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

no real reason, she disguised herself, telling a man leaning against a fence drinking water from a dipper that she was unfamiliar with the place: “As a stranger, I could better get the information I wanted.” Cars chugged down the road and telephones interrupted conversations, but the creek was the same, the oak trees, the yellow brick church that awed her as a child. Wandering in, she listened as the preacher described how the world was created in six days and disparaged anyone who thought differently as in league with Satan. What would have become of her if she’d stayed? she wondered. Then she went out to the car, where the hearty college student who was her driver paged through Ernest Haeckel’s lecture on the views of Darwin. After spending a lifetime searching for the definition of “American” and where she might fit within it, the contrast between church and parking lot answered some fundamental question about her country. “Where else in the world could such an incident as this have taken place?” she wrote.

Private to the end, though the author of three memoirs—Campaigns of Curiosity, Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl,” and The Remaking of an American—Banks demanded in her will that her papers and photos be destroyed, her body burned, and the inscriptions rubbed off her jewelry. She kept her secrets.

IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT, “IOLA”

In 1920, Ida B. Wells-Barnett returned to the South for the first time since her friend was killed and her printing press smashed so viciously twenty-eight years before. She took a train from Chicago to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she met up with the wives and mothers of men who had been jailed during a “race riot” in Elaine. Several of the men had been sentenced to death. She joined the women as they prepared to visit the prison. And though it wasn’t her usual method, she donned a disguise, obscuring her own outsize reputation.

“Boys come and shake hands with my cousin who has come from St. Louis to see me,” one of the women said. The guards didn’t look twice as the famous reporter stepped up to the bars and began conducting interviews. In response to her questions, the jailed men told her their version of events. She pieced together a far different story than the one the papers told, laying bare the cold calculations undergirding the heated violence. It was a good cotton year, and the Black men’s arrest had been an excuse to strip them of pigs, chicken, wagons, furniture, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cotton, they told her. Of their accusers, Wells-Barnett wrote: “They are now enjoying the result of these Negroes’ labor, while the Negroes are condemned to die or stay in prison twenty-one years.” While she was at the jail, the men sang songs, some of which they had written, but she told them the lyrics focused too much on death and forgiveness.

“Pray to live and believe you are going to get out,” she advised. And five years later, in part as a result of her efforts, they did.

Throughout her life, along with raising four children, Wells-Barnett continued to fight against lynching, for opportunities for African Americans, and for women’s suffrage, founding the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913. Sometimes her campaigns collided. At the March 1913 parade in Washington DC, when the National American Suffrage Association instructed Black women to march separately from white so as not to upset some delegations from the South, Wells-Barnett ignored the command and marched with the Illinois group, refusing the place they’d deemed fit for her. The parade marked a shift in the suffrage movement, a turn toward radical actions—White House picketing, arrests, and hunger strikes—a tide of anger that would finally sweep the Nineteenth Amendment to ratification in 1920. Wells-Barnett’s commitment to her vision of the way things should be never wavered, a fact she detailed in her autobiography, aptly titled Crusade for Justice.*

ELIZABETH (COCHRANE) SEAMAN, “NELLIE BLY”

The fall of 1914 found Nellie Bly on a hospital train filled with wounded soldiers, traveling from Przemysl to Budapest. At each station, she watched eager young men headed to the front and saw those returning with hacking coughs, cholera, mangled limbs. Men on the train died in anguish every night. Planes buzzed overhead. Her fifty-year-old feet hurt. At one stop, soldiers ordered a ragged woman to get them some chickens. When she brought four and told them the price, they killed the birds, underpaid her, and mocked her distress. It was just the kind of thing Nellie Bly would notice.

Bly was well out of reporting at the time of the Spanish-American War and the backlash against yellow journalism, but tumultuous life circumstances dragged her back into the profession. For a while, everything seemed to be going her way. After she and Seaman reconciled, he put the Manhattan mansion in her name, made her president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, and willed her all his assets, so that when he died in 1904, her money problems finally seemed to be over.

She attempted to parlay her energy and newspaper experience into running Iron Clad and a second business she launched, the American Steel Barrel Company, modernizing and innovating, adding electricity, acquiring patents, building modern offices. In factories, whose conditions she knew intimately from her journalism, Bly paid a salary rather than by the piece, installed showers with free towels, added a library and bowling alley. But the company was soon mired in financial scandal. The manager, chief cashier, and their allies had forged checks for up to $1.6 million dollars, draining Iron Clad to pay for gambling debts, saloon bills, a yacht. Creditors demanded repayment. During four long years of protracted legal battles, Bly fought for the company, an experience that turned her definitively into a suffragist, as she saw the only help men might offer women in business was the kind predators might offer prey. Iron Clad declared bankruptcy.

At this low point, Arthur Brisbane, a friend from when they were both