Florence B. Barnett. Ferdinand L. Barnett’s children from a previous marriage are Ferdinand Jr. and Albert. The children of Ferdinand Barnett and Ida B. Wells are Herman, Ida B. Barnett, Charles, and Alfreda. The four little girls are the children of Albert and Hulette Barnett (1917). Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.

FOREWORD TO THE 1970 EDITION

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

John Hope Franklin (1915–2009) was the James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University and the author of many books, including From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Racial Inequality in America, and Reconstruction after the Civil War. From 1967 until 1978, he edited a series of African American biographies in which this was originally published.

For more than forty years, Ida B. Wells was one of the most fearless and one of the most respected women in the United States. She was also one of the most articulate. Few defects in American society escaped her notice and her outrage. Among the things she fought were the racial discrimination at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, disfranchisement based on race, discrimination in employment, and segregation on public carriers. She was one of the first persons to bring legal action against a railroad because of discrimination. She was perhaps the first person to recite the horrors of lynching in lurid detail. By the written and spoken word, she laid bare the barbarism and inhumanity of the rope and faggot. Through her visits she became nearly as well known in England as she was in the United States, for she was determined that the entire world should know her native land for what it really was.

If Ida B. Wells spent much of her time fighting the evil aspects of human relations, she worked equally hard in the effort to devise means to improve the lot of her fellows. She was one of the group that conceived and organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was a leader in the club movement among Negro women. For many years she maintained almost single-handedly a facility in Chicago where a variety of young people’s organizations could meet under favorable conditions and auspices. She was in the forefront in promoting political activity among Negroes; and on one occasion she ran for public office herself.

Her zeal and energy were matched by her uncompromising and unequivocal stand on every cause that she espoused. She did not hesitate to criticize southern whites, even before she left the South, or northern white liberals, or members of her own race when she was convinced that their positions were not in the best interests of all mankind. She did not hesitate to go to the scene of racial disturbances, including riots and lynchings, in order to get an accurate picture of what actually occurred. She did not hesitate to summon to the cause of human dignity anybody and everybody whom she believed could serve that cause.

In this autobiography she tells her story simply, but engagingly. In it one learns of her private life as well as her public activities. There is the task of caring for a growing family while continuing to serve the public in many ways. There is the problem of trying to develop leadership that will not destroy itself by petty bickering. There is the exciting opportunity to serve as correspondent for a big-city newspaper without compromising her outspoken position on the problems that she discusses. Few documents written by an American woman approach this one either in importance or interest.

The autobiography has been carefully edited by Alfreda B. Duster, the daughter of Ida B. Wells. Although her interest in the subject is understandably deep and her knowledge of the things about which her mother writes is great, Mrs. Duster has not intruded herself into the story that is, after all, the story of Ida B. Wells. She has accurately perceived her role as an understanding and sympathetic editor, scrupulously avoiding the pitfalls of filial subjectivity.

INTRODUCTION

ALFREDA M. DUSTER

God has raised up a modern Deborah in the person of Miss Ida B. Wells, whose voice has been heard throughout England and the United States . . . pleading as only she can plead for justice and fair treatment to be given her long-suffering and unhappy people. . . . We believe that God delivered her from being lynched at Memphis, that by her portrayal of the burnings at Paris, Texas, Texarkana, Arkansas, and elsewhere she might light a flame of righteous indignation in England and America which, by God’s grace, will never be extinguished until a Negro’s life is as safe in Mississippi and Tennessee as in Massachusetts or Rhode Island.¹

This statement by Norman B. Wood in 1897 was not an unusual description of this fiery reformer, feminist, and race leader during her lifetime and after her death. In newspapers, magazines, journals, and books of the period from 1890 to 1931, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was described over and over again as militant, courageous, determined, impassioned, and aggressive. These were uncommon terms for a person who was born to slave parents—and who was herself born a slave—in the hilly little town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Her mother was a deeply religious woman whose convictions about the essential dignity of man developed under the cruelties of slavery. Her father, a man of independent spirit even in slavery, sought and attained his full independence in the period following emancipation. These qualities of her parents fused to add fire and zeal to the character of Ida Wells.

Holly Springs had progressed from a small cotton plantation community of the 1830s until by the time of the Civil War it was described as a small architectural paradise. An iron foundry and the main office of the Mississippi Central Railroad made it a much desired location. Although little fighting took place there during the Civil War, the town changed hands many times. During one period of Union possession, Confederate forces under the command of General Earl Van Dorn rode into town, met with little resistance from the surprised Northerners, and burned and destroyed the business section of town as well as the armory and all federal supplies. Many fine homes were also burned or used by soldiers and wrecked after occupation.²

In this relatively peaceful small town, Ida grew up, living in the home built and owned by her father, with the duties and responsibilities of the eldest daughter of a family of eight children. Her father was a skilled carpenter and had plenty of work rebuilding homes, industrial plants, and government buildings destroyed during the hostilities. He was a man of considerable ability and much civic concern, and was selected as a member of the first board of trustees of Rust College.

Rust, originally named Shaw University, was founded in 1866 by Rev. A. C. McDonald, a minister from the North, who served as its first president.³ In the early days, Rust College provided instruction at all levels and grades, including the basic elementary subjects. Among the more enlightened portion of the white community in Holly Springs there was support for this college, as was evidenced by the annual report for 1875:

However hostile to the education of the Freedmen the whites may be elsewhere in the South, here both teachers and pupils are respected and encouraged by the most influential of them. One of the first men of this place, an ex-slave holder, has voluntarily taken it upon himself to raise means for us among his people.⁴

Both of Ida’s parents stressed the importance of securing an education, and at Rust she had the guidance and instruction of dedicated missionaries and teachers who came to Holly Springs to assist the freedmen. Ida attended Rust all during her childhood and was regarded as an exceedingly apt pupil. On Sundays her religious parents would permit only the Bible to be read, so Ida read the Bible over and over again.

In 1878 a terrible epidemic of yellow fever struck Holly Springs. Two thousand of the town’s population of 3,500 fled; most of those who remained contracted the disease, and 304 died.⁵ Both of Ida’s parents and their youngest child, Stanley, ten months of age, died in this epidemic. Another child, Eddie, had died a few years earlier, and Eugenia, the sister next to Ida, died a few years later. Although friends, neighbors, and other well-wishers offered to take some of the children, Ida, at sixteen, was steadfastly determined to keep the family together. Her father had left some money, and with the help of the Masons, who were guardians, she cared for all of them.

After passing the teacher’s examination, Ida was assigned to a one-room school in the rural district about six miles from Holly Springs. As her brothers Jim and George grew into their late teens, they were apprenticed to carpenters and learned the trade of their father, which they followed all their lives.

About 1882 or 1883, an aunt, Fannie Butler, sister of Ida’s father, who lived in Memphis, Tennessee, some forty miles away, suggested to Ida that she move to Memphis and seek a teaching position there. Mrs. Butler, widowed in the epidemic of 1878, offered to care for Ida’s younger sisters, who were near the age of her own daughter. Ida accepted and at first taught in the rural schools of Shelby County while she studied for the teacher’s examination for the city schools of Memphis.

In May 1884, as Ida was on the way to her school in Woodstock, Tennessee, the conductor on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad told her she would have to ride in the smoking car. She refused. When the conductor and baggage man attempted to force her to ride in the other coach, she got off the train at the next stop, returned to Memphis, and sued the railroad. The case attracted much attention because whereas the law stated that accommodations should be separate—but equal—railroad personnel had insisted that all Negroes ride in the smoking car, which was not a first-class coach. In December 1884, the local court returned a verdict in favor of Ida Wells and awarded her five hundred dollars in damages.⁶ The railroad appealed the case.

Ida did not give up her resistance to the railroad’s policy of forcing Negroes to ride in the separate but unequal coaches. In her diary she wrote about going with three friends on one of the educational excursions for teachers: Of course we had the usual trouble about the first class coach, but we conquered.⁷

The victory was short, however, for on 5 April 1887 the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed the decision of the lower court.⁸ At the time she wrote:

The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court in my behalf, last week. Went to see Judge G [Greer, her lawyer] this afternoon and he tells me that four of them [the judges] cast their personal prejudices in the scale of justice and decided in face of all the evidence to the contrary that the smoking car was a first class coach for colored people as provided for by that statute that calls for separate coaches but first class, for the races. I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them. O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us? Thou hast always fought the battles of the weak and oppressed. Come to my aid at this moment and teach me what to do, for I am sorely, bitterly disappointed. Show us the way, even as Thou led the children of Israel out of bondage into the promised land.⁹

By the fall of 1884 Ida had passed the qualifying examination and been assigned as a teacher in the Memphis city schools, where she taught for seven years. During these years, she was regarded as a competent and conscientious teacher, devoted to helping young Negroes acquire what she knew was crucially necessary for their future—a good education. She took advantage of every opportunity to improve her own academic skills with private lessons from older teachers and those skilled in elocution and dramatics. She attended summer sessions at Fisk University and traveled on excursions for teachers to places of interest and value.

Outside the classroom Ida was a serious young woman, scorning frivolities and contemptuous of the wiles that other young women used to attract men. At this time in her life, she has been described as a very beautiful young woman.¹⁰ Her refined and ladylike appearance did not suggest that she was destined to defy mobs and become a vigorous crusader against the injustices that beset the Negro people in the post-Reconstruction days in the South. She had many admirers and enjoyed going to concerts, plays, lectures, church meetings, and social affairs. In the days when Sunday afternoons were social hours, many young suitors called on her and took her for walks or rides. She was called hard-hearted and incapable of loving anyone, but this was a facade; underneath she longed for the true love of a man she could respect and admire.

In 1887 she began writing for a church paper, using the story of her suit against the railroad and its results as her first article. Soon her articles spread to other church papers and then to some of the Negro weeklies. Thus she discovered her journalistic abilities, and when she was offered an interest in and the editorship of a small newspaper in Memphis, the Free Speech and Headlight, she accepted and invested her savings to become part owner. It is not surprising that her articles criticizing the Memphis Board of Education for conditions in separate colored schools led to her dismissal as a teacher in 1891.

Dismayed but undaunted, she worked diligently on the paper. She shortened its name to the Free Speech, and was enjoying her work and travels for the paper when, on 9 March 1892, three young Negro businessmen were lynched in Memphis. She turned her scathing pen on the lynchers and on the white population of the city who allowed and condoned such a lynching. An angry mob wrecked her press and declared that they would have lynched her if she had been found. She had gone to Philadelphia to cover a convention for her paper and was warned not to return. But her pen would not be silenced. She continued her efforts for the cause in the New York Age, where she bitterly railed against the evil of lynching. It was about this time that she began to lecture in the Northeast. Through this activity she received an invitation to tell the story in England, Scotland, and Wales. She spent April and May of 1893 in this first crusade abroad.

While informing the English people about lynching in America, Ida B. Wells learned of the progressive activities of English women, and she was very much impressed with their civic groups. When she returned to the United States, she emphasized the activities of British women to her New England audiences. She urged her female listeners to become more active in the affairs of their community, city, and nation, and to do these things through organized civic clubs. The idea found favorable response and thus the first civic club among Negro women, the Women’s Era Club, was organized in Boston, Massachusetts, with Mrs. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin as president. Miss Wells organized other clubs in New England, and in Chicago she organized the first civic club among Chicago’s Negro women. When she returned to England on her second speaking tour, the Chicago group obtained a charter and named the club in honor of Ida B. Wells.

In 1893 she turned from the problem of lynching to the slight that Negroes had received at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Petition after petition for participation in this Chicago World’s Fair had been made by individual Negroes and by groups, but all had been denied. Consequently, during July 1893, in conjunction with Frederick Douglass, Ferdinand L. Barnett, and I. Garland Penn, she produced an eighty-one-page booklet: The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition—The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature. The preface stated:

To The Seeker After Truth:

Columbia has bidden the civilized world to join with her in celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, and the invitation has been accepted. At Jackson Park are displayed exhibits of her natural resources, and her progress in the arts and sciences, but that which would best illustrate her moral grandeur has been ignored.

The exhibit of the progress made by a race in 25 years of freedom as against 250 years of slavery would have been the greatest tribute to the greatness and progressiveness of American institutions which could have been shown to the world. The colored people of this great Republic number eight millions—more than one-tenth of the whole population of the United States. They were among the earliest settlers of this continent, landing at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 in a slave ship, before the Puritans, who landed at Plymouth in 1620. They have contributed a large share to American prosperity and civilization. The labor of one-half of this country has always been, and is still being done by them. The first credit this country had in its commerce with foreign nations was created by productions resulting from their labor. The wealth created by their industry has afforded to the white people of this country the leisure essential to their great progress in education, art, science, industry and invention.¹¹

In 1894 Ida B. Wells made a second journey and crusade through England. During this tour of six months, the Chicago Inter-Ocean regularly published her articles in a column entitled Ida B. Wells Abroad. Her lectures were well received in England, where the press and pulpit gave enthusiastic support to her pleas. An Anti-Lynching Committee was organized which consisted of some of the foremost citizens of Great Britain.

Returning to America in July 1894, she continued the crusade by lecturing throughout the North and organizing anti-lynching committees wherever possible. She took up residence in Chicago and in 1895 published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894. In the first chapter, The Case Stated, she wrote:

The student of American sociology will find the year 1894 marked by a pronounced awakening of the public conscience to a system of anarchy and outlawry which had grown during a series of ten years to be so common, that scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments of the people of our land.

It becomes the painful duty of the Negro to reproduce a record which shows that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone murder and defy the contempt of civilization.

These pages are written in no spirit of vindictiveness, for all who give the subject of lynching consideration must concede that far too serious is the condition of that civilized government in which the spirit of unrestrained outlawry constantly increases in violence, and casts its blight over a continually growing area of territory. We plead not for the colored people alone, but for all victims of the terrible injustice which puts men and women to death without form of law. During the year 1894, there were 132 persons executed in the United States by due form of law, while in the same year, 197 persons were put to death by mobs who gave the victims no opportunity to make a lawful defense. No comment need be made upon a condition of public sentiment responsible for such alarming results.

The purpose of the pages which follow shall be to give the record which has been made, not by colored men, but that which is the result of compilations made by white men of the South. Out of their own mouths shall the murderers be condemned. For a number of years the Chicago Tribune, admittedly one of the leading journals of America, has made a specialty of compilation of statistics touching upon lynching. The data compiled by that journal and published to the world January 1st, 1894, up to the present time has not been disputed. In order to be safe from the charge of exaggeration, the incidents hereinafter reported have been confined to those vouched for by the Tribune.¹²

A booklet of one hundred pages, the Red Record was not only the statistical record of lynchings in the United States, but a detailed history of the lynching of Negroes—and others—since the Emancipation Proclamation. Her alarm over the growth of mob violence had prompted her to appeal to world opinion. In her crusades in the United States and Great Britain and in her writings, she hoped to eradicate this form of barbarism.

The decision to make Chicago her home was influenced by a romantic interest in Ferdinand Lee Barnett, founder of the Conservator, the first Negro newspaper in Chicago. Mr. Barnett was a graduate of the law school which later became affiliated with Northwestern University. Years later, Langston Hughes recorded the marriage and noted the mutual interests of the Barnetts as follows:

In 1895 Ida B. Wells married another crusader, a Chicago newspaper man, Ferdinand L. Barnett, and together they continued their campaign for equal rights for Negro Americans. They broadened their field of their activities, too, to include every social problem of importance in the Windy City where they lived.¹³

Attorney Barnett was a widower. His first wife, Molly Graham Barnett, died when their children, Ferdinand L. Barnett, Jr., and Albert Graham Barnett were four years and two years of age. Barnett’s mother had lived with him and cared for the boys during the seven years before his marriage to Ida B. Wells. Four children were born to this union. Charles Aked, born in 1896, was named for one of the leaders of the anti-lynching crusade in England, the Rev. Charles F. Aked. Herman Kohlsaat, born in 1897, was named for H. H. Kohlsaat, a famous restaurateur and one of the strongest supporters of the Barnetts’ civic activities and their newspaper the Conservator. Ida B. Wells, Jr., was born in 1901, and Alfreda M. was born in 1904.

After the birth of their second son in 1897, Ida B. Wells-Barnett gave up the newspaper and devoted herself to the tasks of homemaker and mother. She firmly believed in the importance of the presence of a mother in the home during her children’s formative years. She did not take any work outside the home until the youngest child was eight years old and able to attend school alone. Even then, she arranged for her daughters to spend the noon hour at home under the watchful guidance of a cousin.

She was a kind and loving parent, but firm and strict. She impressed upon her children their responsibilities, one of the most important being good conduct in her absence. There was never any need to be concerned when she was present. She did not have to speak; her look was enough to bring under control any mischievous youngster.

Both parents emphasized education for their children. Ferdinand, Jr., was graduated from Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology). Albert G. graduated from Kent College of Law, and in his later life was city editor of the Chicago Defender. Charles Aked was a student at Wendell Phillips High School when an altercation with one of the teachers caused him to quit school. He left home and secured a job as a chauffeur in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Later he had his own printing business and worked as printer and layout specialist for other printing firms. Herman became his father’s associate in the law firm of Barnett & Barnett. In the Depression days he left Chicago, went West, and served in the California State Employment Service until retirement. Ida was her father’s secretary and companion until his death in 1936. Alfreda received the Ph.B. degree from the University of Chicago in 1924, was active in parent-teacher associations, social and civic organizations, and was on the staff of the Division of Community Services of the Illinois Youth Commission until her retirement in 1965.

Within the city of Chicago, the Barnetts exerted influence in most civic affairs. They were perhaps the first Negro family to move east of State Street, when in 1901 they bought a home at 3234 Rhodes Avenue. Although there was no violence when they moved there, they were subjected to various displays of hostility. The white family next door would get up from seats on the front porch whenever the Barnetts appeared, shake their rugs with disgust, and go into their house, slamming the door with displeasure. Within the next decade, as the number of Negro families in the area increased, the Barnett boys and other Negro boys were regularly attacked by the Thirty-First Street gang. As a protective measure, they organized all the Negro boys of the area into a tight group which then met fisticuffs with fisticuffs. On one occasion, when a large number of white youths followed the boys home and stood outside the house jeering and threatening, Mrs. Barnett repeated the assertion that she frequently made during her anti-lynching crusades: that she had but one life to give, and if she must die by violence, she would take some of her persecutors with her. She kept a pistol available in the house and dared anyone to cross her threshold to harm her or any member of her family.

Ida Wells-Barnett never gave up her militancy or dedication to the cause of helping right the wrongs against Negroes. She urged the young men in a Sunday school class she taught at Grace Presbyterian Church to form an organization for this purpose. It was called the Negro Fellowship League and was located at 2840 South State Street in the area of the largest incidence of crime, wholesale arrests, and third degree methods of obtaining confessions. In the three-story building, the league utilized the lower floor for the center and the upper floors for sleeping rooms for men without homes—at twenty-five cents a night. In 1914 the league moved to 3004 South State Street, utilizing only one large room for activities for the center, for meetings, religious services on Sundays, and an employment office on weekdays. Even this activity closed down early in 1920, as lowered income and Mrs. Barnett’s failing health necessitated longer absences from the offices.

In 1910 when she established the Negro Fellowship League, Mrs. Wells-Barnett hoped for support from middle- and upper-class Negroes with education, ability, and influence. She sought the kind of financial help and cooperation from these Negroes that Jane Addams was able to secure from whites for Hull House. In this she was disappointed. Although her friends and associates in clubs, churches, and social life admired her dedication and hard work, they were not willing to venture into the area of Twenty-Eighth and State Streets to work among the recent migrants—uneducated, unemployed, and living in such undesirable neighborhoods. Some individuals and some of the federated clubs, such as the Gaudeamus Civic and Charity Club, did give assistance, but it was most inadequate for the urgent needs.

Added to her differences with the upper-class Negroes over service to the unfortunate was her disdain for the crudities she observed among some of them. She felt that the upper class should consist of persons of refinement, good breeding, and good manners. Thus, she resented the entrance of persons of questionable morals who had enough money to pay their way into society.

In like manner, Ida B. Wells-Barnett had high standards for ministers of the gospel and felt that they should be above ordinary men in their personal and professional lives. Any hint of scandal in their personal habits or handling of finances was enough for her to withdraw her respect and support. She thought that ministers had a very special opportunity to reach large numbers of people and that they had a responsibility to use their contacts for the good of those people. She believed that they should assist them in their improvement in this world as well as prepare them for the next world. Many ministers felt that she meddled too much in their sphere of influence, although they admired and respected her dedication