Anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and temperance activist Frances Willard electrified the 1890s. Wells, the “Joan of Arc” of her race, was a fearless African-American journalist who challenged Jim Crow violence. Willard, the “Queen of American Democracy,” was the politically ingenious president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the country’s largest women’s organization.
The two had much in common. Proponents of female suffrage, public health and child education, they shared goals, friends and the conviction that women should play a role in the public sphere. Yet Wells and Willard were unable to form a productive partnership. Instead, they seriously vexed each other. In the mid-1890s, when they both traveled to England on speaking tours, their disagreements morphed into a cross-Atlantic public media battle.
Wells’ and Willard’s potential alliance foundered on the racial and sexual politics of their favored causes. Wells’ priority was an end to lynching. She needed to dispel the myth that mob violence was a necessary response to the purported desires of black men for white women. Willard’s priority was the nationwide prohibition of alcohol, a campaign that emphasized women’s moral virtues (in contrast to men’s drunkenness and troublemaking) and required the participation of white Southerners, whose racism Willard was reluctant to criticize because she wanted their support.
Wells believed in temperance, and Willard, the daughter of abolitionists, was no proponent of lynching, but the arguments and strategies they employed on behalf of their respective crusades resulted in a clash of rhetoric and values. In their conflict, it was Wells, an outspoken African-American in increasingly violent Jim Crow America, who had the odds stacked against her.
Incidents of lynching rose dramatically when federal troops left the South at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. By the 1890s, 82 percent of American lynchings occurred in the South; in 1892 alone, 161 African-Americans were killed by Southern mobs.
In 1892, Wells lost three friends to a lynching in Memphis, where she worked for a black newspaper. The men were killed because their grocery store began drawing too many customers from a rival white business. In response, Wells refocused her life’s work. The study of lynching became her obsession, and she began challenging the widespread notion that lynching was tied to rape.
Wells’ key insight, built on unflinching investigative journalism and statistical compilations, was that lynching most often occurred in response to instances of black economic or political success. She further suggested the quite radical idea that interracial sex had nothing to do with predatory men but rather came from mutual desire. In a famous editorial, she wrote: “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” If white Southerners kept falsely insisting on this excuse for lynching, she said, people would begin to question “the moral reputation of their women.” In other words, Wells hinted that maybe Southern women weren’t so chaste. These comments caused such furor that, for her safety, Wells fled the South, eventually settling in Chicago.
For Willard, Wells’ comments about the “moral reputation” of Southern white women were anathema. Willard grounded her temperance movement upon the notion that women’s pure nature should be enlisted to combat male vices like alcoholism, domestic abuse and lust. (While in no time or place have men held a monopoly on debauchery, Gilded Age men sure spent more time and money in bars and brothels than their female counterparts.) This celebration of virtuous womanhood gave the temperance movement moral credibility, and it bolstered the claim that women deserved the vote in order to protect their families.
Wells’ editorial had cast aspersions on Willard’s most sacred principles. It had questioned the image of the “pure woman” and drawn attention to lynching, a political issue that, unlike temperance, would divide rather than unite Northern and Southern reformers.
But Willard provoked Wells, too. In an interview titled “The Race Problem,” Willard insinuated that black men’s drinking justified lynching. Asked if she supported legislation protecting voting rights, she suggested that disenfranchisement was understandable because black men drank too much: “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grogshop is its center of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced.”
Wells hated this quote. During an 1894 anti-lynching tour in Britain, when both women were in the country, Wells cited Willard’s interview to the press: “Here we have Miss Willard’s words in full, condoning fraud, violence, murder, at the ballot box; rapine, shooting, hanging, and burning.” Willard’s rejoinder: “[S]tatements made by Miss Wells concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless acts between the races … has put an imputation upon half the white race in this country that is unjust.” Willard insisted on refuting Wells’ claim that white women had any impure desires for black men.
Wells seemed to win this round. Publicly shamed, Willard joined Wells’ new organization, the British Anti-Lynching Committee. But back home, both Southerners and Northerners resented the way Wells had stirred up anger abroad. Calling Wells “a slanderous and nasty-minded mulatress,” the New York Times forswore cross-Atlantic meddling: “[Southerners] do not attach that importance to British opinion which British opinion attaches to itself.”
In the end, Wells emerged the more scathed. Both women kept campaigning, but Willard’s causes met more immediate success. By 1920, the United States had both prohibited alcohol and granted women the vote. (In 1933, however, the 21st Amendment concluded a Prohibition era that had simply driven drinking underground.)
Lynching persisted, despite Wells’, and others’, efforts. In 1922, 1935 and 1947, Southern members of Congress defeated anti-lynching bills that would have made mob executions a federal felony. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched for flirting with a white woman in Mississippi, an event that galvanized the civil rights movement. Till’s murderers, barely denying the crime, were acquitted.
Fifty years later, in 2005, the United States Senate formally apologized for its long failure to prohibit lynching. Were she alive, Wells might have asked for a bitter drink.
Sarah Levine-Gronningsater is a doctoral student in history at the University of Chicago.
The two had much in common. Proponents of female suffrage, public health and child education, they shared goals, friends and the conviction that women should play a role in the public sphere. Yet Wells and Willard were unable to form a productive partnership. Instead, they seriously vexed each other. In the mid-1890s, when they both traveled to England on speaking tours, their disagreements morphed into a cross-Atlantic public media battle.
Wells’ and Willard’s potential alliance foundered on the racial and sexual politics of their favored causes. Wells’ priority was an end to lynching. She needed to dispel the myth that mob violence was a necessary response to the purported desires of black men for white women. Willard’s priority was the nationwide prohibition of alcohol, a campaign that emphasized women’s moral virtues (in contrast to men’s drunkenness and troublemaking) and required the participation of white Southerners, whose racism Willard was reluctant to criticize because she wanted their support.
Wells believed in temperance, and Willard, the daughter of abolitionists, was no proponent of lynching, but the arguments and strategies they employed on behalf of their respective crusades resulted in a clash of rhetoric and values. In their conflict, it was Wells, an outspoken African-American in increasingly violent Jim Crow America, who had the odds stacked against her.
Incidents of lynching rose dramatically when federal troops left the South at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. By the 1890s, 82 percent of American lynchings occurred in the South; in 1892 alone, 161 African-Americans were killed by Southern mobs.
In 1892, Wells lost three friends to a lynching in Memphis, where she worked for a black newspaper. The men were killed because their grocery store began drawing too many customers from a rival white business. In response, Wells refocused her life’s work. The study of lynching became her obsession, and she began challenging the widespread notion that lynching was tied to rape.
Wells’ key insight, built on unflinching investigative journalism and statistical compilations, was that lynching most often occurred in response to instances of black economic or political success. She further suggested the quite radical idea that interracial sex had nothing to do with predatory men but rather came from mutual desire. In a famous editorial, she wrote: “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” If white Southerners kept falsely insisting on this excuse for lynching, she said, people would begin to question “the moral reputation of their women.” In other words, Wells hinted that maybe Southern women weren’t so chaste. These comments caused such furor that, for her safety, Wells fled the South, eventually settling in Chicago.
For Willard, Wells’ comments about the “moral reputation” of Southern white women were anathema. Willard grounded her temperance movement upon the notion that women’s pure nature should be enlisted to combat male vices like alcoholism, domestic abuse and lust. (While in no time or place have men held a monopoly on debauchery, Gilded Age men sure spent more time and money in bars and brothels than their female counterparts.) This celebration of virtuous womanhood gave the temperance movement moral credibility, and it bolstered the claim that women deserved the vote in order to protect their families.
Wells’ editorial had cast aspersions on Willard’s most sacred principles. It had questioned the image of the “pure woman” and drawn attention to lynching, a political issue that, unlike temperance, would divide rather than unite Northern and Southern reformers.
But Willard provoked Wells, too. In an interview titled “The Race Problem,” Willard insinuated that black men’s drinking justified lynching. Asked if she supported legislation protecting voting rights, she suggested that disenfranchisement was understandable because black men drank too much: “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grogshop is its center of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced.”
Wells hated this quote. During an 1894 anti-lynching tour in Britain, when both women were in the country, Wells cited Willard’s interview to the press: “Here we have Miss Willard’s words in full, condoning fraud, violence, murder, at the ballot box; rapine, shooting, hanging, and burning.” Willard’s rejoinder: “[S]tatements made by Miss Wells concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless acts between the races … has put an imputation upon half the white race in this country that is unjust.” Willard insisted on refuting Wells’ claim that white women had any impure desires for black men.
Wells seemed to win this round. Publicly shamed, Willard joined Wells’ new organization, the British Anti-Lynching Committee. But back home, both Southerners and Northerners resented the way Wells had stirred up anger abroad. Calling Wells “a slanderous and nasty-minded mulatress,” the New York Times forswore cross-Atlantic meddling: “[Southerners] do not attach that importance to British opinion which British opinion attaches to itself.”
In the end, Wells emerged the more scathed. Both women kept campaigning, but Willard’s causes met more immediate success. By 1920, the United States had both prohibited alcohol and granted women the vote. (In 1933, however, the 21st Amendment concluded a Prohibition era that had simply driven drinking underground.)
Lynching persisted, despite Wells’, and others’, efforts. In 1922, 1935 and 1947, Southern members of Congress defeated anti-lynching bills that would have made mob executions a federal felony. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched for flirting with a white woman in Mississippi, an event that galvanized the civil rights movement. Till’s murderers, barely denying the crime, were acquitted.
Fifty years later, in 2005, the United States Senate formally apologized for its long failure to prohibit lynching. Were she alive, Wells might have asked for a bitter drink.
Sarah Levine-Gronningsater is a doctoral student in history at the University of Chicago.
