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Staging Migrations toward an American West
From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones
By Marta Effinger-Crichlow University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2014 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-312-9
CHAPTER 1
"Tell My People to Go West"
Ida B. Wells
The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order was rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave 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.
These words, written by Ida Bell Wells in an 1892 editorial about the lynching of Thomas Moss and his business partners, convey Wells's outrage over oppressive racial violence inflicted upon the black residents of Memphis. A witness claimed Moss begged "for his life for the sake of his wife and child and unborn baby." In his final moments, he cried out to his attackers, "Tell my people to go West — there is no justice for them here." Moss's words first appeared in the Memphis Commercial on March 10, 1892. At the time of the lynchings, Wells was away from Memphis spreading the word about her Free Speech and Headlight newspaper. Upon learning of the murders, Wells, who later became the impetus behind the anti-lynching crusade, continued to parallel Moss's final words with her own reports of lynching. One might imagine Wells, a petite yet energetic young woman, calling out to all who would listen, Go West, people. There is no justice for us here!
This chapter illustrates that for Wells, the phrase "Tell my people to go West" represented more than simply moving geographically. This directive functioned metaphorically and was posited as a challenge for blacks who left and for those who remained in Memphis. The chapter also explores the irony of Wells's text, when juxtaposed with her movement across the southern and western landscapes, especially her return to Memphis from Visalia, California, in 1886. Finally, by writing and speaking the phrase, as well as her own access to and interpretation of public spaces, Wells became one of the first black women to instigate migrations toward an American West before the turn of the century.
Performance, defined as "the practical application of embodied skill and knowledge to the task of taking action," is a process. In this book, the word — which is also the message "Tell my people to go West," as performed by Wells — raised the consciousness of a people and incited them to act and is the force that helped them to assert their identity as free people. Wells's decisive use and circulation of Moss's words in her newspaper editorials and public speeches inspired physical as well as symbolic migrations.
This chapter seeks to trace much of Wells's life prior to and during the early stages of her anti-lynching crusade. Critical artifacts such as Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Wells's daughter, Alfreda M. Duster, and The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis, help to show how Wells's early movement shaped her "production of knowledge about culture." These personal accounts reveal that Wells was not merely traveling. In large part, her movement was tied to her search for freedom for self as well as for a collective. These texts are used to weave, in chronological order, Wells's public performances of everyday life, including her dispersal and manipulation of the word about freedom and migration.
Wells's early, more private life provides a framework for a discussion of the ways in which she began staging mobility. She writes, "I was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, before the close of the Civil War [July 16, 1862]." Wells, the eldest of eight children born to Jim and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Wells, both former slaves, learned stories of bondage and freedom from her parents, who gave her "a love of liberty and self-sufficiency that characterized her throughout her life." At a young age, her father, the son of his plantation master in Tippah County, Mississippi, was taken to Holly Springs, to serve as an apprentice in carpentry to a Mr. Bolling. Her mother's roots began in Virginia, but her master eventually sold her to a planter in Mississippi. Although married in slavery, Wells's parents remarried after emancipation, which signifies their attempts to make their lives their own. Moreover, the social activism undertaken by Jim, a Mason, made an even greater impact upon his daughter's understandings about freedom and mobility: "I do not remember when or where I started school. My earlier recollections are of reading the newspaper to my father and an admiring group of his friends. He was interested in politics and I heard the words Ku Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant. I knew dimly that it meant something fearful, by the anxious way my mother walked the floor at night when my father was out to a political meeting." As Wells read the newspaper to her father and his friends, she devoured the words. She took "the stage" before the male audience as a recipient and a distributor of knowledge. Her voice was thus validated in this black masculine community. In addition, Decosta-Willis remarks that Wells "learned lessons on religion, discipline, morality, and housework at home from her mother," but she chose to model her life after her father and other black men in Holly Springs, who gave her "political and civic training." In part, when Lizzie "walked the floor," the discourse of mobility was played out for Ida. Her mother's motion clarified the significance of her father's motion.
The yellow fever epidemic struck down both of Wells's parents and her brother in 1878. Sixteen-year-old Ida was visiting her grandmother when she received notice of their deaths. She ignored warnings and returned to Holly Springs to retrieve her five younger siblings: Eugenia, James, George, Annie, and Lily. Despite offers made by friends and neighbors to take in each of the children, Wells refused to allow the family to be separated. With money left by her father, and with the assistance of her "guardians," the Masons, Wells suddenly became a surrogate parent.
She understood that with an education, she would be better equipped to care for herself and her young charges. Her parents had attended school after emancipation and always emphasized to their children the importance of education. Wells attended Rust College in Holly Springs, where her father served as a trustee. Called Shaw University when it was first established in 1866, Rust College became one of the thousands of schools established by the Freedmen's Aid Society after the Civil War to educate free blacks throughout the South. "Old and young flocked to the schools opened" by these missionaries from the Methodist Episcopal Church of the North. Early on Wells's access to her father's community work, as well as her own religious and academic training from Rust, helped to engross her within the word.
In order to care for her siblings, Wells worked inside and outside the home. She taught at a country school in Mississippi. Her two brothers, George and Jim, eventually secured apprenticeships as carpenters while her mother's sister, Belle, cared for her sister Eugenia. By age twenty-three, Wells accepted the advice of her aunt Fannie and resettled with sisters Annie and Lily in Memphis. Thereafter, Wells passed the teacher's examination and secured an "adequate" salary as a teacher in a Shelby County school.
Years before the lynching of Moss and his business partners, tensions prevailed among blacks and whites in Memphis. In 1831 free blacks were prohibited from entering the state. Throughout the Civil War, black Union soldiers and black refugees landed in the city near the Mississippi River, and ex-slaves also flocked there. Early on they sought to actualize full-fledged citizenship by acquiring education, economic independence, and political power. Self-help, evangelistic service, and racial solidarity dominated discussions during weekly prayer meetings and lectures and at annual conventions hosted by churches and fraternal organizations. As the black population swelled throughout Reconstruction, black clergy, teachers, and businesspersons attempted to address the needs of this growing population.
By 1885, when Wells settled in Memphis, the city had already earned a reputation as a thriving urban center that served as a major market for cotton, hardwoods, and wholesale groceries. As a result of emancipation, "industrialization and urbanization not only altered the location, but influenced the transformation of the lives and work experiences of the majority of black women." In particular, women in Memphis established networks such as literary and cultural clubs. Memphis's cultural amenities made it more appealing for an ambitious young woman like Wells to settle there, as she continued to search for freedom. Decosta-Willis claims Wells was drawn "by the glitter: the gaslit theaters, cobblestone streets, railroad terminals, department stores, churches and synagogues, schools and hospitals, and the waterfront, teeming with steamboats and cotton barges." But Beverly G. Bond makes it clear in "'Till Fair Aurora Rise': African American Women in Memphis, Tennessee, 1841 — 1915" that black women still faced racism, sexism, and classism: "Their responses to adversity and oppression varied from accommodation to activism and the extent to which they adopted either approach depended upon individual impairment, class affiliation and the situations they filed."
Wells's experience with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1884 proves that "rules" in Tennessee restricted black women to a substandard status even as they attempted to remain physically mobile. During a trip from Memphis to her one-room school in Woodstock, Tennessee, a train conductor ordered Wells out of her seat in the ladies' train car and into the smoking car, where men were seated. The determined young woman bit the conductor when he attempted to drag her out of the ladies' car. Even though Wells had purchased a first-class ticket, the conductor, aided by white passengers, forcibly removed her from her seat while other white passengers on the train "continued applauding the conductor for the brave stand." Instead of moving to the smoking car, Wells exited the train, returned to Memphis, and sued the railroad. On December 25, 1884, the Memphis Daily Appeal ran the headline "a darky damsel obtains a verdict for damages against the chesapeake and ohio railroad – — What It Cost to Put a Colored School Teacher in a Smoking Car — Verdict for $500." While reporting Wells's success, the newspaper's posture implies it was ludicrous for a black woman to be rescued by the judicial system — in this case, the federal court. Ultimately, Wells became the first black person to challenge the nullification of Charles Sumner's Civil Rights Act of 1875.
The train upon which Wells traveled represented the kind of train cars Barbara Welke examines in Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution: 1865 — 1920. According to Welke, American society used the layout of the spacious railway car to enforce race and gender guidelines. For instance, Welke points out that "both the smoker and ladies' car were in name 'first class' cars." The smokers' car exemplified men's ruggedness by its hard seats while in contrast, the ladies' car symbolized women's delicacy by its comfortable sofa seats and ice water dispensers. In forcing a woman of color, like Wells, into the smoking car, railroad officials refused to view black women as ladies. They also made clear statements about the worth of this race of women: "Black women, along with their children, were expected to ride in smoking cars with men of color and white men. The cars were often filthy and smoke-filled; coarse jokes, drinking, and spitting were tolerated and expected."
White and black men rode in the same car with no distinctions being made. The ladies' car, commonly the last car on the train, was the safest and the most comfortable. Black women found whites to be openly scornful of their so-called attempts at playing the lady. Wells's audacious refusal to take a seat in the smoking car and her unwavering determination to carry her complaint into court challenged whites' disdain for black women. Although the smoking car was not labeled a racially segregated car, Wells openly rejected the oppressive conditions of the Jim Crow era. She refused to take her supposed place as a second-class citizen in American society. Her story emerged as both a public outcry and a critique. Wells forced American society to imagine black women beyond a confined space, serving as a model for other black women who sought to move around the nation free from contempt and harassment. The lawsuit "launched" Wells into the public setting of the courtroom and the newspaper. In 1884 Wells wrote her first article for Tennessee's religious weekly Living Way, describing her suit against the railroad. Impressed with her use of the pen, Reverend Robert N. Countee, the publisher, invited her to join his staff. Wells, who signed her articles "Iola," professed her commitment to writing in "a plain, common-sense way of things, which concerned our people." She soon captured the attention of a larger readership when black papers in New York, Michigan, Missouri, and Tennessee began running her stories. Her African American colleagues from around the country dubbed her the "Princess of the Press."
Three years after Wells's federal court victory against the Chesapeake and Ohio, the railroad appealed, and the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the earlier decision. It ruled 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." In Wells's diary, dated April 11, 1887, she turns to God for answers:
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 & 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.
Wells believed that the lower court verdict to be a setback for herself and for her people. Even so, this was not the end of her fight for justice and equality. She embeds spiritual references into her text — not surprising in light of the early lessons she learned at home and school. Moreover, she followed a tradition embraced by other prophetic African American women, like the first female political writer, Maria W. Stewart, who related faith and sociopolitical activism. The Very Reverend Nathan D. Baxter, former dean of the Washington National Cathedral, once declared in a sermon at Chicago's St. Thomas Episcopal Church, "Faith is a conviction out of a deep spiritual sense. Faith is the hope that we are not in the struggle alone." Wells demonstrates that she depends upon her faith in God to guide her everyday performances. She believed equality was morally right. And through the words "I ... would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them," Wells shows that she continues to focus on the needs of the collective. Similar to the folktale "The People Could Fly," in which Africans on a southern plantation take flight, Wells, in her diary entry, also considers the importance of physical movement. She imagines a Promised Land for her people. Since her daily performances around Memphis show her commitment to experiencing freedom on earth, it is unlikely that she only imagined a Promised Land in heaven for black people.
In her diary, Wells compares the suffering of the children of Israel and the suffering of black Tennesseans. Blacks began considering emigration in 1869. In particular, Kansas experienced a flood of black Tennesseans in 1879. Thousands of them turned to immigration after failing to gain power through the vote. It is likely that early on Wells was aware of how black emigrants envisioned the West: like Israel — as a God-appointed home for the race.
Wells commonly found herself the lone crusader on the journey for equality and justice. Despite her concern over the impact of the railroad case on her people, she said she received very little assistance from southern blacks because some argued "it was not a race matter and there was no need for them to help her in her fight." The week following the 1887 ruling, Wells attended a meeting of a local civil rights group "organized to fight White violence and the politics of accommodation, which intensified in the decade following the Compromise of 1877, which led to the end of Reconstruction." Even with a lack of support, Wells's experience with the railroad inspired her public and private discourses around mobility. The court suit, her editorials, and her diary entries are critical texts and performances that helped set the stage for her comments in 1892.
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Excerpted from Staging Migrations toward an American West by Marta Effinger-Crichlow. Copyright © 2014 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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