Two major events changed the trajectory of Ida’s life. In the 1876 presidential election, no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, so it was given to a fifteen-member commission to decide who the next president would be. Though some scholars dispute the idea, it is generally agreed that even though Republican Rutherford Hayes had lost the popular vote, he won commission votes by promising to withdraw the remaining federal troops from the South. He was named president, and the withdrawal happened shortly thereafter in 1877, ending Reconstruction and leaving the white South able to fully restore its domination, now in the name of “neo-slavery.”2 This was a huge change in the South, and although it would be the 1890s before the white South was able to codify neo-slavery, Ida Wells and many others would live under its monstrous power.
The second major event for Ida Wells happened one year later in 1878. Yellow fever swept through the Mississippi River valley, and Ida was sent to stay with her grandmother in the country. While there, they received the terrible news that both Ida’s father and mother had died in the epidemic. Ida headed back to Holly Springs and found that her father’s Masonic brothers were dividing up her siblings so that they would have a home. Showing her characteristic determination and firepower, Ida refused to allow this to happen. She emphasized strongly that she would oversee her siblings and provide for their care. The adults reluctantly agreed, and for the rest of their childhoods, her siblings would be under her care in one form or fashion—quite an undertaking for a sixteen-year-old! She then lied about her age and got a teaching job in order to support her family.
For several years she worked and raised her siblings, meanwhile moving to Memphis, where she began to engage African Americans in the city. She rode the train to her teaching job on the outskirts of Memphis. It was on one of these trips that the incident happened where she was ordered to move to the “black” car and then thrown off the train when she refused to do so. Here we see a lesson that Ida Wells learned about the devastating power of racism. It was not just the opinions of those individuals classified as “white” that were the problem. She had encountered a dominating white man in the train conductor, but she had also encountered a sympathetic white man in the former Union soldier who was the judge in the court, who ruled in her favor. In the decision of the Tennessee Supreme Court, Ida saw clearly that the law, i.e., the system of the order of society, was filled with racism and was now expressly designed to favor those classified as “white,” despite the deaths of almost 700,000 people in the Civil War to seek to make it otherwise. In her diary entry (highlighted above in the introduction), we saw her despair both for herself and for her kin, those people classified as “black” in American culture. Her answer on that day was the image of flying away, a powerful African image of escaping the oppression of racism by taking flight.
One of Ida Wells’s great gifts, however, was resistance and resilience. Though despairing and discouraged, those emotions did not paralyze her. During her days as a school teacher in the 1880s, she also began to write articles, first for her church weekly, then for local black newspapers. She found her calling! She was passionate and skilled, and she was a dedicated reporter. By 1886, her reports on black life were appearing around the country in black newspapers. In 1889, she bought a one-third interest in Free Speech and Headlight, a small black-owned paper in Memphis. As one of the few women reporters, she found more than her share of sexism, but she persevered, and she began to be recognized for her skills as a reporter rather than the novelty of her gender.3
Then came the next major event to influence her life: three of her acquaintances were lynched in Memphis in March 1892. One of them, Tom Moss, had named her as godmother to his daughter. Their crime? The three African Americans were running a successful grocery store in competition with a white-owned store across the street in a black neighborhood. The owner of the white store gathered a mob to attack their rival store, and the African Americans returned fire when they were attacked. Three white men were wounded, but none were killed. Thirty-one African Americans were arrested, but later they were all removed from the jail by masked raiders. Three of them, including Ida Wells’s good friend Tom Moss, were executed in a lynching.4
If she had not done so already, Wells began to connect the dots behind the motivations for this lynching and many others. She discerned that the lynchings of black people were not responses to individual crimes but rather part of a system-wide effort to reestablish white supremacy throughout the South. The charge of rape against black men as a justification for these murders now rang hollow for Wells. In response, she began a study of the 728 lynchings over the previous ten years. She used white newspapers as her primary sources, and her findings were astonishing to all: only one-third of those lynched were even charged with rape. Some were not charged at all, and other charges included assault, insolence, and theft.
She protested strongly against these lynchings and the white justifications for them. She began to write about them and their sinister purpose in her paper, Free Speech. In early May 1892, she published a blistering editorial about the real purpose for lynching black people, also implying that some of the liaisons between black men and white women were consensual, not rape. She was on a trip to New York, and when she arrived there, she was met by her friend and colleague T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age. He greeted her: “Well, we’ve been a long time getting you to New York, but now that you are here I am afraid that you’ll have to stay.” When she indicated that his comment made no sense, he showed her a copy of a New York paper, which narrated events in Memphis after her Free Speech editorial. Her offices had been burned to the ground, and she was threatened with being lynched herself if she returned to Memphis.5 She would not return to the South again until some thirty years later, in 1922.
In many ways, this was a major turning point for Ida Wells. She now determined to work against lynching and racism and for women’s rights on a national and international level. She became one of the leading advocates against lynching, and she made two trips to Great Britain to develop support there for the antilynching campaign. She developed a rapport with Ferdinand Douglass in his later years. He indicated to her that even he, the giant of the antislavery movement, had begun to believe—just a little bit—that black men’s sexuality was part of the issue in all the lynchings.6 He was grateful to Ida Wells for reminding him that lynchings were about white supremacy, not black sexuality. He wrote an introduction to her Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, published in 1892.
Wells was a powerful and fierce speaker on the subjects of racial justice, the need to engage and defeat white supremacy, and rights for women. In 1895, in the midst of her touring and writing, she married attorney Frederick Douglass and moved to Chicago. Her wedding announcement was on the front page of the New York Times Style section. She delayed the event three times because she was so busy speaking against lynching.7 Once she got married, she sought to balance domestic life (including having four children) and her activist life. Others watched her balancing act, and some, like her friend Susan B. Anthony, criticized her for choosing family life over political life. Catherine will explore this relationship more fully in chapter 5.
Wells struggled with what Anthony called “divided duty” and sought to make it work on both sides. She chafed that this “divided duty” issue came up for women but not for men. She took her first son, Charles, with her to many meetings in his infancy, but when she had her second child, Herman, in 1897, she decided to retire from public life to tend to her family. The retirement lasted five months, when she responded to a call to advocate on behalf of justice