The Lives of the Constitution by Joseph Tartakovsky

Author:Joseph Tartakovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594039867
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Ida Wells-Barnett, who relocated to Chicago after fleeing Memphis, was one of the most important figures in America working to ensure that black women would overcome ignorance, real or perceived. Black women had organized on a large scale in the North as early as the 1890s, particularly though “clubs,” a now-vanished form of political sisterhood. Wells-Barnett personally founded so many of them that she became known as the “Mother of Clubs.” Some, in her honor, were named Ida B. Wells Clubs. In the days before suffrage, her goal, Wells-Barnett said, was to gird black women to “use their moral influence to see that their men voted and voted right.” By 1896, the National League of Colored Women, and later the National Association of Colored Women, had a hundred groups among its associational members. At one remarkable gathering, Harriet Tubman, the oldest attendee, introduced to the audience the youngest attendee, Wells-Barnett’s first son.

Later, in 1913, Wells-Barnett founded the famed Alpha Suffrage Club, the first suffrage organization for black women. That year women in Illinois got the right to vote for U.S. presidents and local officials—a form of so-called “partial” suffrage that in many states preceded full suffrage. (It was easier to obtain since it didn’t threaten state-legislature incumbents.) In 1916, in the first national election where both major parties embraced suffrage, on paper at least, Wells-Barnett supported Charles Evan Hughes over Woodrow Wilson. Three years before, Wells-Barnett was part of a delegation to the Wilson White House to complain about growing segregation in federal departments. She recalled that Wilson “received us standing” and said he was “unaware of such discrimination,” but after being shown an order from a cabinet member forbidding white and black clerks from using the same toilets, he “promised to look into the matter.”

Wells-Barnett took pride in her business card during this period; it denominated her the national organizer for “Illinois Colored Women.” The Alpha Suffrage Club hosted panels, dinners, parades, and receptions for candidates for offices like city judge or county commissioner. Wells-Barnett brought women to Springfield to lobby against a Jim Crow public-accommodations bill and another bill outlawing miscegenation. “[T]he winding through the capitol building of two or three hundred colored women,” Wells-Barnett recalled, “was itself a sight that had never been witnessed before.” She bought a voting machine and had an election commissioner give her members lessons in electoral procedure. Racial tribalism was the order of the day, and Wells-Barnett sought to elect blacks, as blacks, to office, most famously the Chicago South Side’s Oscar De Priest, the first black man elected to Congress in the 20th century. Her club even expelled members found to have worked for the election of white aldermen and published their names as traitors. In 1918, an overheated federal agent labeled Wells-Barnett a “far more dangerous agitator than Marcus Garvey,” which was untrue; aside from advocating defensive fire against lynchers, Wells-Barnett never encouraged violence.

It was in working to elect black men that Wells-Barnett encountered a form of opposition unrelated to

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