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

B. Anthony in her redbrick house in Rochester, New York. The two maintained a relationship, though Anthony’s organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was increasingly adopting racist rhetoric in an effort to woo southerners to the cause.

Wells-Barnett noticed an odd tone in Anthony’s voice as she pronounced “Wells-Barnett,” one she interpreted as distaste.

“Miss Anthony, don’t you believe in women getting married?”

“Oh, yes,” Anthony said, “but not women like you who had a special call for special work. . . . I know no one better fitted to do the work you had in hand than yourself.” The suffragist added that Wells-Barnett’s activism and writing had fallen off since she’d married and, rightly so, as her thoughts were probably with her children. It was, Anthony said, necessarily a “divided duty.”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett with her son in 1896

Ida B. Wells with her first son, 1896 (Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.) Used with permission.

What Wells-Barnett felt she couldn’t say in response was that organizations hadn’t been able to fund her activism as Anthony had been funded. On her trip to Washington to advocate for the family of the postmaster who had been lynched, she’d run out of money, and she and her husband covered the expenses themselves. She needed more support, so an organization like the Afro-American League seemed like a good idea. At the meeting she was elected secretary, and commented, sounding both resigned and energized, “despite my best intentions, when I got back home to my family I was once again launched in public movements.”

First, the tool to measure wind speed blew away. Then the rain gauge went. Then everything on the roof. The Local Forecast official watched in increasing anxiety as his instruments vanished, one by one. Sunshine recorders, thermographs, clocks—all gone. At John Sealy Hospital, patients grabbed their bedding to keep it from floating away. Winds stripped the roof off the Tremont Hotel and tossed bricks and stones “like they were little feathers,” according to one guest.

In the first few hours after the hurricane tore through Texas’s barrier islands in September 1900, killing six thousand people, it was “as easy to get into Galveston . . . as to Mars,” according to Winifred Black, who had rushed to the scene to report for Hearst. Journalists were banned. But she tucked her hair under a boy’s cap, stepped into boy’s shoes, heaved a pick on her shoulder, said she was a construction worker, and climbed into a small boat headed from the mainland across the bay.

On the deck, they moved over the water, now calm and eerily quiet with stars overhead. As the boat approached Galveston, bodies floated by. When it landed, the city was dark, the ground “slimy with the debris of the sea.” Picking her way past pools in the middle of streets and the campfires of the newly homeless, holding her breath against the smell, Winifred talked to the survivors. She expected tears, but everyone seemed numb. At a hotel, the clerk mechanically repeated there were no rooms, then someone else said there were plenty of rooms, just no water.

Her dispatches, the first from the wrecked city, showed the country the flooded homes, the drowned children. She reported on the official response, interviewing a US marshal, who admitted there was nothing they could do with the bodies but stack them in piles and burn them. The city was under martial law, and he had stationed men on street corners to shoot looters. (Disconcertingly, she repeated his assertion that none of the looters were Americans, but rather “negroes” and southern European immigrants.) She interviewed the mayor, who commandeered some able-bodied residents for cleanup and sent others to feed themselves at relief stations. She talked with a general who was dismayed at the appearance of a woman on the scene. He requested she ask her readers to donate money and disinfectants. Most of all, she reported the shock in the wake of a large-scale natural disaster. At the Aziola Club across the street from the hotel, she met a man who had been stuck under a pile of debris for four hours while friends walked past: “He told us what he was thinking about as he lay there with a man pinned across his chest and two dead men under him. He tried to make his story amusing and we all tried to laugh.”

After filing her stories in the middle of the night through a telegraph office in Houston, Winifred Black returned to her hotel, where stacks of telegrams awaited her, detailing the supplies that were on their way. Now that she’d dressed as a man and reported on a disaster, Hearst asked her to organize the relief effort. And she did, rallying to his cause as ever, arranging for cots in a high school to house the homeless, buying dishes, meeting doctors from Chicago at the Houston train station. It was a new century, coming at the country like a wall of water set to unmoor the past, requiring roles as yet unimagined, and she was ready to take them on.

Chapter 18

1900–Present

Vanishing Ink

Our journalism has accomplished more than can now be estimated; in fact not until careful biographers make special studies drawn from the lives of the pioneer journalists, shall we or those contemporary with them ever know the actual meed of good work accomplished by them under almost insurmountable difficulties.

—Victoria Earle Matthews

In 1965, a hundred years after Elizabeth Banks, Elizabeth Jordan, and Kate Swan were born, Truman Capote stunned readers with the story of two men who killed an entire family in Kansas for a profit of only a few dollars. The series started with the Clutters going about an ordinary day—baking a cherry pie, feeding a horse an apple core—on a collision course with two disgruntled men who’d heard jailhouse rumors of a rich farmer and his full safe. Magazines throughout the 1950s and ’60s, flush with cash in the way New York newspapers had been in the 1890s, paid reporters to do in-depth,