“IF IOLA WERE A MAN”: GENDER, JIM CROW AND PUBLIC PROTEST IN THE WORK OF IDA B. WELLS

MIA BAY

“If Iola were a man, she would be a humming independent in politics”, reported a leading black journalist, T. Thomas Fortune, after first meeting “Iola” (the pen name of Ida B. Wells), “she has plenty of nerve, and is sharp as a steel trap”.1 Written in 1888, this assessment of the first famous African American female journalist highlights the gendered terrain that Wells had to traverse as she assumed prominence in African American cultural leadership. Born in 1862 to slave parents, Wells was a woman often taking on traditionally male roles: firstly as the breadwinner of her household at age sixteen, after her parents died in a yellow fever epidemic that swept the Mississippi Valley in 1878, and then as the first black female owner and editor of a newspaper, seeing herself as an heir to Frederick Douglass. Yet, despite performing these roles, Wells’ life, thought, and activism were shaped by her gender. Wells is most famous today for her denunciations of . But her career as an activist began before that, as did her development of a trenchant analysis of the sexual politics of , so evident in her anti-lynching campaign. Both grew out of Wells’ experiences as a black woman in a public sphere within which she was forced to question conventional understandings of gender and sexual relations, by virtue of the fact that the Southern white ideology of chivalry rarely applied to black women. Growing up in late nineteenth-century Mississippi and Tennessee, Wells came of age at time when segregation not only eroded the social and civil equality of all blacks, it also challenged them in gendered terms. Disenfranchisement was an assault on the racial manhood of black men, while many Jim Crow practices made a mockery of any claims by African American females to womanhood.

1 Article by T. Thomas Fortune, The New York Age, 11 August 1888, 1.

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In short, white supremacy confronted black men and women differently, launching Wells into a public career that would not have been the same “if Iola were a man”.

As Patricia Schechter notes, Wells’ critique of lynching centrally engaged with these gender-and-race intercalations. Her campaign against lynching “made black women visible in the dynamics of southern lynching and sexualized racism”, and in so doing transformed lynching into a women’s issue.2 In particular, Wells mobilized middle-class African American women, who became lynching’s earliest public critics. The impact of the anti-lynching work of Wells and other African American women has been well chronicled. Their efforts helped feminize American reform by defining opposition to lynching as “women’s work” and through their campaigns generating widespread public disapproval for lynching both in the North and abroad, paving the way for biracial movements against lynching and Jim Crow in the twentieth century.3 Less clear, however, is why it was lynching that provoked such unprecedented public activity among African American women. Although Wells’ crusade helped transform the understanding of lynching into a powerful symbol of the racial terror that was Jim Crow, lynching was only one of many forms of racial violence that Southern whites inflicted on African in the late nineteenth- century South. Southern black communities were terrorized by white capping, race riots, oppressive and exploitative labor relations and a severely discriminatory justice system that placed many blacks in a penal servitude that was “worse than slavery” and as lethal as lynching.4 Lynching was usually a crime against men, and worse still, it was ideologically linked to the “indelicate” subject of rape – a topic

2 Patricia Schechter, “Unsettled Business: Ida B. Wells Against Lynching, or How Anti-lynching Got Its Gender”, in Under the Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997, 296. 3 Idem., 292. For Wells’ impact on public opinion, see also Hazel Carby, “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory”, in “Race”, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995, 301-16; and Ch. 2 of Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 4 Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind, New York: Vintage, 1999, 422-44; David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, New York: Free Press, 1997, 209-13.