Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

other writers featured by the Journalist were not stunt reporters. The tightrope the stunt reporters walked—an ostensibly respectable woman dipping into disreputable waters, only to resurface unscathed!—wasn’t available to Black women. The genre was tied to white-owned newspapers that rarely hired Black reporters or covered their communities. And when Black subjects did appear, they were often depicted as destitute or criminals rather than artists, intellectuals, or activists. These papers, and the way they wrote about Black people, were the target of frequent criticism of Wells and writers in her circle.

Though not a stunt journalist, Wells actively experimented with voice and persona. This is clear from the diaries she kept between 1885 and 1887. Diarists, especially young ones, write themselves into being, playing with handwriting styles, turns of phrase. In her journal, Wells tried on roles, literally and figuratively, aware that none quite fit. She wanted to be better—spending less money on clothes, writing wonderful sentences, wasting less time looking for lost keys—but she also took pleasure in a rich social life. Despite teaching and taking care of younger siblings (they had all been orphaned by yellow fever when Wells was sixteen), she played a scene as Lady Macbeth for a literary society, attended baseball games, chatted and corresponded with a bevy of suitors. Noting that she enjoyed the company of men but didn’t want to get married, she wrote: “I am an anomaly to myself as well as to others.”

At the same time as she explored different perspectives, she had a sense of how the world should be, what justice looked like. In 1883, at only twenty-one, she defied the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company that sold her a first-class ticket but expected her to ride in the “colored” car. When a drunk white man entered Wells’s carriage, she got up and moved into the one designated for “ladies.” When asked to leave, because to the railroad “ladies” meant “whites,” Wells stood up for herself to the point of gripping the seat as the conductor dragged her out the door, ripping her sleeve. Then she sued.

One day in September 1886, just as she wondered whether a plot for a novel she wanted to write might be too sensational, she read a newspaper article that ignited a rage so powerful it tore through her diary’s often lighthearted tone. In Jackson, Tennessee, about eighty-five miles from Wells’s home in Memphis, a white woman had died of arsenic poisoning. When her Black cook was found to have rat poison in the house, the cook was arrested, dragged from jail, and murdered. Her naked body was hung up for everyone to see. “O my God!” Wells wrote. “Can such things be and no justice for it?” Outrage undergirded an account she wrote for the Gate City Press. And then, almost immediately, she feared punishment for voicing these thoughts, for unleashing her anger. But her need to write outweighed her worry about consequences. “It may be unwise to express myself so strongly but I cannot help it,” she wrote in her journal. The article might be used against her, she concluded, “but I trust in God.”

In early 1889, after her lawsuit, which she’d won in the lower court, had been overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court; after the husband confessed that he’d been the one who poisoned his wife and that the Black cook was innocent; after she’d put away the diary, Wells decided to take a concrete step toward forging the future she wanted—both personally and politically. She invested in the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, becoming editor and part owner. This would, she thought, give her the freedom to speak her mind. And it did, at least for a while.

In Memphis in March 1892, three men were lynched on the outskirts of town, and Wells covered it for her paper. One of the murdered men was her friend, the congenial postal carrier and grocery store owner Thomas Moss, father of her goddaughter. It was clear to Wells that the killers were prompted by economic interest—they wanted to shut down a competing grocery store. Out of her grief, Wells used her newspaper, the Free Speech, to suggest Black Memphis citizens should abandon the city, turning their backs on “a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” Many agreed and moved to Oklahoma, leaving white business owners with lost revenue and resentment. Aware of the swirling anger, hers and others’, she bought a gun.

Two months later, she wrote an even more forceful Free Speech editorial that detailed eight additional lynchings and called the repeated claims of Black men raping white women a “thread-bare lie.” While some in Lizzie Borden’s community couldn’t imagine a Christian white woman stepping outside the bounds of the law, Wells suggested that southern white women often slept with Black men willingly, because they desired them, and then lied about it. Interracial marriage was illegal, so when these women suspected a neighbor might have spotted their lover at the door or worried their child would have dark skin, they said they had been raped. Wells’s unsigned editorial warned that if white men kept obsessing about sex between Black men and white women, “a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

The day the article ran, in the early summer of 1892, Wells was vacationing on the East Coast. Alarming reports from Memphis began to trickle in. A rival newspaper, the Scimitar, said the author of the Free Speech editorial should be tied to a stake, branded, and mutilated. She’d said what it was absolutely forbidden to say. Her business manager, warned of a gathering mob, had fled. Men were watching the train and her house, waiting, murderous, for her return. Her newspaper office had been destroyed—type smashed, chairs broken, a threatening note left in the