A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age by Philip Dray

Author:Philip Dray [Dray, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, Social Science, Race & Ethnic Relations, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9780374720780
Google: VKs9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: FarrarStraus
Published: 2022-05-24T20:33:28+00:00

Publishing such volatile words in the South in the early 1890s was beyond asking for trouble; it was suicidal. Wells, however, who stood no more than five feet tall, had never lacked for daring. Following the deaths of both her parents in a yellow fever epidemic in 1878, when she was sixteen, she had refused to hand her several younger siblings off to the care of relatives and instead assumed sole management as head of her family. She taught at a one-room country schoolhouse in Mississippi, and later in Memphis, where she dabbled in literary and theatrical club life and contributed articles to local African American newspapers. Her early pieces dealt with household and women’s health issues, but she soon branched out, penning eloquent critiques of politics and the struggle for equal rights. Of a decidedly activist bent, she once bit a conductor who tried to physically evict her from a first-class railroad car, and in a similar incident in 1884, she brought and won a lawsuit after she was driven from a “ladies’ car” and sent to the Jim Crow “smoking car” of a train. A DARKY DAMSEL OBTAINS A VERDICT FOR DAMAGES AGAINST THE CHESAPEAKE & OHIO RAILROAD: WHAT IT COSTS TO PUT A COLORED SCHOOL TEACHER IN A SMOKING CAR—VERDICT FOR $500, the Memphis Daily Appeal headlined its account. The award, however, was successfully appealed, the state supreme court ruling that her sole intent had been to harass the railroad.

In May 1892, when her incendiary words about white women and lynching ran in the Free Speech and Headlight, she was in New York City. In her absence the paper’s offices were vandalized, while the Memphis Scimitar, assuming the author of such a calumny to be a man, threatened “to brand [the editor] in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.”

T. Thomas Fortune had long followed Wells’s Memphis writings and, aware that she could not safely return home, offered her work on the Age. In exchange for the subscription list of the Free Speech and Headlight, he and co-owner Jerome B. Peterson gave her a quarter interest in the Age and a salary to write weekly pieces about the South. “Having destroyed my paper, had a price put on my life, and been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth, I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely,” she vowed.

“Miss Ida B. Wells has added her vigorous pen to the pugnacious quill-quivers of the New York Age,” applauded the Detroit Plaindealer. “If those sneaking, cowardly, Negro-hating Memphis copperheads think they have gained anything by this arrangement, they are welcome to it.” Indeed, Wells lost no time in returning to her criticisms. In a June 25 article for the Age, she noted that “the miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union

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