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In this chapter, the authors focus on the genealogical dimensions of the anti-lynching efforts of those nineteenth-century progressive advocates who joined Ida B. Wells-Barnett during her anti-lynching crusades. Extending the work of post-structural theorists, who focus on larger discursive formations, the authors comment on the enduring texts and visualities that swirled around Wells-Barnett and those who critiqued her work as she put together her famed “Red Record” of lynchings.

Chapter 5 highlights Tourgée’s extensive anti-lynching journalism, which filled his “Bystander” column from 1888 on. The chapter centers around Tourgée’s collaboration with Ida B. Wells and Harry C. Smith, editor of the Cleveland Gazette, in a three-way campaign against lynching through the press, public lectures, and the legislative arena. The three journalists formulated similar critiques of lynching, quoted each other’s writings, promoted each other’s political agendas, and paid homage to each other. All three not only exposed the sexual and racial double standard used to justify lynching, but uncovered the economic motives behind mob violence and called for armed resistance against lynch mobs. After his election to the Ohio state legislature, Smith secured passage of an anti-lynching law that Tourgée drafted, which became a model for those in nine other states, as well as for the NAACP.

At the same time that black women engaged in the “politics of home” during the Depression (Ch. 1), this chapter shows that among the largely male-led political networks, a diversity of competing leaders created the possibility for powerful collaborations during the late 1930s. The chapter details the formation of political networks that have been overshadowed until now in histories of radical labor-civil rights organizing. In particular, the battle for the construction of the Ida B. Wells Homes, the first public housing project for African Americans in the city, not only energized the new protest politics of the late 1930s, but also helped develop a heterogenous group of organizations – including groups of black building trades workers, reformers in social work organizations, and politicians building the first black Democratic machine – that endured well beyond the Black Popular Front era of the late 1930s and late 1940s.

Notebook 2 reframes Ida B Wells as a thinker of the multitude. In her unfinished autobiography Crusade for Justice, Wells sets aside her image as the maverick opposing lynching singlehandedly. Her autobiography grounds her intellectual and activist legacy in galvanizing collective opposition to racism, sexual violence, and class exploitation, with lynching serving as the microcosm of these horrors across the South and a newly imperial United States. This chapter reinterprets Wells’s canonical pamphlets from the 1890s and 1900s through her autobiography’s viewpoint. This notebook also challenges today’s common-sense view that racism is the by-product of “one bad apple” who can be converted to a less racist view by their victims. Lynching involves a collective reinforcing its superiority through informal and formal institutional channels. Only another collective force can counter it. Wells does not find that agency in “the people”—those who are already recognized as having rights—but in the multitude, that complicated mass at once empowering and destabilizing the State. Finally, this chapter challenges leftist romanticizations of the multitude by showing how it can express itself in mass acts of disinformation and terror and the collective pursuit of truth and justice, when guilt and fear are overcome.

The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 provoked wide-ranging protests from African Americans who were largely excluded from the Fair's exhibits. The famed anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells travelled to Chicago and joined forces with Frederick Douglass and Ferdinand Barnett to write a powerful critique of white America. The World's Fair also sparked Chicago's first organizations led by black women, who in the following decades formed a wide array of social reform, racial uplift and political organizations in the city. The women's reform work, which was part of the larger black club movement and paralleled the work of white women reformers, helped to establish a sense of a black community in the increasingly segregated city.

Chapter 1 introduces Tourgée and illuminates his ethos, first, by tracing his career from the Reconstruction era to 1890, when he entered on his most intensive collaboration with African Americans, and second, by sampling his exchanges with selected African American correspondents, among them Charles W. Chesnutt, William H. Anderson, T. Thomas Fortune, Ida B. Wells, and Louis A. Martinet, with whom Tourgée developed his warmest friendship. The spirited dialogue in which Tourgée engages with his African American correspondents reveals his commitment to plain speaking, his generosity, his occasional insensitivity, his sympathetic understanding of the humiliation that racism inflicted, and African Americans’ appreciation of a white ally who did not treat them with condescension. One major episode—Tourgée’s uncompromising opposition to the flawed Blair Education Bill, which African Americans pragmatically supported as their sole viable option—also exemplifies the racial arrogance he could sometimes display.

This chapter explores the work of militant Black journalists like T. Thomas Fortune, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois who mobilized to combat the political economies and social orders of the New South—and directly attacked Grady. Black journalism became the incubator of Black activism. The men and women of the Black press built a critical Black discursive space for Black Americans to debate, organize, and mobilize and exposed the New South as a regime of racial control. They rejected the New South narrative and the anti-Black systems and structures it spawned and fought instead to build a “New America” that respected Black civil, political and human rights, a truly multiracial and democratic America.

This chapter documents the complex relationship between lynching and newspapers, which has received inadequate attention. As the author writes, “any understanding of the phenomenon of lynching in the United States must begin with news accounts of lynchings.” Between 1890 and 1920, newspapers in America carried news and discussions about lynching on an almost daily basis. White papers legitimized and at times even incited lynching through the use of sensationalism, melodrama, and racist stereotypes of white female victimhood and “Black brutes.” The Black press, including Ida B. Wells and John L. Mitchell, fought back, documenting lynchings, exposing the racist lies used to justify them, and organizing public protest and support for federal anti-lynching bills.

This chapter presents the essay, “Mob Law in the South,” written by Fortune for the Independent, appealing to the nation for assistance in ending the brutal acts of lynching. He extoled the actions of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her internationalization of the issue—an act he supported early on as he and the Afro-American League held meetings to raise money for her travels. Fortune also employed Wells-Barnett when she fled the South after the 1893 lynching of her friends and the firestorm that her editorials started. In the end, Fortune, like Wells-Barnett, placed the blame for the continued lynchings squarely on the apathy and silence of the nation.

This chapter discusses Ida. B. Wells's crusade against Negro lynching and other abuses. Illinois newspapers adhering to the Democratic Party almost invariably treated the Negroes with undisguised hostility, while even the Republican press often subjected them to heavy-handed humor. While attention was centered upon those unfortunate enough to become involved with the police, the most eminent colored people were not immune to ridicule and abuse. This chapter looks at the efforts of Wells, whose reputation as a journalist and crusader against lynching spread after the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, when she collaborated with Frederick Douglass, I. Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett on writing a booklet recording the achievements of American Negroes and refuting the false impressions created by most of the newspapers. Wells wrote for various Negro publications under the pseudonym “Iola” and was recognized as the most implacable and effective enemy of mob rule and racial discrimination in general.

Using the life and times of pioneering antilynching activist and sociologist Ida B. Wells, this chapter begins the exploration of chocolate cities as black villages. One of the defining attributes, the village illustrates how a critical mass of black people living, working, and striving alongside one another creates ripples that affect the politics and movement of black people near and far.

Chapter 13 examines the Reconstruction Era struggle for women’s rights and African American rights through the American Equal Rights Association, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), especially the WCTU activism of acclaimed black writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Born of the so-called Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873–1974, under the leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU would become the most successful woman’s organization of all time. Willard’s Do Everything campaign expanded women’s activism, both nationally and globally. Despite racial tensions within the WCTU, temperance activism provided the main avenue of political organization for women across the Reconstruction-Era South, both black and white. By the 1890s Willard had made common cause between not just temperance, equal rights, antilynching leagues, and suffragist movements, but—as a Christian socialist—with both the domestic and international labor movement as well.

This chapter examines how the managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution and national spokesman of the New South, Henry W. Grady, led Georgia Democrats in building white supremacy in the South. It examines his support and protection of convict leasing; normalization of inflammatory reporting practices in lynching coverage; promotion of the idea of “equal but separate” that became Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine; use of the Atlanta Constitution as the propaganda machine of New South Democrats; and his national advocacy for the disfranchisement of Black southerners. It also documents the New South and Grady critique of Black press leaders such as T. Thomas Fortune and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Caroline Bressey’s essay explores how ‘racial prejudice excluded black women from new spaces of expression created by white women’ in the British press (p. 528). It was not until 1900, with the founding of the Pan-African, that there was a British periodical explicitly dedicated to publishing the contributions of black journalists. Thus, the history of black women’s journalism in Britain prior to the turn of the century is largely unknown. This lack of scholarship makes it necessary to take a ‘transatlantic comparative approach’ when surveying an emerging field of inquiry (p. 528). In the United States, there was more explicit discussion of black women’s contributions to the periodical press, as highlighted in I. Garland Penn’s 1891 book, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. This volume not only highlighted the unequal, sometimes hostile environment in which black journalists worked but also provided a key for discovering the names and achievements of a wide range of women writers, including Victoria Earle and Ida B. Wells. These writers spoke out on key political issues, including racism and sexism, contributing to journals as diverse as Our Women and Children (1888–90) and the more radical Free Speech (1892).

This chapter argues that the role of the National Association of Colored Women in early law-related civil rights activism should be reconceptualized to emphasize the importance of African American club women's work in pushing the boundaries of the public/private divide. These activists built private social welfare institutions to serve African Americans' communities excluded from the benefits of the emerging social welfare state—as a first step that utilized the avenues for agency presented by the political conditions of the times—and then often followed up these efforts with requests that the public institutions of the state take over or fund institutions built through private, voluntarist efforts.

Capitalism in the United States is unthinkable apart from the myth of White Supremacy, for capitalism was built on stolen land and stolen people. Further, white Americans imagined that capitalism was God-ordained, grounded in “Nature and Nature’s God,” and heralded a golden age of peace and prosperity for all humankind. Following the Civil War, the myth of the Chosen Nation morphed into the myth that God blessed the righteous with wealth and the wicked with poverty—the central assumption of the Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie appealed to all these myths in his 1889 essay, “Wealth,” in the North American Review. Likewise, many American industrialists invoked these myths to justify their goal: the economic conquest of the world. Government and industry, however, typically excluded blacks from this engine of economic prosperity, thereby contributing to realities already in place—systemic racism and white privilege. In the early twentieth century, laissez-faire capitalism and the myths that sustained it came under withering assault from labor, the Social Gospel movement, and black social critics like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Langston Hughes, especially since the wealth of the Gilded Age contrasted with unprecedented numbers of lynchings of America’s blacks.

This chapter begins by discussing the designation of “Colored American Day” on August 25, 1893. It then explains that this day was designated in order to combat the exclusionary climate during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, wherein almost all black Americans were excluded in the planning and execution of the fair’s exhibitions. Ida B. Wells and other African-Americans urged blacks to boycott the fair for they feared the event might provide whites with ammunition to mock the race. It discusses that “Colored American Day” was observed in a dignified manner and the appearance and demeanor of the participants brought honor to the race. This chapter adds that the event demonstrated that acculturation was the avenue to greater acceptance into the larger social order. The emergence of ragtime and The Creole Show was a cultural innovation, an important first step toward the development of the black musical comedies.

White Americans still paid little heed to Black engagement with Scripture, which continued to spread and deepen in the half-century after the Civil War. Denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal church promoted higher educational standards for its ministers. Public figures like Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass retained firm allegiance to Scripture. Thoughtful biblical immersion inspired capable leaders like the AME’s Daniel Alexander Payne and the Episcopalian Alexander Crummell. Francis Grimké, pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., was a particularly forceful leader who combined a traditional conservative understanding of the Bible with a lifelong commitment to progressive civil rights reform.