Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) dealt firsthand with the complexities of being black and being a woman in the post-reconstruction South. One of the biggest trials of her identity as a woman was when Wells was denied a seat in the ladies’ car of a train on multiple occasions, resulting in her pursuing a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southern railroad company. She won the initial trial on the basis that the judge saw the issue being more of a class than race and because he saw Wells as a lady, describing her as, “a person of lady-like appearance and deportment, a school teacher, and one who might be expected to object to traveling in the company of rough or boisterous men, smokers and drunkards.” However, Wells lost her case in front of the Tennessee State Supreme Court on the basis that she was not a lady. The railroad lawyer painted an image of Wells as an overly aggressive black woman who dared sit next to a white woman, using her insistence on being able to sit in the ladies’ car as his evidence. This evidence was accepted and Wells lost her case; her description changed from a woman of “lady-like appearance and deportment” to someone who aimed to “harass” the railroad company and had too much “persistence”.
Wells’ determination to fight for her rights violated the “submissive” pillar of the cult of true womanhood. The cult of true womanhood was an idea that dominated the United Kingdom and the United States in the 19th century consisting of four cardinal values: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. To be submissive, a woman was “to work in silence, unseen” and to “repress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defense, in gentle submission” (Welter, 1966). Wells was not one to submit and continued to refuse to do so when she began her career as a journalist and wrote Southern Horrors. She was so outspoken that after publishing the editorial outlining the true causes of lynching, The Evening Scimitar, a white newspaper, threatened to “brand him with a hot iron, and perform on him a surgical operation with a pair of tailors’ shears.”(Bay 105) assuming that Wells was a man.
So how did Wells become so outspoken and learn to think so analytically the way she did? Wells’ experience as a black woman and an awareness of the intersection of her race and gender shaped the way she thought. As a black woman, Wells become well-aware that she would not be able to completely fit the expectations of a lady, including the cardinal rule of purity. Her status as a black women automatically branded her as unpure. Wells cared for her younger siblings alone for a time after her parents died, but she soon become the subject of gossip because of her unsupervised status and the hypersexualization of black women. Just by being a black woman, people would assume she had “loose” morals, so at only sixteen, Wells had learned to become hypervigilant of her sexual representation. She ended up writing to her grandmother Peggy to come live with her and her young siblings in order to stop the slander (Bay 33).
Although unfortunate, the sexual slander she experienced shifted her perceptions of race and question narratives constructed about black people. This shift likely played an important role in spurring her inquisition of the causes of lynching. Wells experienced sexual slander influenced by race, and experienced the subsequent slander of her lynched friends following the memphis lynchings. She knew the black men who were lynched to be good and honest people, and yet due to their race and the view of black men as predatory, they were branded as rapists and their lynchings were justified. This experience helped shift her perceptions of black men and lynching in general. Prior to her firsthand experience with lynching, she had bought the idea that many of the lynchings were due to rape or attempted rape, even once saying that “perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life” if a man was lynched for rape (Bay 100). However, her experience with these false narratives helped her realize that lynching was nothing more than a power play that had become racialized as a form to keep black people in submission even after slavery had been abolished.
The Memphis lynchings also changed her position on “fight vs. flight” for black citizens. She had initially advocated for standing one’s ground, but in the light of the lynchings she understood that regardless of weapons, white people would find a way to kill and justify murder. She realized that in order to be safe, she would have to abandon some of her previous ideas of self-defense and combine them with a flight approach. She valued her life and the lives of other black people more than she valued occupying a moral high ground. As a result, she encouraged black people to leave Memphis and travel west in search of more accepting communities.
Ida B. Wells had a keen perception of the economic role black people played in society. She was aware that black people in Memphis composed a large sector of the economy, and that while the white people of Memphis held no regard for the lives of black people, they cared about their money. Knowing this, she organized a boycott of the railroads, businesses in memphis, and encouraged a mass exodus to the West. Her boycott damaged the economy of memphis and soon representatives from the railroad begged her to get black people to ride the train again, even though they denied the fact that the boycott had anything to do with the lynchings.
Ida B. Wells had an incredibly analytic mind that was molded by her experiences as a black woman. It is impossible to disentangle her perceptions of racial consciousness from her identity as a woman because one informs the other. Even though she did not fit the typical perceptions of what being a woman and a lady was, Ida B. Wells refused to give up that part of her identity. In her lawsuit against the railroad, she remained steadfast in her claim that she was a lady even when the defense claimed that her actions proved otherwise. She never claimed that her bold writing or her non-traditional relationship with her husband made her more of a man. She was satisfied in her knowledge that she was a woman and a lady, even if others disagreed.
Images:
https://www.biography.com/news/ida-b-wells-biography-facts
https://perfectlywoman.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/familydevotion3.jpg
Literature:
Bay, Mia. (2009). To Tell the Truth Freely. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Welter, B. (1966). The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860. American Quarterly, 18(2), 151-174. doi:10.2307/2711179