Reports of Strange Fruit

Brian Balogh: One of our favorite stories at Backstory is about a prominent black female activist and journalist brought to us in 2018 by my colleague Nathan Connolly. It starts off on a sunny Tennessee day in September of 1883 when a young African American school teacher named Ida B. Wells boarded a train in Memphis. Historian Paula Giddings picks up the story.

Paula Giddings: The trains were very important to African Americans in this period of what it represents. I mean, the trains are bringing communities together. They’re going trans-continentally at this point, and Black saw this as a very important emblem of their first class citizenship.

Nathan Connolly: Remember, this is less than 20 years after the civil war. Blacks across the south are trying to claim the rights that had been promised to them after emancipation, and train travel, believe it or not, was a major battleground in the late 19th century. One of the ways African Americans expressed their rights is to buy a first class ticket, and that’s what Ida B. Wells was doing on that September day in 1883. I mean, picture it. She’s has a parasol, she’s wearing long white gloves, she’s wearing a long full length dress, corset at the waist. She’s the picture of respectability.

Paula Giddings: She goes into the first class colored car, but she sees that people are smoking there and there was even a white man who was drunk there.

Nathan Connolly: And Wells was hearing none of it. She decided it was better off for her to go to the lady’s car with those who could travel quietly and with a sense of class, basically, found their seat.

Joanne Freeman: Okay, so Nathan, she leaves the first class colored car, as they would’ve put it, because it was rowdy and smoky.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah. I mean, she felt she had the right to sit in first class accommodations because she bought a first class ticket, so she leaves the first class colored car and moves to the first class ladies car, which she had that before. It was mostly full of white women. That decision, to enter the woman’s car, would propel Ida B. Wells onto a new path, one that would make her a household name in America.

Speaker 18: I regret to inform you, ma’am, I cannot accept your ticket in this car.

Nathan Connolly: The conductor, William Murray, when he asked for her ticket about a mile into the trip determined that she was not indeed a lady. She couldn’t sit in the lady’s car.

Joanne Freeman: Did he say that to her? I mean, did he say, “You are not a lady?”

Nathan Connolly: He basically said that she should be in the colored car.

Paula Giddings: Conductor asked her to leave. She refused to move.

Speaker 18: Vacate the seat at once.

Ida Wells: I’m sorry. I intend to ride [crosstalk 00:18:30]-

Paula Giddings: There were efforts to get her out of the car.

Nathan Connolly: She first said no verbally, then he put his hands on her, actually grabbed her by the arm and tucked her so hard that it tore the sleeve on her dress. Wells in response lashed her feet beneath the seat in front of her.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Nathan Connolly: Then decided to take a bite out of the conductors hand and drew blood. She scratched him with nails.

Paula Giddings: Until finally she was actually physically extricated.

Nathan Connolly: Took two or three extra people to basically forcibly drag Wells from the Lady’s car to the colored only car.

Joanne Freeman: But here’s a question: what are the other ladies in the car doing?

Nathan Connolly: Believe it or not, Joanne, they were actually cheering, and not and that sharing for Wells, but cheering for the conductors who were dragging Ida Wells out of the lady’s car and back to the colored only car. Here’s how Wells described it later.

Ida Wells: Some of them even stood on the seats so that they could get a good view and continued applauding the conductor for his brave stand.

David Mindich: Nathan, this is an incredibly compelling story, but is this the train to nowhere? I don’t really understand where advocacy journalism is coming up along the track here.

Nathan Connolly: Well, a few things come out of this incident. First and importantly, Wells sues the train company and wins, though is later overturned on appeal. Secondly.

Paula Giddings: Wells is asked to write about her experience.

Nathan Connolly: Which she does in a local black paper called The Living Way. Her story gets a big response from black readers and he decides to give up teaching and become a journalist full time. She moves from her own story to describe and document the experiences of black citizens across the Jim crow south.

Paula Giddings: She would later say that, “In journalism I found the real me.” So this was that beginning of that career and of her really pursuing the craft to express herself.

Joanne Freeman: So, Nathan, it sounds like Ida Wells found her voice and she’s found what she wants to do with that voice.

Nathan Connolly: That’s right, Joanne. But before we get into her story let’s describe what journalism looked like in the late 19th century. It was, you could say, an industry in flux.

David Mindich: So in the 1880s there were a bunch of fairly boring newspapers. They were very text based.

Nathan Connolly: This is media historian David Mindich. He says there were elite newspapers, such as in New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, that covered business and stocks and had been around for decades, but they were also losing readers to a new breed of newspapers, like the New York World and the New York Journal. These upstarts were published by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

David Mindich: Pulitzer and Hearst really introduced street life and street reporting and women’s news and celebrity news to the news universe of the late 1880s and 1890s.

Nathan Connolly: These papers are using sensational headlines, using very shaky research methods, and they’re finding ways to gobble up as much readership as possible. You might recognize-

David Mindich: Reality TV.

Nathan Connolly: Or the time, yellow journalism, to use that term.

David Mindich: And reporting became more exciting. They’re completely blowing over their rivals, the elite newspapers, so the elite newspapers had to make a decision. Were they’re going to join them in their sensationalism or are they just going to try to ridicule them? They chose the second. Notably, The New York Times called it not only yellow journalism but freak journalism.

Nathan Connolly: Mindich says that the older establishment papers also trumpeted the concept of objectivity. It became the new standard. A hallmark of objective reporting was its dispassionate tone.

David Mindich: Try to cover the world in a very serious way, balanced, fair, conservative-minded in their reporting and restrained in their language.

Nathan Connolly: A sense of detachment. You want reporters who can take themselves out of the story and seemingly give all sides of an event, and what we assume to simply be a timeless value in journalism is really a way for papers, like the New York Times, to get a larger slice of the market share.

Nathan Connolly: That strategy didn’t quite boost circulation, but it did solidify the reputation of the New York Times as the paper of record. In contrast to those working class rags, the New York Times proclaimed it’s paper, “Does not soil the breakfast cloth.” So that’s the white press, the mainstream. But in the world of 19th century journalism there’s another player, the black press. There were scores of small, independently owned black newspapers across the country. Ida B Wells made a name for herself in the black press. Historian Paula Giddings says that by the time she was 30 years old Wells already co owned a newspaper in Memphis and her articles were being reprinted throughout the country.

Paula Giddings: She’s called the princess of the press, and she’s written a lot and she’s really hailed and people like her writing. She’s one of the few women, in fact, one of the few journalists that both women and men seem to read equally.

Nathan Connolly: Wells wrote about the countless challenges that black Americans were facing after the Civil War. I mean, you had systematic disenfranchisement, you had Jim crow laws, you had debt peonage and of course the most terrifying trend of all, lynching.

Paula Giddings: There’s genocidal threats if you hear and read, even in a newspaper, threats of the needs that have to wipe out the evil of blacks.

Nathan Connolly: Lynchings and other terror attacks on African Americans spiked in the 1880s and 1890s. Now, the white press covered some of these crimes, but most of the coverage followed a pretty standard script. You had an African American man who commits some crime, usually a rape, and the white masses seek vigilante justice or some kind of violence. Now, implicit in this narrative was the belief among white Americans that blacks simply weren’t ready for freedom. You had scientific journals that’s cited poverty rates as if somehow blacks had regressed in the late 19th century. You had notions of political power that were given too soon to black people, and reconstruction was a failure in that respect. The idea, of course, was that you had to control blacks from their otherwise primal state.

Paula Giddings: Again, to rationalize lynching, which was to protect white womanhood from what they said was the new Negro crime, which was the rape of white women all across the south.

David Mindich: So the northern elite newspapers covered lynching with appropriate disgust. In that, you know, most of the articles were horrified by the practice of lynching. However, they balanced that disgust with a sense that African Americans were committing crimes.

Nathan Connolly: In other words, northerners never questioned the guilt of the victims. They just thought the criminal should be tried or convicted in a court of law instead of lynched by a mob. Then in 1892, there were three men lynched in Memphis, Tennessee. They happened to be friends of Ida B. Wells.

Nathan Connolly: Here’s what happened. A black businessman named Thomas Moss owned a grocery store in Memphis. Two of his friends worked for him. His main business competitor was a white grocer.

Paula Giddings: Who was in the same area.

Nathan Connolly: Who was in the black neighborhood? Right?

Paula Giddings: Yes. Well, it was a neighborhood that was changing. You know, the south wasn’t segregated until really relatively late, but this was an area that had been white. It was beginning to change towards blacks, but it was still a mixed neighborhood at this point.

Nathan Connolly: But the problem is that when you compete in these small communities it can create these moments of friction.

Paula Giddings: And there is an incident.

Nathan Connolly: Two teenage boys get into a fist fight in front of the Moss grocery store. Older men of both races jumped in to break it up, but the fight escalated and turned into a small race riot. Remember that grocer or down the road? He smelled an opportunity.

Paula Giddings: The white proprietor says that really the real provocateurs of this riot were the men of the People’s grocery who included Thomas Moss and two other men.

Nathan Connolly: They decided to attack the grocery store. Moss and McDowell and Stewart took up arms and defended themselves against what ultimately became a band of white men armed who came to the establishment. There was a gun fight and shortly thereafter the three men were lynched in pretty methodical fashion.

Paula Giddings: It was a horrible, torturous lynching. The reason why we know all these gory details is because the white press had actually been told in advance that the lynching was going to take place and where it was going to take place.

Nathan Connolly: The local white papers portrayed Moss as a rioter and a killer. Months later, another newspaper accused him of being a rapist. And how did those local white papers cover the lynching itself? Well, one adopted a high minded, even reverential tone.

David Mindich: There is no whooping, not even loud talking, no cursing, in fact. Nothing boisterous. Everything was done decently and in order. The vengeance was sharp, swift, and sure, but administered with due regard to the fact that people were asleep all around the jail.

Nathan Connolly: Wells happened to be out of town when the lynching occurred, and once she got home she began to piece together the real story. She realized that the kindling that ignited the riot, the gunfight, the lynching was all a cover. The white grocer down the road simply wanted to put Moss out of business.

Paula Giddings: This lynching was to be a lesson to blacks who deigned to succeed and to emerge and to compete with whites and to fight back.

Nathan Connolly: And it really did kind of fix in her mind that the kinds of things that were happening to black people across the south couldn’t all be traced back to some narrative about the evil black male rapist or sexual predator, but that there were economic issues that could also be at the base of racial violence.

Paula Giddings: So she begins to think about lynching anew. If Thomas Moss was guilty of nothing but competing with white people, what is happening with all these other lynchings that I’m reading about?

Nathan Connolly: Wells began traveling across the South to do her own investigations of lynchings. I mean, think about it. No one else in the white press was even trying to get the facts, but Ida B. Wells, she was fearless.

David Mindich: And so she goes to actual scenes of the crime.

Paula Giddings: She actually goes to the scene, she documents everything.

Nathan Connolly: Imagine, you know, someone who’s literally, you know, tramping around in the woods, right? Investigating the marks under a lynching tree.

Paula Giddings: She interviews witnesses.

Nathan Connolly: Investigative journalism being carried out by a woman of color, oftentimes at night or under some kind of false story to kind of get her access to certain people.

Paula Giddings: The other thing Wells did, by the way, was to send a private investigators to some of these lynchings. White investigators, in fact, who reported back to her.

Nathan Connolly: She also poured through data in establishment papers, and really like a sociologist, began to notice certain patterns. Eventually she reached some explosive conclusions.

Paula Giddings: She shows that the great majority of blacks weren’t even accused of rape, much less guilty of it.

David Mindich: When it was charged, rape was charged only after the lynching.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

David Mindich: She began to systematically unpack and refute the lie that African Americans were lawless.

Nathan Connolly: Wells printed her conclusions in an unsigned editorial in her newspaper.

Ida Wells: Nobody in this section believes the old threadbare lie that Negro man assault white women. If southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves and a conclusion will be reached, which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

Nathan Connolly: Soon after she published that editorial a white mob destroyed her printing press in Memphis. They chased her partner’s out of town and she fled too. Wells went to New York and published an anti-lynching pamphlet called Southern Horrors. She was invited then to speak to audiences across the US and Britain, and she helped make lynching an international scandal.

Joanne Freeman: Now, somehow, Nathan, I don’t think you’re going to tell me at this point that those big establishment papers rushed to hire Ida Wells.

Nathan Connolly: I will not tell you that. Let Mindich tell it.

David Mindich: And The New York Times called her a nasty minded [inaudible 00:31:36] and called on sober Americans to repudiate her.

Nathan Connolly: Remember how those major papers of the day prided themselves on their objectivity? Well, Wells is reporting on lynching actually demolished a lot of that, because for all of their devotion to balance, it never occurred to the big presses to question the guilt of the lynching victims. So, in effect, they missed the real story.

Speaker 21: Nathan, I’m confused. I mean, here’s this woman trudging through dangerous landscape to collect facts, to find evidence. How is it that these so called objective New York Times can critique that?

Nathan Connolly: Well, when you have a press room that has all white men and you don’t have a set of diverse perspectives about something as simple as whether or not a crime was committed it really leaves you out of position when somebody else comes on the scene with new evidence.

Speaker 2: So her advocacy is what made her more objective.

Nathan Connolly: It didn’t necessarily make her more objective, but it made her more effective. And that, I think, is a very important distinction, right? If objectivity is thought of as being the gold standard in this period and there’s a way in which, you know, kind of perceived or projected distance from the issues, somehow made the account more true, what Ida B. Wells basically showed is that by caring enough to put, again, feet on the ground, to ask the questions, to find ways to get to the bottom of things because, frankly, she cared about black life, she ended up writing better journalism. Right? It wasn’t that it was necessarily-

Speaker 2: More objective journalism you might say.

Nathan Connolly: Well, it wasn’t emotionally distant. It just was more accurate. Yeah.

Speaker 2: But it was a journalism that put a whole set of facts-

Joanne Freeman: I was about to use the word fact. I was going to say, they don’t like her facts so they attack her motives.

David Mindich: The New York Times was often using the same criticisms of Wells that it used against Pulitzer and Hearst for being kind of sensational journalists. And it’s almost as if white reporters couldn’t fathom that African Americans were being terrorized by whites in the south. I mean, that probably would go against their concept of America as being a fair country.

Joanne Freeman: Nathan, I have a question. I’m actually curious. How much did Wells work actually change the myths that were circulating about lynching?

Nathan Connolly: Well, according to David Mindich, it took the white mainstream press decades to get around to recognizing Wells’ investigative work. Black Americans, as a point of contrast, recognized almost immediately that what Wells was doing was digging up the truth.

David Mindich: Frederick Douglas said to Ida B. Wells, you know, “Until I read your reporting, I had thought that African American crimes contributed to lynching.” So, you know, if Frederick Douglass, arguably the leading 19th century civil rights figure, had bought into these lies you know that this was a widespread pervasive belief that just basically everyone believed.

Nathan Connolly: Ida B. Wells was restoring reputations, and in many cases he vindicated African Americans who had not only been murdered, but who I’ve been dishonored by false accusations.

Joanne Freeman: She also preserved their deaths for our historical record.

Lisa Lenore: My name is Lisa Lenore and I am an ancestor of one of the men listed in Ida B. Wells’ work on lynching.

Joanne Freeman: Wells reported that Samuel Woods, Lenore’s great, great grandfather, had been lynched “without reason.”

Lisa Lenore: I think that when people see names in the paper they just think, “Oh, it’s someone’s name,” But they don’t realize that there’s families that are attached to these names and hopes and dreams and so many aspirations. So when she put that in this document, that was so powerful for us as a family to really reconnect with this portion of our history that we were not, we did not know about because it was so painful. It was in the background, but to have it documented just really elevated it even more so for me.

Joanne Freeman: Lenore, a former reporter, says that she draws inspiration from Wells as an investigative journalist.

Nathan Connolly: It’s really a twin legacy. Wells was a pioneer of investigative and advocacy journalism.

Paula Giddings: Well, one of her phrases was, she said, “The people must know before they can act,” and so what her overarching objective was always to inform people about what was happening in a way that would help them to act.

Nathan Connolly: Paula Giddings is a historian at Smith College and author of Ida, A Sword Among Lions.

Joanne Freeman: David Mindich also help tell that story. He’s a professor of media studies and journalism at Saint Michael’s college in Colchester, Vermont, and the author of Just The Facts, How Objectivity Came To Define American Journalism.

Brian Balogh: You’ll find our complete Backstory archive with hundreds of stories and discussions that Backstoryradio.org. Funding from the WK Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and Backstory change the narrative of race and representation. Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the national endowment for the humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Johns Hopkins University, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 23: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia, Ed Ayers is this professor for humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.