Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the mother of the nineteenth-century antilynching movement, was among the first to publicly challenge the racist ideas about Black men and women that Southern whites deployed to excuse their mob violence. Wells-Barnett, born into slavery during the Civil War, lost her parents to yellow fever at sixteen. She was a teacher-turned-journalist who co-owned the Memphis Free Speech. She launched her antilynching crusade in 1892, after a white mob of economic competitors murdered three prospering Black Memphis store owners, one of whom was a close friend.
She urged African Americans to fight back, with guns if necessary and through economic pressure. Spurred by her scathing editorials, thousands migrated to Oklahoma, while those who stayed in Memphis boycotted the newly opened streetcar line. Wells-Barnett began investigating other lynchings and soon discovered that many were designed to suppress the economic and political rights of Black people. When she published an editorial arguing that “nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” a white mob destroyed her press. Wells-Barnett, in New York at the time, received warnings not to return to Memphis at the cost of her life.
Far from being silenced by this attack, Wells-Barnett transformed herself into the architect of an international crusade. In exile from Memphis, she wrote for the New York Age and in 1892 published her first antilynching pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, which offered an incisive analysis of the economic roots of lynching and linked violence against Black men with the sexual exploitation of Black women by white men. Wells-Barnett revealed that less than 30 percent of all lynchings involved the charge of rape, let alone the conviction. She also documented consensual sexual contact between Black men and white women and insisted that lynching functioned to keep Black folks terrorized, politically disenfranchised, and economically dependent.
From the inception of her crusade, Wells-Barnett claimed that white hysteria about the rape of white women by Black men effectively masked violence against women—both Black and white. “To justify their own barbarism,” she argued, Southern white men “assume a chivalry which they do not possess.” Lynching, she explained, was not about protecting Southern womanhood but had everything to do with shoring up white men’s social, economic, and political power—in other words, white male supremacy. Desperate to control white women’s sexual behavior and maintain sexual control over Black women, Southern white men had created a scapegoat in the animalized figure of the Black rapist. Wells-Barnett argued that the focus and attention on the image of the Black rapist concealed lynching’s motives and masked violence against Black women who were victims of sexual assault and lynching.
While Wells-Barnett advocated Black self-defense and self-help, she also hoped to turn white public opinion against the South, where most lynchings took place. In 1893 and again in 1894, she traveled to England, where she inspired the formation of the British Anti-Lynching Society and published The Red Record in 1895. By the end of her second British tour, Wells-Barnett had made lynching a cause célèbre among British reformers. White American men found that in the eyes of the “civilized” world, their tolerance of racial violence had cast them in the unsightly position of unmanly savages. Her skillful manipulation of dominant cultural themes did not stop lynching, but it did put mob violence on the American reform agenda and made visible sexual assault against Black women.
Highlighting Black women’s victimization and white men’s disregard for law and order, Wells-Barnett challenged the racial double standard embedded in the rape-lynch discourse. In The Red Record, under the heading “Suspected, Innocent and Lynched,” Wells-Barnett reported the 1893 lynching of Benjamin Jackson; his wife, Mahala Jackson; his mother-in-law, Lou Carter; and Rufus Bigley in Quincy, Mississippi. She explained that the two women, accused of well poisoning, were hung by a white mob even after they were found innocent of the charges against them. Wells-Barnett argued that neither their innocence nor their sex served to “protect the women from the demands of the Christian white people of that section of the country. In any other land and with any other people, the fact that [these two accused persons] were women would have pleaded in their favor for protection and fair play.” Wells-Barnett argued that mob violence against Black women was not only barbaric but ran counter to the rape-lynch discourse. The accusation of rape, she argued, could not explain why Black women were “put to death with unspeakable savagery.”
Wells-Barnett constructed an antilynching argument that addressed the inconsistencies produced not only by female victims of lynching but also by Black female victims of white men’s sexual assault. In The Red Record, under the heading “Color Line Justice,” Wells-Barnett provided numerous examples of Black women and girls raped by white men. She opened the section with this report: “In Baltimore, Maryland, a gang of white ruffians assaulted a respectable colored girl who was out walking with a young man of her own race. They held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was a colored woman. The case went to the courts, and they were acquitted.” Black women, she argued, were protected neither by mob violence nor by the courts.
1894–1899
PLESSY V. FERGUSON
Blair L. M. Kelley
At the beginning of our conversation, Keith Plessy lets me know that if I google Homer Plessy, historic images of mixed-race men pop up, but none of the images are actually of him. He tells me that the man with the full beard is P.B.S. Pinchback, a Union Army officer and the former lieutenant governor of Louisiana. The clean-shaven gentleman, who is also not Plessy, is Daniel Desdunes, the son of organizer Rodolphe Desdunes and the first man selected by the Citizens’ Committee to test the legality of interstate segregation. This isn’t the first time Keith Plessy, whose fourth-great-grandfather was also Homer Plessy’s grandfather, has told me a search of the Internet will not turn up a real picture of Homer Plessy.
He mentioned this when we first met eight years ago, not realizing he kept repeating the same complaint. His repetition underscores his abiding frustration with the error of misidentification and the other omissions that shape our landscapes. Keith Plessy wants to correct those mistakes and reshape how we understand the legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
Those familiar with the outlines of the legal battle for civil rights know that the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson served as the legal foundation for de jure racial segregation. This failed test case was put forward by the small group of Creole of Color New Orleans activists called the Citizens’ Committee. The case set the precedent of “separate but equal” that stood for more than half a century. Indeed, when viewed strictly as a story about legal history, Plessy is the top of a slippery slope down to an American South where Jim Crow segregation marked every landscape. However, my conversations with Keith Plessy remind me that this historic case must be considered in the context of the particularities of place and time—then and now. Plessy v. Ferguson was the manifestation of the African American opposition to segregationist attempts to shame and degrade Black train passengers. While elite Creole of Color leaders organized the Citizens’ Committee, African Americans from all walks of life supported the effort—more than 110 organizations and thirty individuals donated to the cause. Likewise, in this moment, when our collective memories about the past are hotly contested, it will be the work of like-minded people who will harness accurate histories of the past to better address our present.