“declare war against”: “Republicanism and the Negroes,” Fayetteville Observer.
Respectable voices in the Black community: “Mr. J. W. Niles of Arkansas,” New York Globe.
it was America’s officialdom: “On Motion by Mr. Ingalls,” Journal of the Senate of the United States, Serial Set, vol. 2260 (1885), 178.
deflected the Indemnity Party’s: “Niles of Arkansas: That Colored Fomenter of Discord,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 20, 1883.
1884–1889: Philadelphia
“lead the masses”: V. P. Franklin, “ ‘Voice of the Black Community’: The Philadelphia Tribune, 1921–1941,” in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 51, no. 4 (1984): 261, 262. The earliest archived issues of the Tribune begin in 1912.
country’s first penitentiary: Patrolman’s Manual: Bureau of Police, City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Department of Public Safety, 1913), 62; Leslie Patrick-Stamp, “Numbers That Are Not New: African Americans in the Country’s First Prison, 1790–1835,” in Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography 119, no. 1–2 (1995): 96, 98–100.
arrested for murder: Kali Nicole Gross, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 30–31.
followed him from Newport: “A Woman to Hang: Annie E. Cutler Sentenced to Death for Murder,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 17, 1885. For Mettler Bros., see Gopsill’s Philadelphia City Directory for 1884; Eastern State Penitentiary, Convict Description Docket, #A3013, October 16, 1885.
in front of several witnesses: “Murdered in the Street,” New York Times, April 22, 1885.
“He did not look at me”: “Annie Cutler Committed,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 25, 1885.
to her mother: Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 90–93.
sentence be postponed: “Annie E. Cutler Pleads Not Guilty,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 8, 1885; “Murder in the First Degree,” New York Times, May 23, 1885; and “The First Degree: Annie Cutler Declared a Deliberate Murderess,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 23, 1885.
“The sentence of the law”: “The First Degree,” Philadelphia Inquirer; “A Woman to Hang,” Philadelphia Inquirer.
board of pardons: “Annie Cutler to Be Hanged,” New York Times, October 17, 1885; and “She Must Be Saved,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 19, 1885.
signed petitions: “Local Summary,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 29, 1885. Also “George D. McCreary, James S. Wright, Drs. Morton and Caspar Wister and Others, Are Interesting Themselves to Save the Poor Girl’s Life, and It Is Likely That They Will Succeed,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 31, 1885; “About Town,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 7, 1885. Clergy from Newport, Rhode Island, signed and sent a petition for commutation for Annie; see “Case of Annie Cutler,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 1885.
“directly connected”: “Woman’s Rights: A Member of the Citizens’ Suffrage Association Resigns on Account of a Discussion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 1885.
seemed like a win: “Annie Cutler,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 1885; “Annie Cutler’s Defense,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 17, 1885; Gross, Colored Amazons, 141.
1889–1894: Lynching
“I found that in order”: Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 71.
“that most frightful crime”: Philip Alexander Bruce, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman (1889; Nabu Press, 2012), 83, 84.
“nobody in this section”: Free Speech (May 21, 1892).
In exile from Memphis: Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), published in On Lynchings (New Hampshire: Ayer, 1991). For other Wells publications, see “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynchings,” Original Rights Magazine (June 1910); “Lynch Law in America,” Arena (January 1900); “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” Independent (May 16, 1901); and “Our Country’s Lynching Record,” Survey (February 1, 1913).
“To justify their own barbarism”: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Red Record (1895), www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm.
“Suspected, Innocent and Lynched”: Ibid.
white men’s sexual assault: Wells recounted the rape of black women in Southern Horrors under the heading “The Black and White of It,” 16–27. When she described the brutal lynching of Eph. Grizzard, who was accused of raping a white woman in Tennessee, she pointed out that a white man who raped an eight-year-old Black girl was in the same cell with Grizzard when the mob took him. Wells once again highlighted the double standard in the rape-lynch discourse when she declared, “The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black.”
“Color Line Justice”: Wells, Red Record, 148. A similar quote, in which she identified the young woman as Mrs. Camphor, appeared in Southern Horrors, 25.
1894–1899: Plessy v. Ferguson
Citizens’ Committee: “Report of the Proceedings of the Citizens’ Committee” contained names of all that had donated to support the case, listing local and South-wide support for their efforts. Plessy v. Ferguson Records, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.
had portraits: For more on the roots of Black photography and portraiture, see Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
“the Committee engaged”: Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits, trans. and ed. Dorothea Olga McCants (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 144; Albion W. Tourgée Papers, 1801–1924, Kent State University.
purchase her freedom: The family discovery of the story of Agnes Mathieu is detailed in Michael Nolden Henderson, Got Proof!: My Genealogical Journey (Suwanee, GA: Right Image, 2013).
legacy of activism: For more on Victor Dupart’s role in Homer Plessy’s upbringing, see Keith Weldon Medley, We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2012), 27.