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

wreckage. Telegrams and letters sent to her in New York carried the same message: if she valued her life, she shouldn’t come back. And these were the notes from friends. She was stranded.

Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, who had been publishing her work for several years, told her: “Well, we’ve been a long time getting you to New York, but now you are here I am afraid you will have to stay.”

So she did, writing for the New York Age, at first smaller pieces, and then, on June 25, 1892, putting together a lengthy article called “The Truth About Lynching,” elaborating on her claim that miscegenation laws and prejudice made it impossible for unions of mutual passion to be acknowledged. Based on extensive investigations of individual lynchings, Wells marshaled story after story to support her argument that, in many cases of supposed rape, white women were sleeping with Black men willingly. In one case, a woman said the man in her bedroom was only putting up curtains; in another, the woman insisted it wasn’t an interracial affair as she, too, was Black. In another, a minister’s wife declared her lover was actually her rapist. The offence lay not in the crime but in the race and sex of the participants, Wells argued. White men raped Black women with impunity. In addition: “They could and did fall in love with the pretty mulatto and quadroon girls as well as black ones, but they professed an inability to imagine white women doing the same thing with Negro and mulatto men.”

From her May editorial onward, Wells discussed women’s bodies, capable of interracial lust and affection, in a way her opponents found intolerable. Her banishment from Memphis was devastating, exiling her from those she loved. But it was also liberating: “I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely.”

Victoria Earle Matthews, a Brooklyn-based reporter who had been profiled along with Ida B. Wells in the Journalist’s 1889 feature on African American women, recognized Wells as a talented writer in desperate need of money and support. Matthews’s own work, to this point, had been in a different vein. She wrote, mostly under pseudonyms, for white-owned papers like the New York Times, the Herald, the Mail and Express, as well as Black-owned papers like the New York Age and the Washington Bee. Born into slavery to an enslaved mother, Matthews was roughly four years old at the end of the Civil War. Her mother fled north and arranged to bring her children after her, so she had grown up in New York. At nineteen, she married a coachman who, according to the census, couldn’t write. She sought out education wherever she found it. Peers described her as a “zealous, watchful spirit,” and there was no doubt she could get things done. “No writer of the race is kept busier,” noted the Journalist.

One of her earliest journalistic efforts was modesty itself. As “editress” for the “Home Circle” feature of the Washington Bee, she filled her columns with housekeeping tips. Silk scarves placed on the mantel or a Japanese scrap basket decorated with a ribbon brighten the home. Reinforcing sock heels will mean they need less darning. But, unlike Bly or Banks, Matthews saw writing about domesticity as significant—a way for Black women to build a family home—something destroyed by generations of slavery. She hoped, too, these kinds of articles might lead to something else, both for her and others of her race. In her inaugural column, she urged women to overcome their reluctance to write: “I do not think our women will object when I say comparatively speaking, very little journalistic work has been done by us in the past; not due to a lack of ability, but a natural timidity, which I hope is dying out.” Like other women stepping into this new territory, she was wary to appear to be asking too much.

Victoria Earle Matthews in the Journalist, January 26, 1889

Victoria Earle Matthews portrait, Journalist, January 26, 1889 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

But she’d begun to expand her scope, writing a “New York Letter” for the National Leader. She used her column to advocate for Black men to run for office, encourage the Empire Women’s Republican Club to discuss political issues, question why all the speakers at the unveiling of Boston’s Crispus Attucks monument had been white. “Peace and security are very good things to have,” she wrote, “but there are other things quite as necessary to the proper enjoyment of life.” What would happen, she wondered, if African Americans were given a platform, or took one?

Seeing an opportunity to build just this kind of platform, Matthews gathered friends and acquaintances and organized a benefit for Ida B. Wells in October 1892.

At Lyric Hall in Manhattan, Wells entered a room where every detail seemed crafted to demonstrate good feeling. Event programs looked like copies of her Free Speech newspaper, now defunct. Her pen name “Iola” was projected in lights on the stage platform. Organizers presented her with flowers, a pin in the shape of a pen, and $500 to underwrite a book of her lynching reporting: Southern Horrors, Lynch Law in All Its Phases.*

After songs and speeches, it was her turn to speak. Wells left her handkerchief on her chair on the stage and rose to stand in front of the hundreds of supporters, mostly women, many very accomplished. Doctors, writers, assistant principals crowded the hall. It was a sea of strangers, welcoming in white sashes but strangers nonetheless. Wells had taught and written, but she hadn’t given a lot of lectures. Nervous, she kept the text of her speech in front of her, though she knew it by heart.

She started in on the story of her friend, Thomas Moss, who owned the thriving People’s Grocery Company outside of Memphis, and the fight among boys playing marbles that turned into a