One of the ways that she sought to address women’s issues was the formation of women’s clubs and national associations of women around political issues. She helped to organize the first National Conference of Colored Women in Boston in 1895, and she attended their first convention in Washington, DC, in 1896, when they changed their name to the National Association of Colored Women. This meeting was a combining of many streams: women from the antislavery days, such as Frances E. W. Harper and the powerful Harriet Tubman, joining now with those struggling against the reinstatement of neo-slavery under Jim Crow. Wells established women’s clubs in Chicago and Illinois and helped to organize the women to work for equity on the local, state, and national levels.
Things were changing on the national scene, as the white supremacists in the South linked with antiblack allies in the north to reestablish “slavery by another name,” as Doug Blackmon so aptly called it. The death of Ferdinand Douglass in 1895 left a huge vacuum in national voices for racial equality, and Booker T. Washington stepped in to fill the gap. Washington, however, seemed to prefer agitation for self-improvement for African Americans over agitation for equal rights. Washington gave a speech at the opening of Piedmont Park in Atlanta in September 1895 in which he seemed to surrender the work for racial equality to the rising tide of racism. He was astute politically and became the most powerful black man in America, but Wells and others like W. E. B. Du Bois strenuously opposed this direction. Wells put it like this in her autobiography:
Mr. Washington’s theory had been that we ought not to spend our time agitating for our rights; that we had better give attention to trying to be first-class people in a jim crow car than insisting that the jim crow car be abolished.9
Washington’s philosophy was complicated, but in the end, it affirmed the white supremacist point of view, that people of African descent were not equal to people of Anglo descent. Those classified as “black” did not have equal rights because they were not deserving of them.
This was the mantra during slavery, and while it wobbled a bit during Reconstruction, by the 1890s it had returned in full force, not just in the South but throughout the nation. Washington read the political winds better than did Ida Wells, but his subsequent surrender of the struggles for racial equality gave white supremacy political and even scientific cover for its views. In 1896 the Supreme Court decided 8–1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was the law of the land. In practice it actually meant “separate and unequal.” In 1898, whites in Wilmington, North Carolina, staged a coup d’etat, overthrowing the legitimately elected black city government, killing many black citizens in the process. Ida Wells appealed to President William McKinley to intercede, but he refused to do so. Wells then publicly criticized President McKinley for his allowing white supremacy to prevail. Her growing radicalism brought her into conflict with many organizations that had welcomed her earlier, both on political and sexist grounds.
With four children now, Wells leaned back toward the domestic side of the “divided duty,” never dropping out, but spending less time on the road and more time closer to home. In 1909 she went to New York to participate in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where she made an impassioned plea to adopt a strong antilynching platform. While she had hoped to be named as one of the forty founding committee members, her radicality kept her off the list, and she admitted in her autobiography that her hurt feelings clouded her judgment. She refused to allow her name to be amended to the list, and she left the meeting.10
In 1912 Woodrow Wilson was elected to be president of the United States, the first Southerner to hold the office since the Civil War. Women’s groups were agitating for the right to vote for women, and they organized a march on the day before Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. Wells went to DC to participate in it, but the National American Woman Suffrage Association told her that she could not join the march because they did not want to antagonize the white Southern women. Wells dropped back a few rows and joined in the march anyway, stepping in to march with the Illinois delegation. She would return to Washington later in 1913 as part of the delegation from the National Equal Rights League, founded by William Monroe Trotter of Boston. They met with President Wilson to urge him to disavow the idea of resegregation of the federal government. Wilson heard them and promised to assist them, but he did not. Indeed, segregation in the offices of the federal government was reestablished early in Wilson’s presidency.
All during this time of her “divided duty,” Wells formed clubs to assist those African Americans fleeing persecution in the South in the great migration. The main club was called the Negro Fellow ship League, and it offered housing, meals, counseling, and fellowship for those migrating north. Wells not only talked about these kinds of things, but she herself put them into action. When the funding ran out for the center, she obtained a job as a probation officer and used her salary to fund the League’s activities.
Because of its importance in her formation and its terroristic nature, she remained keenly interested in the continuing issue of lynching. Where the number of lynchings had diminished, they revived again during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. She traveled to East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917 to investigate the murders there of over forty African Americans. In 1919 another white race riot that started near Elaine, Arkansas, and spread throughout Phillips County would become the deadliest lynching in American history, when at least 237 African-Americans were murdered.11 Its location is close to where Catherine and Nibs both grew up in Arkansas.
Twelve African American men were arrested for murder, though white marauders had clearly started the violence.12 For the protection of the twelve, they were moved from the jail in Helena, Arkansas, to Little Rock. They had been convicted and sentenced to death, and they were given stays of execution several times, as their nationally known case, Moore v. Dempsey, made it to the US Supreme Court. Early in the case, Ida Wells began to raise funds for their defense, and one of the twelve wrote her and asked her to help them and to visit them. In January 1922, she decided to go to Arkansas to visit the men. It would be her first trip South since she arrived in New York in May 1892, shortly after her offices in Memphis had been firebombed, and a price put on her head.
In that light, she was somewhat anxious, and as she got closer to Helena, she went incognito as a cousin of one of the men in jail. She and a group of the men’s relatives went to visit the men in jail, and the men’s eyes lit up when they were told that the visitor was not a cousin but was Ida B. Wells. They talked for a long while, and Wells took many notes on their stories. Then the men sang some songs of their own and some spirituals. At the end of the singing, Ida Wells gave them a charge:
I have been listening to you for nearly two hours. You have talked and sung and prayed about dying, and forgiving your enemies, and of feeling sure that you are going to be received in the New Jerusalem because your God knows that you are innocent of the offense for which you expect to be electrocuted. But why don’t you pray to live and ask to be freed? The God you serve is the God of Paul and Silas who opened their prison gates, and if you have all the faith you say you have, you ought to believe that he will open your prison doors too. . . . Quit talking about dying; if you believe your God is all powerful, believe that he is powerful enough to open these prison doors, and say so.13
As in so many cases, Ida Wells proved to be prophetic. Moore vs. Dempsey was the first case in the twentieth century to be considered by the Supreme Court in regard to the rights of African Americans in the South in criminal matters. The Court heard the case in January 1923, and in February ruled 6–2 that the twelve had been denied their constitutional rights. The case was remanded back to the lower