A Lioness Roared—Ida B. Wells and a War on Lynching

                            Ida B. Wells, undaunted.

 

The word to describe Ida B. Wells was fierce.  The word more commonly used, formidable, is entirely inadequate for a life of defiance and struggle that began in slavery during the Civil War and ended just before the New Deal.  Along the way she was the associate or opponent—sometimes both the with the same person—of Fredrick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony, Francis Willard, Jane Adams, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Dubois, Alice Paul, and Marcus Garvey.  She exposed the lynch mobs running rampant in the Jim Crow South,  helped found the NAACP and half a dozen other important organizations, pioneered the Great Migration from the rural South to Chicago and other Northern industrial cities and demanded equal voting rights for women and African-Americans.  When she died it was as if a visceral force of nature had suddenly vanished.

Wells was born in slavery as the Civil War was rapidly marching toward the end of servitude on July 16, 1862 on a plantation in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  Her parents were among a sort of slave elite, spared the drudgery of the fields and by in large the lash.  Her father, James Wells, was a master carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Warrenton Wells, was a prized cook.  Both were literate and began to teach their daughter as soon as she was big enough to hold a book.

After emancipation, James Wells became a known Race Man, a vocal leader among his people and ambitious for himself, his family, and his race.  He managed to attend Shaw University, now Rust College, in Holly Springs for a while.  He was a leading member of the local chapter of the Loyalty League, a kind of Republican Party auxiliary in support of Reconstruction and opposed to the Ku Klux Klan.  He spoke for Republican candidates and his home was a center for political action, but he never himself ran for office.

If the family’s politics were firmly Republican, mother Lizzie made sure that young Ida was brought up in the firm Christian principles of the Baptist faith.

From the beginning she showed a fierce independence and a quick temper at perceived injustices.  Her parents enrolled her at Shaw, but after a few months was expelled for a sharp exchange with the college president.  She was sent to visit her grandmother to cool down while her father tried to mend fences.

Ida’s nurturing and stimulating home was shattered in 1878 while on that visit.  She got word that her parents and an infant brother were all struck down in a devastating yellow fever epidemic that swept the South.

Orphaned at 16, she resisted efforts to parcel out five other younger siblings to relatives.  She determined to keep the family together.  Ida took a job teaching in segregated schools, working at a distance from home and coming back on weekends and holidays while her paternal grandmother cared for the children.  From the beginning she was outraged that as a Black teacher, her salary was $30 a month, less than half the pay of whites. 

After a few years to improve her lot, she moved with most of her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee, the bustling economic capitol of the Mississippi Delta, and the home to a large and sophisticated Black community.  By 1883 she was employed by the Shelby County School District in nearby Woodstock.  During the summers she studied at Fisk University across the state in Nashville and she also frequent visited family in Mississippi.

So Ida was a veteran train rider.  She knew the conditions of segregation in the cars well that had taken quick root after the Supreme Court had struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 the previous year.  That act had banned discrimination on public accommodations in interstate commerce—railroads. 

On May 4, 1884 Wells was ordered out of her seat by a conductor to make room for a white passenger.  She refused to be relocated to the smoking parlor and had to be dragged from the train by two or three men.  Almost 50 years before Rosa Parks, Ida would not submit so passively to arrest.

Cartoonist Kate Beaton depicted Ida B. Wells's defining moment on a train in her Hark! A Vagrant.

Back in Memphis she hired a prominent Black attorney to sue the railroad and wrote about her experience and cause in the Black church newspaper The Living Way. Despite her attorney being bribed by the railroad to sabotage her case, Wells won a $500 judgment.  The state Supreme Court later overturned the verdict and ordered her to pay steep court costs.

But the event made her a hero in the Black community and launched her on a secondary career as a journalist and crusader.  In addition to The Living Way, she was hired to contribute articles to the Evening Star.  She was an outspoken commenter on race issues while continuing to teach.

In 1889 Rev. R. Nightingale of the Beale Street Baptist Church invited Wells to become co-owner and editor of his anti-segregationist newspaper, Free Speech and Headlight.  With the end of Reconstruction and the dawning of the Jim Crow era violence against Blacks to “put them back in their place” was escalating.  Wells made a specialty of documenting outrages.

In March of 1892 the three proprietors of the thriving People’s Grocery Store in Memphis, which was seen as competition and an affront to white businesses, were attacked by a mob and dragged from their store.  A crowd from the community gathered to defend the men and three of the white attackers were shot.  Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, all personal friends of Wells, were arrested and jailed.  A mob broke into the jail and murdered the men.

Wells had been out of town at the time of the attack.  But she rushed home and began writing furiously.  Finally, she concluded that if the leading business people in the Black community were not safe from lynching nobody was.  Sadly and reluctantly she advised her readers:

There is, therefore, only one thing left to do; 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 when accused by white persons.

Receiving daily death threats Wells armed herself with a pistol.

Three months after her friends were lynched a mob attacked and burned the offices of Free Speech and Headlight.

                                            Well's classic lynching expose made her famous

She took up the cause of exposing and fighting lynch law with a vengeance and unmatched passion.  Speaking to women’s clubs around the country about her documented research on how widespread it had become, Wells raised enough money to publish a pamphlet,  Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases. Later she documented the atrocities in detail in an even more shocking book, The Red Record, which made her a celebrity.  \

Ida also breached the taboo topic of sex, repudiating the popular myth that many lynching were to protect pure white womanhood from predatory Black males.  She document that most interracial sexual liaisons were not only voluntary, but were initiated by whites, women as well as men. 

Sooner rather than later she had to take her own advice.  In 1893 she relocated to Chicago, the tip of the spear of the Great Migration which would fill northern cities with southern Blacks.  She continued to speak out on lynching and contributed to black newspapers. 

But she did not confine herself to the issue of lynching.  She had been drawn to Chicago by the World Columbian Exposition.  She was soon collaborating with Fredrick Douglas in urging a Black boycott of the Fair in protest to discrimination in hiring construction workers and more skilled workers—Blacks were only hired for the most menial tasks and as waiters and porters.  She contributed to the pamphlet, Reasons Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.  More than 20,000 copies were circulated to fair visitors.

Wells launched an extensive speaking tour which took her to many northern cities and to visits to England to promote her anti-lynching campaign.  She was greeted as a hero in London.  She also met and was impressed by the leading English Suffragettes.  While in town she became embroiled in a bitter public newspaper exchange with another visiting American reformer, Francis Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who asserted that Blacks were not ready for or deserving of equality until they gave up drinking, which she said was epidemic. Wells, herself a teetotaler, refuted the charges in none too temperate language.

In 1895 Wells married the editor of Chicago’s first major Black newspaper, Chicago Conservator, Ferdinand L. Barnett.  Barnett was also a lawyer and former Assistant States Attorney.  They had met shortly before her departure from Memphis when Barnett served as her pro bono attorney in a libel case.  She became step mother to his two children and the devoted couple had four more.  She continued her public career but frankly sometimes had difficulty balancing home and other commitments.

                                    Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett with her children in 1909.

Well’s interest in women’s issues was almost as strong as her devotion to her race.  She felt the two causes were not only complimentary, but inseparable.  In 1896, Wells founded the National Association of Colored Women, and also founded the National Afro-American Council. She also formed the Women’s Era Club, the first civic organization for Black women which was later renamed for its founder.

The latter organization brought her into close collaboration with Jane Adams and they jointly campaigned against the segregation of Chicago Public Schools and on other reforms. 

Her frequent lectures on behalf of universal suffrage attracted the attention and admiration of the aging founder of the movement, Susan B. Anthony.  When Wells had to dial back some of her commitments for a while after the birth of her second child, Anthony publicly lamented the loss.

In 1909 she was one of the prominent leaders to join with W.E.B Dubois, Mary White Ovington and others to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  However her name was left out of publicity about the founding and she was one of the few principle founders not to get a prominent office in the new organization.  Dubois claimed that Wells asked not to be listed, and later corrected the founding story.  Few people, least of all Wells herself who was not one to hide her light under a bushel, believed the story.  There was frankly a kind of rivalry between two of the best known and most militant Black leaders both of whom had risen to prominence as journalists and muckrakers.  Despite the snub, Wells remained active in the organization and for his part Dubois published her articles in The Crisis.

The always outspoken Wells was not afraid of controversy within the Black community and movement.  She was an early and outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington, the figure often held up by the white establishment as the modest model of Black leadership for demanding few concessions from whites and advocating self-improvement through education. 

She also drew the wrath of many black leaders by praising Marcus Garvey for his message of economic self-sufficiency for Blacks and was one of the few to publicly defend him when he was accused of mail fraud in a Federal indictment in 1919.  Despite the criticisms, her embrace of Pan-Africanism and particularly the Back to Africa aspects of Garvey’s movement was limited.  She preferred to live and fight in the United States.  And after Garvey flirted with an alliance with the Ku Klux Klan in the early ‘20s so that “each race could flourish,” she could not stomach further association with anyone who could ally with lynchers.

Ida Wells-Barnett did not mellow with age.  She remained opinionated, defiant, and radical.  Black leaders who hoped to curry favor with white politicians and business executive distanced themselves from her.

But positions like these limited her influence among Black leaders who hoped to mollify white suspicions.  It could crop up even in organizations that she founded.   She was once denied a speaking role at a convention of the National Association of Colored Women because delegates feared her radicalism would result in bad press.

Wells threw her support to Alice Paul’s militant faction of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and with her friend Jane Adams interceded with the conservative national leadership of the organization to approve the giant Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington , D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural in 1913.  She marched with a contingent of Black women.

By the 1920s Wells was semi-retired from public life, having given up public lectures and most organizational duties.  She could still be counted on to fire off a fiery article or editorial when an issue moved her.  She mostly dedicated herself to her husband and family and to meticulous research for an autobiography she was writing.

Once in a while she responded like an old fire horse to an alarm.  In 1930, disgusted that neither major party had any program to relieve the great distress in the Black community caused by the Great Depression, she ran as an independent for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly.  She was one of the first Black women in the country to run for election at that level.  Of course she lost.

When she died she was still working on her autobiography, Crusade for Justice.  A first edition had been published in 1928, but she was working on a greatly revised and expanded version, backed by meticulous research when she died. As one writer put it “the book ends in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word.”

Wells was widely mourned, especially in Chicago.

Mid-rise buildings in the Chicago Housing Authority's Ida B. Wells Homes shortly after they opened just before World War II.  From a promising beginning they deteriorated into a crime and drug infested ghetto by the turn of the 21st Century and were razed.

She was memorialized most obviously in the massive Ida B. Wells Homes, a wall of high-rise public housing along with mid-rises and row houses built by the WPA in 1939-41 for the Chicago Housing Authority.  Always intended for Blacks from the slums of the South Side, the Homes deteriorated into a gang violence ridden symbol of urban failure and were razed in stages between 2002 and 2011.  Most of the residents never new a thing about the woman the buildings were named for.

                                    Wells was honored in 1989 with this Black Heritage USPS stamp.

Wells’s fame has been surprisingly limited for one so deeply involved in so many social issues over such a long and critical time.  She mostly gets a footnote mention in histories for her anti-lynching crusades.  The academic guardians of American history, at least as it is presented to impressionable high school and college students, favor far more moderate voices than that of Ida B. Wells.

Perhaps they are still a little afraid of her after all this time.  Certainly not surprising in a country where a third of the voting age population regards Kamala Harris as a raging radical and America hater.

The Cup Cake Downfall of Dr. Koch, the Consumption Bug, and Popular Culture

                        Dr. Robert Koch at work in his laboratory.

Consumption, as it was then widely known, was a pervasive and enduring near world-wide epidemic that had no identifiable beginning or foreseeable end.  It brought slow, sure death to millions.  Most pervasive among the urban poor crowded together in fetid slums and the lowest levels of the rural peasantry whose large, multi-generational families often lived together in crowded hovels.

But consumption was no respecter of class privilege.  Those who read biographies of notables from the 17th to early 20th Centuries as well as literature from the same period are struck by the frequent references to the White Plague and its devastating effects.  Take, for instance, just the highly educated and largely affluent literary elite of Boston and the New England Renaissance.  Ralph Waldo Emerson saw a beloved brother, his child bride Ellen Louisa, and other friends and relatives succumb to the disease.  Theodore Parker was just one of several other leading figures of the Transcendentalist movement who died of it.  It was suspected to run in families—we would call it hereditary today—largely because devoted family members would tenderly nurse stricken kin giving them the long, close exposure we now know is necessary to transmit the disease.

In the 1938 weeper Three Comrades Margaret Sullivan dies beautifully, with self-sacrificing heroism of consumption in a mountain sanitarium leaving behind her grieving husband Robert Taylor, and his surviving World War I comrade Franchot Tone who also worshiped her.  Tragic death by consumption was a frequent theme of novels, plays, and film for generations.

The very memory of the disease haunted people even after it was on its way to being controlled.  Every movie goer knew that a cough in the first reel was certain foreshadowing of a tragic death bed scene in the last.

Consumption was commonly assumed to rise spontaneously, be caused by miasmas or foul air—and thus to be treatable by exposure to clean, fresh air in sanitariums away from the city—or, as noted, be hereditary.

On March 24, 1884 Dr. Robert Heinrich Herman Koch, Germany’s most distinguished physician and the Father of Microbiology published a paper sweeping away all of those suppositions and rendering them mere superstitions and as outdated in medicine as bleeding.  Consumption, or as he called it tuberculosis, was caused by a bacterium which he had isolated and named Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Dr. Koch, of course, could not offer a cure for the dread disease, but by proving that it was a communicable infectious disease he laid the groundwork for eventual effective public health preventative measures and eventually treatment.  Infection rates began to decline in Europe and North America after World War I.  But it wasn’t until the development of the antibiotic streptomycin in 1948 that an effective treatment of the active illness was achieved.  That was followed by other effective antibiotics.

The development of a Tubercular skin test led to the discovery that many more people carry the infection in a latent, but communicable form.  Only 10-15% of those with latent infection get the active disease, generally when the immune system has been weakened by other illness, injury, and infection, or due to chronic malnutrition. 

By the turn of the 21st Century rates of active tuberculosis infections in the advanced industrialized nations had plummeted to near zero.  Most new reported cases involved immigrants and visitors.  Even high rates of infection in the Third World were coming down, albeit slowly.  Then in 2007 international rates began a sharp increase, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia.   Increases are blamed on the rapid development of anti-biotic resistant strains, tuberculosis as a secondary infection in those with HIV/AIDS, over whelmed and underfunded public health services in desperately poor and often politically unstable countries.  Drug resistance has even caused rates to begin to creep up in Europe and the U.S.

Internationally there were in 2012 8.6 million active chronic cases were, 8.8 million new cases diagnosed, and 1.20–1.45 million deaths, most of these occurring in developing countries.  Of these about 350 thousand occurred in those also infected with HIV.  That means that tuberculosis today is far more deadly than the widely reported panic infections of recent years until the Coronaviris struck down 2.7 million over the last 18 months.

Deadly Tuberculosis bacteria first isolated and identified by Dr, Kosh using the techniques and protocols that he invented and which are still the standard for microbiological research.

But back to Dr. Koch.  His breakthrough discovery, for which he was honored with the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1905, was the result of years of work in microbiology and the development of his famous Four Postulates—four conditions, all of which must be met, that prove any disease is directly caused by an identifiable microbe.

Robert Koch was born in Clausthal, Hanover, Germany to a middle class family on December 11, 1843.  A very bright child, he reportedly taught himself to read from his parent’s books and magazines before he entered school in 1848.  At gymnasium—the equivalent of high school but with higher academic standards than in America—he excelled in math and science.  Koch entered the University of Göttingen at age 19 where he studied natural science for two years before switching to medicine.

Even as an undergraduate Koch’s proclivity for research and laboratory work drew notice.  He was asked to assist Jacob Henle, a noted anatomist who had published a pioneering theory of contagion in 1840, to participate in his research project on uterine nerve structure.  The next year he was conducting independent research into succinic acid secretion at the Physiological Institute culminating in his lauded dissertation. Koch graduated medical school in January 1866 with the highest honors and a bright future ahead of him.

In the summer of 1867 Koch married Emma Adolfine Josephine Fraatz and they had a daughter, Gertrude, the following year.  In 1870 he was called away from his established medical practice and family to serve as a surgeon in the Franco-Prussian War.

Dr. Koch examining a sheep for anthrax.

After the war Koch turned his attention to research in various plagues which he was convinced were communicable diseases.  His first break through came with anthrax, the deadly disease that annually did major economic damage by infecting herds of cattle and other domestic ruminants.  He identified the cause, the bacteria Bacillus anthracis.  He also discovered that spores of the bacteria could remain dormant for long periods of time and become activated under optimal circumstances.  Koch used microscopy, including dyeing his samples for examination on a slide, and identifying agar as an ideal culture medium in which to grow specimens for examination.  These became the standard techniques for microbiological research to follow.

Even more important was his development of the Four Postulates based on his experience with anthrax.  The postulates are

1)      The organism must always be present, in every case of the disease.

2)      The organism must be isolated from a host containing the disease and grown in a pure culture.

3)      Samples of the organism taken from pure culture must cause the same disease when inoculated into a healthy, susceptible animal in the laboratory.

4)      The organism must be isolated from the inoculated animal and must be identified as the same original organism first isolated from the originally diseased host.

Even using more advanced equipment and techniques than Koch had available, modern epidemiologists employ these same criteria and methods.

Dr. Koch about the time he gained fame for his breakthrough identification of the anthrax pathogen, 

The isolation of Bacillus anthracis was the first time in history a specific microbe had been identified as the cause of a disease and thus gave strong support to the still controversial germ theory and was a nail in the coffin of outdated ideas like spontaneous generation.

Koch was widely acclaimed for his discovery and it led to his appointment as a professor of medicine and an administrator at Berlin University.

He next turned his attention to a disease that regularly erupted, especially in semi-tropical and tropical regions in devastating epidemics—Cholera.  Koch collected samples and did field research during epidemics in Egypt and India.  He isolated and identified Vibrio cholera.  It turned out that in 1854 Italian anatomist Fillipo Pacini had isolated the same bug but had not widely published his findings nor definitively identified it as the cause of Cholera.

On the strength of these achievements Koch was recruited as an advisor to the Imperial Department of Health in the newly consolidated German Empire.  It was during this time that he performed his research on tuberculosis and published his result in 1882.  It was the apex of a brilliant career.  Not only would he be awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery but also the Prussian Order of Merit in 1906.  In 1908 with support of a gift of 500,000 gold Marks from American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie the Robert Koch Medal and Award was established to be awarded annually to the scientist who does the most to advance research and discovery in microbiology.  The criteria of the judges is said to be, “What would Robert Koch be working on if he was alive today?”

Dr. Koch created a scandal when he divorced his wife of 25 years to marry his much younger mistress, actress Emma Hedwig Freiberg.

In 1893 he ended his 25 year marriage to Emma after becoming involved with a beautiful and much younger actress, Hedwig Freiberg who he had been seeing as early as 1889.  Indeed his scandalous involvement with her may have led to a not entirely voluntary retirement from Berlin University in 1890.  Koch married Hedwig after his divorce.

Had it not been for the scandal Koch might have been as celebrated in America as his contemporary, the Frenchman Louis Pasteur. Certainly their accomplishments and advancement of modern medicine were at least comparable.  But the deep Puritanical strain of Americans would never allow that level of adoration for an open and unapologetic adulterer.

In the 1930 film classic The Blue Angel, nightclub singer Lola Lola--Marlena Dietrich--was the cause of the downfall and ruin of a distinguished professor--Emile Jannings--said to be modeled on Dr, Koch.

Their story is said to have inspired the 1930 German film Der blaue Engel—shot simultaneously in an English version, The Blue Angel—and released by Paramount in the U.S.  The movie featured the fall of a distinguished professor played by Emile Jannings when he becomes infatuated by night club singer Marlene Dietrich in the memorable role that made her an international star.  The movie was based on Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat published in 1905 when Koch’s scandal was still in people’s minds. 

Ironically Jannings would go on to portray Koch is a German 1939 bio-pic.  The Nazi-era film was a propaganda piece celebrating the achievements of good Aryan science.

Luckily Koch’s fall was not as complete or lethal as the professor in the book and movie.  He accepted his major awards with Hedwig at his side.  She remained there until he died on May 22, 1910 as the health spa of Baden-Baden of a heart attack at 66 years of age.  He had been in declining health for years.