When and Where I Enter

Paula J. Giddings

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061984921
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

“History at its best—clear, intelligent, moving. Paula Giddings has written a book as priceless as its subject”—Toni Morrison

Acclaimed by writers Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter is not only an eloquent testament to the unsung contributions of individual women to our nation, but to the collective activism which elevated the race and women's movements that define our times. From Ida B. Wells to the first black Presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm; from the anti-lynching movement to the struggle for suffrage and equal protection under the law; Giddings tells the stories of black women who transcended the dual discrimination of race and gender—and whose legacy inspires our own generation. Forty years after the passing of the Voting Rights Act, when phrases like “affirmative action” and “wrongful imprisonment” are rallying cries, Giddings words resonate now more than ever.

Part I

INVENTING THEMSELVES

…she had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may well have invented herself.

—TONI MORRISON

I

“To Sell My Life as Dearly as Possible”: Ida B. Wells and the First Antilynching Campaign

Before they took his life, they asked Thomas Moss if he had anything to say. “Tell my people to go west,” he told his abductors. “There is no justice for them here.”¹ With those final words, Thomas Moss and two of his friends, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, were lynched a mile outside of Memphis, Tennessee. A newspaper account of the mob-murder pointed out that the men did not die without a struggle. McDowell had tried to wrestle a gun from the hands of one of the killers. When the Black man’s body was recovered, the fingers of his right hand had been shot to pieces; his eyes were gouged out.

The lynching of March 9, 1892, was the climax of ugly events in Memphis. From the time the three Black men had gone into business for themselves, their People’s Grocery, as it was called, had been the target of White resentment. The store, which sold food and miscellaneous items and became a gathering place for Memphis Blacks, represented, after all, a desire for economic independence. The start-up capital for the grocery had been provided by Moss, a postman who was the city’s first Black to hold a federal position. He worked in the store evenings, while his partners worked there during the day.

For Whites the most galling thing about the People’s Grocery was that it took away business from a White store owner who had long been used to a monopoly of Black trade. The White proprietor initiated against the Black businessmen a series of provocations that culminated in an attack of armed thugs sent to raze the grocery. The attack came on a Saturday night, when the store was full of Black men—armed Black men—who repelled the invaders and shot three Whites in the process. In short order Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were arrested along with one hundred other Blacks charged with conspiracy.

The White press in Memphis whipped the community into a frenzy over the incident. The Black men were painted as “brutes” and “criminals” who victimized “innocent” Whites. If the wounded men died, Blacks were warned, there was going to be a bloodletting. The threat hung heavy in the air. Whites were permitted to enter the jail where the Blacks were interned to “look them over.” Outside, Blacks stood vigil to discourage the possibility of mob violence.

The vigil ended when it was reported that the Whites would recover from their gunshot wounds—for the Blacks thought their friends would now be safe. They were wrong. In a predawn raid, Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were taken from their cells, put on the switch engine of a train headed out of the city, and lynched. In the angry aftermath of the killing, a judge issued an order for the sheriff to shoot any Black demonstrator who seemed to be “causing trouble,” and prohibited the sale of guns to Blacks. Emboldened by the order, and unappeased by the death of the three men, armed Whites converged upon the People’s Grocery, helped themselves to food and drink, then destroyed most of what they couldn’t consume or steal. Creditors auctioned the brutalized remnants and the store was closed down on an ominous note of finality.

If the incident had occurred in any other time or place, it might have been set down as just another dreary statistic. Lynching (legally defined as murder committed by a mob of three or more persons) of Blacks had been on the rise for the last decade. In 1892, the year of the Memphis murders, there had been 255 lynchings, more than in any previous year.² But the deaths of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart would open a new chapter in the racial struggle, for they spurred two women to dedicate their lives to the fight against lynching and the malevolent impulses that underlined it. Two women named Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells.

Terrell was living in Washington, D.C., when she heard the terrible news. Born Mary Church in Memphis, Tennessee, she had been a friend of Thomas Moss since childhood. Terrell had seen him less than a year before in Memphis, at her wedding. That had been such a happy time. She had just returned from two years of study in Europe, and it was so good to see her Memphis friends again—especially Moss. For a wedding present he gave her a set of elegant silver oyster forks.

Moss’s death was particularly unsettling for Terrell at this time in her life. She was twenty-nine and, though expecting her first child, had not found peace of mind in domestic tranquility. That she always wanted to work had been a point of contention between Mary and her father since her graduation from Oberlin eight years before. A former slave who became one of the wealthiest Blacks in the country, Robert Church wanted his daughter to live the life of a gentlewoman. Ladies didn’t work, he always told her. But Mary continually defied that notion. She taught at Wilberforce University and later at Washington Colored High School, despite her father’s threats to disinherit her. In D.C. she met Robert Terrell, principal of the highly touted Black public school. She married him and settled in Washington, where the future of her husband—a Harvard graduate and lawyer bound for a municipal judgeship—was assured. The marriage and difficult pregnancy had almost persuaded Terrell to try to live the life of a “lady,” as her father would put it. But then came the news about Thomas Moss.

She sought out an old family friend, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and together they secured an appointment with President Benjamin Harrison at the White House. They implored him to condemn lynching in his annual address before Congress. Douglass’s plea was especially eloquent, Terrell later wrote, but like every President before Franklin Roosevelt, Harrison refused to take a public stand against lynching.

For Terrell, though, the lynching of her friend, followed not long after by the death of her newborn infant in a segregated, poorly equipped hospital, erased forever any idea of leading the traditional life of a lady. She plunged headlong into work, embarking upon a vibrant activism that would continue until her death, sixty-two years later. In a short span of time, she served as president of the country’s most prominent Black cultural organization, the Bethel Literary and Historical Society; was appointed to the Washington, D.C., Board of Education, becoming the first Black woman to serve on a citywide board; and co-founded the Washington Colored Women’s League.

The implications of Moss’s death were seared into Terrell’s memory by an editorial in the Black Memphis newspaper Free Speech. “The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival,” it said in part.³ The words were written by Ida B. Wells, columnist and co-owner of the paper. She had been so stunned by the lynching that she had had to force herself to write a cogent editorial for her readers. In her ten years as a journalist, and in the nearly half-century of writing that followed, her columns on the Moss lynching were the most painful. A woman who never made friends easily, Wells considered Thomas Moss and his wife, Betty, her very closest friends. She was godmother to their little girl, Maurine; Betty, she knew, was pregnant with her second child.

As a widely respected journalist, Wells’s words were taken to heart by the beleaguered Black community. Her first editorials suggested that Blacks, vulnerable to the whims of White lawlessness, should take Moss’s advice to “save our money and leave 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….”⁴ Those residents who could, did just that. Hundreds of Blacks began leaving Memphis for Kansas, Oklahoma, and points west. Ministers escorted whole congregations; entire families began their exodus to unknown territories, taking only what they could carry. Betty Moss stayed in Memphis until her child was born, and then moved to Indiana.

So many Blacks took the advice of Wells that the White business community began to panic. “Business was practically at a standstill,” Wells recalled in her autobiography, “for the Negro was famous then, as now, for spending his money for fine clothes, furniture, jewelry, and pianos and other musical instruments, to say nothing of good things to eat. Music houses had more musical instruments, sold on the installment plan, thrown back on their hands than they could find storage for.”⁵ Wells also helped instigate a Black boycott of the city’s trolleys, causing the transportation company to join the list of businesses beginning to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy.

Ida B. Wells didn’t believe in the ultimate efficacy of passive resistance, however. She purchased a pistol, determined to “sell my life as dearly as possible,” and suggested that other Blacks do the same. “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every home,” Wells told her community. “When the white man…knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.”⁶

But Wells would go beyond these responses to the Moss lynching. What had occurred in Memphis was only a part of a larger phenomenon that threatened Blacks throughout the country. Her entire life, it seemed, had prepared her not only to understand but to confront the broader issue head on—despite the consequences.

Her life paralleled Mary Church Terrell’s in many ways. The two women were born a year apart, and both were daughters of former slaves. Their fathers were sons of their former masters; both were men who filled their daughters with racial pride—and the spirit of defiance.

Settling in Memphis after the Civil War, Robert Church was the owner of a saloon which was ransacked in the Memphis riot of 1866. He was shot in the head and left to die, but miraculously survived. The threat of continued violence did not stop him from testifying against the men in a federal inquiry, or from being politically active in the community thereafter. He was a “race man,” as one would have been called then.

James Wells, Ida’s father, was also a race man, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where Ida was born. He, too, was a man who refused to be intimidated. A carpenter who worked for the town’s leading contractor, Wells refused entreaties to “sell” his newly won vote. The refusal cost him his job, and without hesitation—or regret—he moved his family and went into business for himself. It was a lesson not lost on his oldest daughter. The fathers of both Wells and Terrell married energetic and determined women. Louisa Church established a fashionable hair salon in Memphis which provided the family with their first home and carriage. Elizabeth Wells thrust most of her energies into the rearing of six children, making sure they understood discipline and the need for education, both secular and religious. “Our job,” Ida, the firstborn, wrote, “was to learn all we could.”⁷ Like so many freedmen and women, the Wellses believed deeply in the sanctity of family life. James and Elizabeth were among the many who, though married as slaves, renewed their vows “officially” as persons of free will. Their ideals made the event of 1878 all the more tragic.

That year was a turning point for both families. A yellow fever epidemic raged through the Mississippi Valley leaving death in its wake. Both of Ida’s parents were consumed by the disease within twenty-four hours of each other, and their nine-month-old baby died as well. Friends tried to help out, offering to take the children in. But Ida Wells refused to have her five surviving brothers and sisters separated; her parents would “turn over in their graves,” she felt, especially since one of her sisters, crippled from a spinal disease, would have been put into an institution. So at the age of sixteen, Wells ended her childhood to become the sole support of her young family. She left Rust College and, lying about her age, got a teaching position in a rural school. For two years Wells maintained a grueling schedule of riding a mule to the school each week and returning on weekends to take care of the domestic needs of her siblings, until at last relatives in Memphis could take the family in.

The epidemic changed the lives of the Churches too, but in another way. Robert Church sent his wife and daughter to New York but remained in Memphis, where residents were deserting their properties or selling them at depressed prices. Church, speculating that the city would eventually recover, bought up all the property he could. The gamble paid off in handsome dividends. Church reputedly became the first Black millionaire in the South.

Both women lived in Memphis in the 1880’s. Wells attended LeMoyne Institute and received a license to teach elementary school. During summer vacations she took teachers’ training courses at Fisk University. Although never a close friend of the Churches she had brief associations with both Mary and her father. Once, in dire need of funds, Wells wrote Robert Church, asking him for a loan. She was in California and did not have the fare to return to Memphis in time for the opening of the school semester. In the letter Wells assured him that she would repay the loan, with interest, and that she was a woman of reputable character. She wrote to him, Wells said, because he was “the only man of my race I knew could lend me that much money [$150] and wait for me to repay it.”⁸ Robert Church sent her the needed fare.

Wells also met Mary Church briefly, probably just before the latter went to Oberlin. On Ida Wells, who was serious-minded and disdained social frivolities, the meeting left a lasting impression. Mary Church was “the first woman of my age who is similarly inspired with the same desires, hopes and ambitions,” she observed. “I only wish I had known her long ago.”⁹ At the time, Wells hardly realized that their lives would diverge, only to intersect periodically, sometimes contentiously, for the remainder of their lives. Both had distinct roles in the struggle ahead, roles shaped by the contrasting resonances of their young adult years.

While Mary Church was studying the “Gentleman’s Course” at Oberlin—a curriculum that included classical Latin and Greek—Wells underwent a different sort of education. It was 1884, and Ida B. Wells took her accustomed seat in the “Ladies’ Coach” of a train bound for Memphis from Woodstock, Tennessee. But by that year, customs in the South were changing. A conductor demanded that Wells leave the first-class section for the smoking car. When she refused, the conductor attempted to force her from her seat—a mistake, he quickly realized when he felt a vicelike bite on the back of his hand. He called more conductors to his aid, and to the standing cheers of the White passengers on the train, the three men dragged the petite Black passenger out of the car.

A humiliated and angry Wells returned to Memphis and immediately engaged the sole Black lawyer in the city to bring suit against the railroad. The attorney seemed to dawdle on the case, and Wells suspected that he had been bought off by the authorities. She got a White lawyer and had her day in court. Before a judge who was an ex-Union officer, the determined Wells won the decision. The case prompted a White paper, the Daily Appeal, to write the first of many articles about the city’s most controversial resident: A DARKY DAMSEL OBTAINS A VERDICT FOR DAMAGES AGAINST THE CHESAPEAKE & OHIO RAILROAD ran its headlines on Christmas Day, 1884.

Needless to say, Wells was ecstatic about the victory. Inaugurating her journalistic career, she wrote an articl...