The Other Reconstruction

Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nella Larsen

Ericka M. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317733720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2000. The Other Reconstruction examines groundbreaking works by three African American women whose writings expose the economic, political, and social factors that sustained race violence in post-Reconstruction United States. Their works demonstrate that fixed representations--of race, gender, and class--are a prerequisite of tolerated interracial and intraracial violence. Ida B. Wells-Barnett's works challenge the "lynching narrative" and reveal that this violence depended upon the personal and political silence of women. Angelina Weld Grimke's short stories critique class-based strategies of Negro advancement as they expand conventional conceptions of race violence. Nella Larsen's novels explore the problems of cultural fixity. These writers' examination of the potential violence of fixed representations informs later acts of cultural expression as well as future liberation struggles.

CHAPTER 1

Telling Stories

Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Southern Horrors

Ida B. Wells-Barnett campaigned virtually her entire life for a federal anti-lynching bill in the United States. She spoke tirelessly to audiences in this country and abroad of the shameful persistence of mob brutalities against African Americans, as she stressed the urgency of this issue to the future of not just the colored race but to American society as a whole. Though she wrote numerous articles and essays on lynching, her three most extensive treatments of mob violence are Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (1900). In her essay “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Hazel Carby states, “Wells’s analysis of the relation between political terrorism, economic oppression, and conventional codes of sexuality and morality has still to be surpassed in its incisive condemnation of the patriarchal manipulation of race and gender” (307). However, historians and critics have paid little attention to the language of these pamphlets to demonstrate how Wells-Barnett executes her project; and few discuss the function of class in her works. I will illustrate that the significance of Wells-Barnett’s treatment of racially motivated mob violence at the turn of the century lies in its interrogation of the concepts of “property” and “propriety” in the maintenance of not just white supremacist domination of African American men, but also of the systematic linking of race, class, and sexuality that manipulates white womanhood and obliterates black womanhood to secure this dominance. Further, her writings explore the function of narrative in sustaining this power, but narrative as a means of positive transformation as well. Her awareness of the widespread damage caused by mob violence opened avenues of exploration for future African American women writers, as I will discuss in later chapters.

Wells-Barnett’s approach to lynching brings attention to the rhetorical relationship between “property” and “propriety” in much of the social and political discourse on the changing economic status of African Americans at the turn of the century. Prior to 1863 blacks in the southern regions of the United States were considered the property of whites by law. After the Civil War they were no longer legal property in the South, but they possessed very little property as well. The dismantling of slavery as an institution meant that blacks were no longer a commodity exchanged between whites—as were cattle, cotton, and firearms—but most blacks in the South still depended upon whites for their livelihood, as landownership remained for the most part exclusively white.

A few governmental attempts at providing land for freedmen were made in the years immediately following emancipation, but the intention and determination behind these efforts proved insufficient to provide any real basis upon which freed men and women could begin to build productive homes for themselves. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. DuBois traces the short life of government-supported programs designed to aid blacks after the war. He notes in his chapter “Of the Dawn of Freedom” that shortly after the war’s end a bill was introduced in Congress to create a Bureau of Emancipation, but the mandate was never reported. Then in June, explains Du Bois, the Secretary of War supported a temporary bureau for the “improvement, protection, and employment of refugee freedmen” (225). President Lincoln agreed to go forward with the plan—though, Du Bois notes, not enthusiastically—and gave the responsibility to special Treasury agents. By law these agents were to lease abandoned lands to freedmen for no more than a period of twelve months in each case. A large amount of land was leased in the Mississippi Valley, providing employment for a number of blacks, but in August 1864 this process was suspended “for reasons of ‘public policy’” and the army regained control of the land (226).

Later the federal government seemed to assume a more definitive stance in helping to integrate African Americans into the economic fabric of the nation as productive consumers by establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865. Du Bois notes that while the Bureau produced some positive results—the inception of peasant proprietorship, the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and the founding of the free common school in the South—it failed to promote better relations between ex-masters and freedmen, it encouraged paternalism, and it never fulfilled its promises to provide freed blacks with land (236). Eventually the South, and much of the rest of the nation, grew intolerant of the Bureau, federal funding ceased, and the effort died.

It became clear to many African Americans living in the latter decades of the century that the federal government was unreliable when it came to reparations and assistance. With the dismantling of the Freed-men’s Bureau came the end to any multi-pronged approach to the support and protection of blacks in the United States, and the project became primarily a legislative one. Legal adjustments such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment made equal protection a legal imperative but they did nothing to guarantee it as a moral one. For, Reconstruction under President Andrew Johnson allowed for such oppressive measures as the Black Codes, which restricted blacks in a degree comparable to slavery.

In White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery, Herbert Shapiro suggests that it was in the period of John-sonian Reconstruction that terrorism against blacks became organized, as those who ruled the South overtly expressed their desire to keep African Americans in “powerless semislavery” (5). He notes that by 1866 ex-Confederates in Pulaski, Tennessee, formed the Ku Klux Klan, whose goal was to intimidate blacks into this position. While the Freed-men’s Bureau was supposed to protect black interests—and certainly provide protection from bodily harm at the hands of white mobs—Andrew Johnson’s own commitment to white supremacy undermined its efforts to do so.

Shapiro notes instances such as those in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866 when the mere gathering together of blacks in peaceable assembly so threatened existing power relations that mobs of whites launched brutal assaults on meeting places. He mentions other studies linking violence to economic status in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, including those that focus on attempts by Southern whites to thwart black education through physical assault of black students and teachers in their schools, further frustrating their opportunity to pursue literacy and any non-agricultural vocations. But he also points out that these same mobs tried to make sure blacks never owned the land they tilled by violently threatening not only the individual who sought land ownership but the white person who sold it to him as well.

Accounts of such atrocities in the late-nineteenth century abound, and though many of those supporting and critiquing mob violence claimed that the motivation behind it was “fear of Negro domination,” it was in fact fear of Negro equality—not only economic equality, but the intellectual, political, and social equality that real reconstruction required. This reconstruction would have to do more than establish laws; it would have to challenge the very foundation upon which whiteness was constructed. Concepts such as morality, intellectual aptitude, and civility would have to be de-racialized before unequal distribution of wealth and resources could be proven unjust. Further, true reconstruction would also have to reimagine the roles of white and black women in this new nation.

As the nineteenth century came to a close, blacks in increasing numbers showed themselves intellectually capable of achieving and maintaining all of the conventional components of American success—cohesive family unit, community, education, small business ownership—and their achievements challenged the prewar pro-slavery sentiment regarding Negro inferiority. Inherent intellectual difference between the races was no longer as apparent as it seemed in slave/master relations. In some sense, blacks now looked like whites: The similarity of their desires suggested and demanded equality—equal access and equal opportunity. But equality precluded superiority, and innate superiority had always been the basis upon which white supremacy jusitfied unequal distribution of wealth, both nationally and globally.

George Frederickson explores ways in which this desire to recast the Negro in the cloak of inferiority manifested itself in cultural production after the Civil War and through the dawn of the new century. As he explains in The Black Image in the White Mind, attempts to cast Negroes as savages ill-fitted to mingle with whites manifested themselves in every avenue of production. He mentions the book by Richmond journalist Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause Regained (1868), which argued the “permanent, natural inferiority of the Negro.” In 1867, notes Frederickson, Nashville publisher Buckner Payne produced a pamphlet The Negro: What Is His Ethnological Status?, which claimed biblical proof that blacks were an entirely different species from whites and that God sent the flood as punishment for miscegenation (187–88). And though Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in 1859, its principles became justification for keeping the races apart at all costs, for it offered scientific “proof’ that blacks were different and inferior to whites.

Throughout the waning decades of the nineteenth century and into the opening of the twentieth, many African Americans sought education and the opportunity to enter into professions and positions that had once been reserved for whites only. It became increasingly important for white racists who feared such equality with blacks to convince themselves and others that there was an innate and critical difference between the races. In his chapter “The Negro as Beast: Southern Negrophobia at the Turn of the Century” Frederickson illustrates how such racist propaganda evolved in the early 1900s. He cites such scholars as William B. Smith of Tulane University and author of The Color Line (1905), which claimed the Negro race was dying out from high rate of disease and that there was nothing even the most sympathetic individuals could do (256). Other writers such as Philip Alexander Bruce, Thomas Nelson Page, and J.L.M. Curry claimed that the Negro had regressed since emancipation and become savage. (261). In 1905 Thomas Dixon published the novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, which, a few years later, would become the text upon which D.W. Griffith based his film “The Birth of a Nation,” illustrating visually the beastial nature of the Negro and his uncontrollable lust for white women.

The claim that black males were using their freedom to rape white women gave a particular segment of the white population, and most especially the Southern white population, the fodder it needed to justify the forced submission of blacks at any cost. Through this narrative—that racial equality translated into the rape of white women by black men—those who were steadfast against racial equality hoped to engender more widespread opposition to it by proving blacks morally inferior to whites and thus inherently unequal. Based on the number of lynchings of blacks that took place from 1880 to 1930 in the United States (most of them in the southern regions but, as Wells-Barnett will show, not exclusively in the South) one might conclude that these efforts were successful, at least in garnering widespread tolerance of mob violence.

As Frederickson states, “… the Negro’s overpowering desire for white women was often described as the central fact legitimizing the whole program of legalized segregation and disfranchisement” (282). On the subject of lynching he explains that the more educated and sophisticated Southern Negrophobes condemned lynching in the abstract because it tended toward anarchy in its disrespect for the law, but because they could not come up with another way to keep blacks in their place, they tolerated it (272). The dissemination of the Negro-man-as-lustful-savage myth created a condition in which African Americans were struggling not just for citizenship privileges such as the right to vote, own property, and aquire an education, but also for basic protection from bodily harm as law-enforcement officials and courts did little to prevent lynchings or punish lynchers. As Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s project would demonstrate, however, equality between the races could not be achieved until race, class, gender, and sexuality were reconceptualized, for in the lynching narrative they were inextricably linked.

Many black political leaders and writers at the turn of the century spoke out against lynching and considered it a priority in the struggle for racial equality. Mary Church Terrell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and others urgently condemned the practice and societal tolerance of mob violence, but many arguments against it went no further. Not until the emergence of Wells-Barnett’s writings did scholars and activists begin to explore the theoretical complexity of race violence in the United States. For she illustrated that lynching was more than white oppression of black men. She showed that the lynching narrative—that black men use their newly acquired freedom to rape white women—articulates the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in such a way that it oppresses black and white women in the process. Wells-Barnett’s writings on lynching locate her as a modern theorist in their rejection of traditional standards of identification but also demonstrate a vision far beyond her time in their concern with the way in which narratives operate in the construction of identities.

A Call to Action: The Lynching of Thomas Moss

In her biography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mildred Thompson states:

Here was a woman whose life exemplified concepts that seemed to be opposites, concepts that can be inclusive. She was an integrationist, aspiring to participate in the general society with the privileges of first class citizenship. On the other hand, having learned resourcefulness and independence at an early age, she was unwilling to wait for others to hand her rights she considered hers in the first place, (xiii)

Thompson’s study provides convincing arguments as to why Wells-Barnett, an important international as well as national figure, has been so neglected by scholars of American history, literature and culture.¹ Wells-Barnett refuses to fit neatly into the category of “integrationist” or “black nationalist,” and so defies a popular mode of classifying African American intellectuals. I argue that Wells-Barnett’s writings on lynching also resist conventional codification, in content as well as form. This resistance reflects the scope of her vision regarding mob violence in American society. Her writings indicate that any approach to ending such violence must be multi-faceted and must speak to all members of society, for all have played a role in sustaining it.

Born to Elizabeth and James Wells in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, Ida Wells lived her first two years as a slave. The Civil War ended shortly after her birth, bringing with it the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, and later she attended Rust College, where she excelled. But Ida’s youth was short, for in 1878 a yellow fever epidemic spread through Holly Springs, taking her parents, Elizabeth and James, as well as a brother and sister with it. As the oldest of six remaining children, Ida became the sole supporter of the family at the age of sixteen.

Seeing that employment prospects were dim in Holly Springs, Ida Wells moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she accepted a teaching job and attended Fisk University and the Lemoyne Institute. Soon thereafter, a sharp awakening to the legal, institutional, and social discrimination African Americans still faced 30 years after emancipation and a compulsion to address it inspired a long and illustrious career in journalism. Writing under the name “Iola,” her talent attracted much recognition. The Reverend William J. Simmons, president of the National Baptist Convention and editor of the Negro Press Association, hired Wells as a correspondent for his paper, and later she became the elected secretary to the National Press Association, acquiring high praise from colleagues such as I. Garland Penn and T. Thomas Fortune for her courage, sharp mind, and eloquence. In 1889 Wells became part-owner and editor of Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis weekly with a subscription that grew from 1,500 to 3,500 in her first year on staff. In her editorials Wells addressed race discrimination wherever she saw it, but just a few years later, upon reading about the lynching of a successful black store owner named Thomas Moss and two other black businessmen on March 9, 1892, she focused her pen to condemn the lynching of African Americans in Memphis and throughout the South. Having known Thomas Moss and his wife Betty as respectable, law-abiding citizens for much of her life, Wells began to realize that although Southern white leaders in politics, press, and pulpit justified the lynching of blacks as punishment for the sexual molestation of white women, the true motivation behind mob violence was resentment of recent economic and political gains by African Americans.

In many of her newspaper editorials following the Moss lynching, Wells urged blacks to leave Memphis and move west. In one particular article that appeared in Free Speech on May 21, 1892, she wrote:

Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Illustration
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Lynching and Its Literary Re-Creations
• Chapter 1 Telling Stories: Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Southern Horrors
• Chapter 2 Before the Rope and Fire: Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s A Red Record and Mob Rule in New Orleans
• Chapter 3 The Fly in the Buttermilk, or The Legacy of Margaret Garner: Despair, Agency, and Retaliation in Angelina Weld Grimké’s “Birth Control” Stories
• Chapter 4 Passing As and Passing On: Memory and Mobility from James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing
• Chapter 5 Conclusion: High-Tech Lynchings
• Bibliography
• Index