Ida B. Wells and ‘American Atrocities’ in Britain

Abstract

This article examines the lectures and reception of Ida B. Wells during her 1893 and 1894 anti-lynching tours of Great Britain. Focusing on the rhetorical strategies Wells used in her lectures on these tours, and the way in which she capitalized upon the attention she received in the press, I argue that these tours show us that Wells was at the center of British reform rather than marginalized or a lone militant as she would later become in the United States. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Ida B. Wells and dAmerican AtrocitiesTin Britain
Teresa Zackodnik
Department of English, HC3-5, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E5
Available online 8 June 2005
Synopsis
This article examines the lectures and reception of Ida B. Wells during her 1893 and 1894 anti-lynching tours of Great
Britain. Focusing on the rhetorical strategies Wells used in her lectures on these tours, and the way in which she capitalized
upon the attention she received in the press, I argue that these tours show us that Wells was at the center of British reform rather
than marginalized or a lone militant as she would later become in the United States.
D2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
In 1893 and 1894 Ida B. Wells undertook two anti-
lynching lecture tours of Great Britain. While histor-
ians and scholars agree that Wells’s anti-lynching work
would not have had the effect it did in the United States
had she not first drawn international attention to the
issue on these British lecture tours, her British lectures,
interviews, and the press coverage they garnered have
received scant critical attention. Instead, Wells’s writ-
ings and American responses to them have been the
focus of scholarship on her life and work, which often
underscores her position as a lone figure, a militant who
became alienated from the very reform circles whose
work she was instrumental in advancing.
1
And while
the marginalized militant is an image Wells herself
cultivated, particularly in her autobiography Crusade
for Justice (Duster, 1970), she was very much in the
thick of British reform and a figure of note in British
newspapers during these lecture tours. Attending to
Wells’s work and the press coverage it received on
these tours, then, shows us a rather different activist
than the marginalized figure she would later become.
Not simply an outspoken woman who alienated fel-
low reformists by insisting upon her independent
initiatives for change, Wells addressed British audi-
ences by invoking the reform rhetoric, debates, and
causes of the day and gained the support of existing
organizations in order to advance her anti-lynching
work. Of particular importance in understanding
Wells’s lectures are the rhetorical strategies she used
in order to keep a British public focused on
bAmerican atrocitiesQin the midst of their own con-
cern for bwhite slaveryQand the working and living
conditions of the English poor. Wells called upon her
British audiences to connect the old reform of aboli-
tion to the new one of anti-lynching by drawing on the
codes of domesticity and melodrama once common to
abolitionist rhetoric, and by alluding to contemporary
discourses and debates such as eugenics and the age
of consent. While such strategies recalled great reform
efforts of the past and positioned her appeals at the
center of British reform concerns of the moment, the
subject of her lectures – rape and lynching – risked
0277-5395/$ - see front matter D2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259 – 273
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alienating her audiences. Moreover, press coverage
tended to single Wells out as an oddity. Frequently
focusing on her appearance and manner, and praising
her for her bwomanlyQand earnest appeals, the British
press distinguished Wells not only as an exemplary
woman but also as the attractive although highly
unusual product of American bmiscegenation.QIn
the midst of such press coverage, Wells was able to
manage the risks her appeals presented and to keep
her work a focus of both reform circles and popular
interest alike. The way Wells positioned her appeals
and responded to an often sensationalistic attention to
bAmerican AtrocitiesQand herself tells us much about
the negotiations African American women undertook
as they worked to speak across the color line to
predominantly white British reform movements and
a larger public.
Ida B. Wells’s entrance into anti-lynching agitation
is by now infamous, thanks in no small part to the
incendiary editorial she published in the 21 May 1892
issue of the Memphis paper she co-owned with J.L.
Fleming, the Free Speech. In early March of 1892
Calvin McDowell, Will Stewart, and Thomas Moss
were lynched by a white mob said to be as small as
ten men. Prominent black Memphians who were
members of the People’s Grocery Company cooper-
ative, a black-owned store competing with a white-
owned grocery in Memphis’ racially mixed neighbor-
hood the bCurve,Qthese men were accused of injuring
three deputies in an armed stand-off incited by
rumors of an impending mob raid on their store.
Despite two weeks of hearings, no one was indicted
or tried for their murder (McMurray, 1998). Wells
was close friends with Thomas Moss and his widow,
and the Free Speech covered the lynchings and hear-
ings extensively. Yet it was not until Wells ran an
editorial in the May 21st edition, questioning the
well-worn claim that rape motivated lynching, that
her own life was threatened by the specter of a white
mob. Wells wrote: bNobody in this section of the
country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro
men rape white women. If Southern white men are
not careful, they will over-reach themselves and pub-
lic sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will
then be reached which will be very damaging to the
moral reputation of their womenQ(Wells, 1991a,b,p.
17). The editorial ran while Wells was visiting Phi-
ladelphia and New York. News soon reached her that
Memphis’ Evening Scimitar, assuming she was a
man, had called for her lynching: bIf the negroes
themselves do not apply the remedy without delay
it will be the duty of those he has attacked to tie the
wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the
intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him on
the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a
surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shearsQ
(McMurray, 1998, p. 148). Wells did not return to
Memphis; her partner Fleming fled the city; and a
mob destroyed the Free Speech office. Wells would
later write in her autobiography that the Memphis
lynching challenged her own understanding of such
violence: bLike many another person who had read of
lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant
to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular
and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over
the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that
perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the
mob was justified in taking his lifeQ(Duster, 1970,
p. 64). The Memphis lynching and the destruction of
the Free Speech taught Wells that lynching was eco-
nomically motivated and rarely fueled by its frequent
bjustification,Qthe alleged rape of a white woman.
2
Rather, lynching was a violent act intended to intim-
idate and control African Americans, a spectacle
designed to bremindQthem that they were not the
equals of Southern whites nor were they citizens
who could expect their nation’s protection.
Far from silenced by this intimidation, Wells
turned the threats against her into an attention-grab-
bing pseudonym, accepted T. Thomas Fortune’s offer
to join his paper the New York Age, and earned the
support of black feminists and club women, all of
which enabled her to launch a national and interna-
tional anti-lynching crusade. Fortune was one of the
bbest-known African American editorsQin the late
nineteenth century, was supportive of women journal-
ists, and edited one of the few black papers bthat had
subscribers from all across the United StatesQ
(McMurray, 1998, p. 90). Wells bpurchased a one-
fourth interest in the Age in exchange for her Free
Speech subscription listQ(Giddings, 1986, p. 30). It
was a profitable partnership for both parties, and
Wells’s bexileQfrom Memphis gave her a much
wider readership in the Age than she ever would
have achieved with her own paper. Her opening
foray with Fortune’s paper was to tell of the Memphis
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273260

lynchings and the threats against her life in the 25
June 1892 edition. Titling her article bExiled,QWells
would refer to herself by this name in subsequent
lectures and anti-lynching pamphlets, calling herself
not only an exile from the South but from the nation, a
bland of libertyQas she sarcastically put it (Schechter,
2001, p. 23). bExiled,Qcovering the front page of the
Age,bsold ten thousand copies ... far more than any
other publication in the history of the African–Amer-
ican press.QFortune would later tout it as a bdsensation
... referred to and discussed in hundreds of news-
papers and thousands of homesTQ (Schechter, 2001,p.
54, 85). Requests for its publication as a pamphlet
soon followed (Thompson, 1990) in a year when
lynching reached a peak with bsome 241 people, 66
percent of whom were African AmericanQ(Schechter,
2001, p. 81) dead at the hands of the mob.
Close on the heels of her article, Wells’s speech to
over two hundred elite black women of New York,
Boston and Philadelphia at the Lyric Hall in New
York on 5 October 1892 further solidified her reputa-
tion among African Americans as a bheroineQ(A
distinguished woman honored, 1892). Organized by
Victoria Earle Matthews, Sarah Garnett and Maritcha
Lyons, the event raised over six hundred dollars,
much of which was given to Wells to fund her anti-
lynching efforts. Attended by highly visible and
respected African American women like Josephine
St. Pierre Ruffin and Gertrude Mossell, Wells’s ad-
dress was given the stamp of respectability at a time
when white Southern (McMurray, 1998; Schechter,
2001), and occasionally white Northern (McMurray,
1998; Schechter, 2001),
3
papers were impugning her
and the black press was not always solidly behind her
(McMurray, 1998; Schechter, 2001; Streitmatter,
1994). Wells was subsequently invited to speak else-
where, and began what would be a bfrantic tour of
eastern citiesQ(McMurray, 1998, p. 174).
4
The text of
her Lyric Hall address closely followed her New York
Age article, and Wells promptly published these in
pamphlet form as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All
its Phases in late October 1892.
5
Shortly after the
highly publicized lynching of Henry Smith in Paris,
Texas by a mob numbering roughly 10,000 for alleg-
edly assaulting a four-year-old white girl (McMurray,
1998), Wells’s work drew the attention of Isabelle
Fyvie Mayo and Catherine Impey, Scottish and En-
glish activists, who invited Wells to speak in Britain,
expenses paid.
6
Wells accepted and left the United
States on 5 April 1893 to lecture to Scottish and
English audiences. Wells saw these addresses as an
opportunity to reach white audiences and the white
British press, and to encourage the largest importer of
American cotton to censure the disenfranchisement,
segregation, and lynching of African Americans in the
South. She arrived in Liverpool on April 13 and by
the 21st had begun lecturing in Aberdeen. Her tour
gained such attention from English journalists and
subsequent coverage by their African American coun-
terparts that a recent Wells biography dubbed her bthe
most discussed individual in the black press—aside
from Frederick DouglassQ(McMurray, 1998, p. 189).
During both these lecture tours, Wells addressed
audiences who she knew might find the facts she
presented so sensational they risked being offensive,
and who might simply conflate her appeals with those
of other reformist causes of the day. Wells spoke to
British audiences about the lynching of black men, the
raping and lynching of black women and girls, and
white women as sexual subjects. She addressed a
public who had read of and/or engaged in debates
over the age of consent in the 1880s and had been
incensed by W.T. Stead’s bThe Maiden Tribute of
Modern BabylonQ(1885), which exposed the bwhite
slaveryQof London brothels and its traffic in working-
class white girls. Speaking of the rape of African
American women and girls, and of white women in
consensual interracial relationships, Wells challenged
her listeners’ understanding of bsexual dangerQto
accommodate more than the narratives of the seduc-
tion and entrapment of white women and girls to
which they had become accustomed. For Wells’s
audiences, white working-class women and girls
were the victims of older, privileged (middle- and
upper-class) men in the trade of bwhite slavery.QSex-
ual danger, as they understood it, neither included a
concern for the welfare of African American women
and girls, nor an awareness that black men could be
endangered by white women’s desire and white men’s
violent attempt to deny it. Moreover, Wells demanded
her audiences acknowledge that not all men were
privileged and that class was not the primary differ-
ence in power in the scenes she sketched. Challenging
existing notions of sexual danger as bwhite slavery,Q
Wells also had to contend with the way in which white
women were identified as either the victims of this
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273 261

moral panic or their potential saviours. While work-
ing-class white women and girls could be spirited
away into the btradeQat any moment, white middle-
class British feminists bcapitalize[d] upon [bwhite
slaveryQand] the volatile political conditions of the
1880s ... to gain access to a redefined public sphereQ
by participating in social purity campaigns (Walko-
witz, 1992, p. 7).
7
Wells risked losing a hearing, if not
alienating much of her audience, by speaking openly
of white women’s attraction to black men and by
insisting upon the very different bsexual dangerQ
lynching and rape represented for black men,
women, and children. In order to ensure that her
listeners did not simply accommodate accounts of
lynching in the United States to their existing under-
standing of imperilled white womanhood, thereby
seeing black men as potential threats to white Amer-
ican womanhood, Wells offered a frank analysis of
lynching that could risk the dismissal of her appeals
altogether.
bGraphicQand bharrowingQlectures: bAmerican
atrocitiesQon British platforms
Wells was aware that the subject of her addresses,
articles, and pamphlets could call her reputation into
question, given what her listeners described as the
bgraphic picture she gave of the brutal tyranny to
which the colored people of the Southern States are
subjectedQ(Hopkins, 1902, p. 208). Indeed, Wells’s
outspokenness and her nonconformity to dictates of
womanhood, whether by necessity or by choice, had
drawn criticism in America well before her anti-lynch-
ing agitation drew international attention (Gunning,
1996; McMurray, 1998; Schechter, 2001). The white
Southern press circulated rumours about affairs with
her male colleagues at the Free Speech (Gunning,
1996), and her work raised further suspicions and
censure after her British tours.
8
The white press,
both South and North, routinely impugned Wells in
attempts to neutralize her indictments of white racial
supremacy during these British tours, calling her bthe
negro adventuress of decidedly shady characterQ(Ida,
1893, p. 4), and bthe mulatress missionaryQ(Duster,
1970, p. 218 n.1). Wells would refer to such bfoul
tirade[s]Qas bringing bstronger supporters to the anti-
lynching cause than it perhaps would have had
otherwise,Qand would take them as opportunities to
respond with bfactsQof the blynching recordQ(Wells,
1894f,p.13).
If the dual and often conflicting imperatives of
being both a brace womanQand an boutspokenQactiv-
ist in the United States are registered in such
responses to Wells at home, British press accounts
also registered the risks of her work abroad. In addi-
tion to calling her descriptions of the lynching of
black men, women, and youth and the rape of black
women bgraphic,QScottish papers reported that
b[n]othing more harrowing has been for years related
from a Glasgow platformQ(Hopkins, 1902, p. 280).
English papers like the Liverpool Weekly Review re-
ferred to the accounts Wells offered as ba lamentable,
sickening list, at once a disgrace and degradation to
nineteenth century sense and feelingQ(Wells, 1894f,p.
13), and to lynching as bfiendish saturnaliaQ(A bitter
cry of black America, 1894). While Linda McMurray
speculates that the bdetails of ... lynching titillated the
Victorian public for whom frank discussions of vio-
lence and sex bordered on pornography,Qshe raises
this as a potentially balienatingQeffect on Wells’s
audiences (McMurray, 1998, p. 216), and does not
consider what effect such sensation may have had on
Wells’s work itself and upon her circulation on these
tours. Offering an answer to this question, Shirley
Logan highlights Wells’s use of descriptive detail to
invoke presence on her American anti-lynching tours,
which thereby bpersuade[d] audiences geographically
and emotionally removedQfrom American lynching
by bexhibit[ing] the actual sceneQrather than simply
narrating it (Logan, 1999, pp. 74, 72). However, we
also need to ask what risks are involved in bridging or
closing an emotional gap between audience and sub-
ject, and how Wells might have managed them. More-
over, given the bgraphicQcontent of Wells’s lectures,
however unimpassioned their delivery, we must con-
sider what it might mean to be a black woman on the
platform rendering present or bexhibitingQthe lynch-
ing of black men, women and children to predomi-
nantly white British audiences.
During her speeches in Scotland and England,
Wells unflinchingly focused her audiences on spe-
cific cases of lynching in the United States.
Accounts of her appearances suggest that her 1892
Lyric Hall address to African American women in
New York and her subsequent pamphlet Southern
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273262

Horrors (1892) formed the basis for Wells’s lectures
on this first British tour.
9
As in her pamphlet, Wells
presented lynching alongside the disenfranchisement
and segregation of African Americans in the South,
updating her lectures with accounts and statistics of
new lynchings. In Southern Horrors, Wells cited
twelve newspaper accounts of inter-racial relation-
ships, proving bthe assertion that there are white
women in the South who love the Afro-American’s
company even as there are white men notorious for
their preference for Afro-American womenQ(Wells,
1991a,b, p. 26). She went on to document the rape of
five black women – describing four of these as young
girls, little girls, or children – and the lynching of five
black men, two black women, and one fifteen-year-
old black girl. Finally, Wells closed with the lynching
of thirteen-year-old Mildred Brown of Columbia,
South Carolina, accused of poisoning a white infant
in her care (Wells, 1991a,b, pp. 44–45). Wells would
keep the assault, rape, and lynching of black women
and girls in focus during her speeches, as reports of
both her 1893 and 1894 tours noted in papers like The
Birmingham Daily Post (18 May 1893), The Westmin-
ster Gazette (10 May 1894), and Wells’s own bIda B.
Wells AbroadQcolumn in the Chicago Inter-Ocean
(Wells, 1894c, 1894e). During her 1894 tour, the
lynching of a woman in San Antonio, Texas b[w]ho
was boxed up in a barrel into which nails had been
driven and rolled down hillQ(Wells, 1894e, p. 16),
caught the attention of her audiences and was fre-
quently repeated in coverage of her speeches, by
Wells herself, or by those introducing her addresses
(A bitter cry of black America, 1894; Wells, 1894c,
1894e).
Such accounts of the rape of, and mob assaults on,
black women and girls refuted the notion that lynch-
ing bpunishesQthe black male rapist and importantly,
as Sandra Gunning (1996, p. 86) notes, bargue[d] into
public consciousness the black female body itself as a
primary site of white aggressionQ. Indeed, Wells read
the account of this San Antonio lynching to a gather-
ing of the Women’s Liberal Association of Bristol,
when members said bin their speeches [that they] had
imagined ... lynchings ... [answered] terrible crimes
perpetrated by Negro men upon white womenQ(Wells,
1894e, p. 16). Part of arguing the black female body
into public consciousness and making lynching and its
victims present to British audiences is also to be a
black woman on the platform, in the church pulpit,
and in the press. Wells’s account of her own threat-
ened lynching following her Free Speech editorial
was also part of these addresses (A bitter cry of
black America, 1894). Arguably facilitating her audi-
ences’ imagination and thereby closing that emotional
gap between bAmerican Atrocities,Q
10
as she titled
some of her talks, and British sentiment, Wells pre-
sented herself as potential lynch victim alongside
those she memorialized in her lectures.
However, neither the embodiment of a near-lynch
victim in Wells’s person nor that of actual victims in
the accounts she read are unproblematic appeals, since
as Simone Davis contends, lynching made its victims
the embodiment of or bmedium upon and through
which dthe lyncherTtransmits an economically moti-
vated, political messageQ(Davis, 1995, p. 83). Lynch-
ing’s message extended beyond its ostensible warning
to potential black rapists so that as public spectacle,
the mutilated bodies of its victims threatened African
Americans, both male and female, adults, youth, and
children, with violent consequences should they, too,
bstep out of place.QAfrican Americans who might
baspireQto more than subservience to whites were
btaughtQby such spectacles that an equally violent
fate awaited them. And as Robyn Wiegman has ar-
gued, detailed newspaper accounts of lynching con-
veyed and extended that message, so that spectacle
simultaneously functioned bas a mode of surveillance
by reiterating [lynching’s] performative qualitiesQ
(Wiegman, 1995, p. 91). Whether African Americans
who feared the mob ever saw the violence it exacted
was effectively rendered a moot point by the trans-
mission of lynchings’ details in the press and by word
of mouth.
Wells cleverly turned that spectacle and surveil-
lance extended by the white Southern press into a
technique that lessened the risk that her work would
be rejected as sensationalistic on these tours, or that
she, once threatened with lynching herself, would
become the sole focus of her audiences’ concern.
Wells’s use of quotation from white press accounts
of lynchings, which critics frequently read as part of
her objective style and the credible proof of what she
argued,
11
should also be considered as a strategic
counter to the risk she ran of offending or titillating
her British audiences with the violent spectacle of
lynching and rape. The graphic details of press
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273 263

accounts that formed what she called the bproofQand
bfactsQof her speeches come bout of their own
mouths,Qas she would say, not her own (Wells,
1991a,b, p. 150). Consequently, Wells appeared to
simply relate sensationalized white press descriptions
of lynchings to her audiences, rather than to represent
or evoke such violence herself. She could also be said
to balance that sensation with the rational appeal of
the bfactsQoffered by the statistics she quoted. Indeed,
Wells stressed that she presented facts and proof, that
bstatistics of lynchings proveQthe claim that rape
motivates lynching bis a falsehoodQ(Wells, 1894b).
She needed to avoid reducing the suffering and abuse
of African Americans to sensation and spectacle, par-
ticularly given lynchers’ use of such spectacle as
political message, yet her audiences had to know of
white supremacist violence in America if they were to
be moved to voice their opposition. Wells knew very
well that she spoke again and again to audiences who
had never heard of such atrocities or, if they had,
never conceived they could be true.
12
British press
accounts of her lectures register her growing impact
and a growing understanding of lynching as an
atrocity unlike others of which the British public
had yet known. Reports like The Scottish Pulpit’s
of audiences blisten[ing] ... with rapt attention to
cruelties and outragesQwithout compare (Hopkins,
1902, p. 280), indicate Wells’s success at insisting
upon the uniqueness of violences her listeners could
not condone.
Strategic appeals: bwhite slavery,Qabolition, and
lynching
Indeed, Wells addressed a public that from the mid-
1880s had been scandalized by another sensation,
bwhite slaveryQas moral panic. Stead’s bThe Maiden
Tribute,Qpublished in the Pall Mall Gazette from 4 to
10 July 1885, was, he claimed, the bfirst official report
of a sexual traffic ... in English girlsQ(Devereux,
2001, p. 1). His expose´ extended a rising concern
with prostitution to include the duping and kidnapping
of white working-class girls who became trapped in
London’s sexual underworld. Rendering his accounts
in melodramatic narratives and stressing the value of
virgin girls to bprocurersQin the btrade,QStead’s ac-
count of white slavery presented victims a British
public had yet to consider, conceiving as they did of
a foreign trade in adult, not child, female prostitutes.
bThe Maiden TributeQreached audiences well beyond
the Pall Mall Gazette: the telegraph enabled its cir-
culation on bthe ContinentQand in the United States,
while b[u]nauthorized reprints were said to have sur-
passed the one and a half million markQ(Walkowitz,
1992, p. 82). Stead’s work roused a public demon-
stration numbering 250,000 in Hyde Park and bforced
the passage of age-of-consent legislationQthat had
been bstalled in Parliament for years,Qraising the
age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen
years (Walkowitz, 1992, p. 64).
13
Wells was undoubt-
edly familiar with bwhite slaveryQand the rhetoric of
agitators for its babolitionQby the time of her two
British tours, given that bthe United States produced
what may be the biggest archive anywhere of white
slave material ... [in] newspaper reports, tracts,
pamphlets, and booksQbeginning in 1885 (Devereux,
2001, p. 2). Gabrielle Foreman notes that b[c]ensus
figures and surveys of the 1880s and 1890s charted
the swelling concern and affirmed that prostitution
was on the rise.QBy the 1880s binterest in and agita-
tion for Black rights had dramatically declinedQin the
United States, while bprogressive organizations and
their constituencies rallied behind anti-white-slavery
efforts... and dformer abolitionists ... joined forces
with bsocial purityQreformers to battle the new
slaveryT.... Increasingly, organizers distinguished
white slavery as a subset of ex-Black slavery or
positioned the two as equal evilsQ(Foreman, 1997,
p. 336).
14
Speaking in England Wells had to contend
not only with preconceptions of bwhite slaveryQas
sexual danger to white girls and young women and
social purity agitators as bnew abolitionists,Q
15
but
also with an emerging socialist representation of the
British working poor as the exploited white slaves of
capitalism (Devereux, 2001, p. 6). Attempts to draw
attention to exploitation or victimization beyond this
white lens would have to negotiate a public and
reformist focus on social purity and the
bemancipationQof the British working poor.
Wells’s turn to abolition in her American and
British speeches is notable for its attention to the
power of an existing discourse with both a history
and new meanings that might be remotivated or re-
vised for her purposes. While slavery and abolition
had become metaphors in social purity campaigns and
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273264

socialist literature, Wells sought to make abolition and
anti-lynching agitation analogous thereby returning
that rhetoric, as it were, to a renewed focus on the
rights of African Americans. She clearly knew that
referring as she did to abolition and its greats, like
bGarrison, Douglass, Sumner, Wittier, and PhilipsQ
(Wells, 1893, p. 347) could have a rousing affect on
white Northern audiences and those across the Atlan-
tic.
16
With Frederick Douglass as her supporter, Wells
had access to former British abolitionists like Eliza
Wigham
17
and Ellen Richardson on both of her Brit-
ish tours, and she paid visits to Canon Wilberforce
and the Clarks (Schechter, 2001, p. 101). Wells re-
peated this strategy of invoking abolition during her
second tour, writing an article for the New York
Independent entitled bLiverpool Slave Traditions
and Present PracticesQin which she made analogous
her work and bHenry Ward Beecher’s controversial
antislavery lectures in Liverpool before the Civil WarQ
(Schechter, 2001, p. 101).
18
Through her lectures in
both the United States and Britain, Wells worked to
foreground anti-lynching and anti-slavery as linked
reforms, the one a fulfilment of the other. In bLynch
Law in All Its Phases,Qher February 1893 address to a
predominately white audience at Boston’s Tremont
Temple a few months before she would begin her
first British lecture tour, Wells quoted William
Lloyd Garrison while likening those who bcannot
conceiveQof lynching to their b[a]ncestors... [who]
refused to believe that slavery was the dleague with
death and the covenant with hellT.... [T]he Nation
was at last convinced that slavery was not only a
monster but a tyrant.QWells continued: bThat same
tyrant is at work under a new name and guise. The
lawlessness that has been described here is like unto
that which prevailed under slavery. The very same
forces are at work now as thenQ(Wells, 1893,p.
344). As Patricia Schechter notes, bAfrican American
supporters [would later] pick up onQthese analogies
between slavery and lynching in their anti-lynching
work (Schechter, 2001, p. 110). Meanwhile, time and
again during her first British tour and her second,
Wells would insist that bthe lot of the coloured people
... is little better than when slavery was in full forceQ
(Duster, 1970, p. 91). She would then liken the cen-
sure of American lynching her British audiences
might offer to bthe criticism England levelled at
America before the war for pretending to democracy
while still holding to the old barbarism of slaveryQ
(Sentiment against lynching, 1894).
Wells more than simply reminded her audiences of
past British reform impulses in order to link them to
her current cause. She used two of abolition’s stron-
gest appeals, the sense of bmoral rightQand a concern
for violated domestic space. Early in her first tour,
Wells wrote the Birmingham Daily Post responding to
a local councillor’s letter to the editor that contended
there was no bground ... for British people to dictate
on questions of detail in the local police arrangements
of certain towns in the United StatesQ(A wearied
councillor’s protest, 1894). Wells was quick to point
out that lynching was far more than a local police
arrangement. She then went on to say that since the
American bpulpit and press ... remains silent on these
continued outrages... [i]t is to the religious and moral
sentiment of Great Britain we now turn.... The moral
agencies at work in Great Britain did much for the
final overthrow of chattel slavery. They can, in like
manner, pray and write and preach and talk and act
against ... the hanging, shooting, and burning alive of
a powerless raceQ(Wells, 1894d). This stress on moral
sentiment and moral agencies quite deliberately
invokes that earlier abolitionist emphasis upon aboli-
tion as a bmoral right.Q
Most often the outrages of slavery were conveyed
in representations of imperilled domestic space or
relations: families sold apart; children kidnapped
into slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850;
bondswomen denied the role of mother to their chil-
dren. Such attention to the domestic linked these
abolitionist appeals to existing discourses of sentiment
and melodrama, as Saidiya Hartman points out: bThe
crime of the trade was seen as a crime of the heart —
dthe outrages of feelings and affectionT.... Abolition-
ist discourse shared melodrama’s obsession [with]
virtue, virginity, and the sanctity of the familyQ(Hart-
man, 1997, p. 27). The abolitionist stress on moral
suasion made melodrama, sentimentalism and the
domestic particularly appealing for their opposition
between good and evil — slavery cast as sin could
be opposed to the moral right of its abolition. Signif-
icantly, these appeals also resonated with those of-
fered by Stead’s bMaiden TributeQin its focus on
young, unsuspecting girls lured away from family
and home by procurers who made their living by
satisfying the bimmoralQdesires of privileged men.
19
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273 265

As Judith Walkowitz notes, melodrama had been a
popular form in English radical politics since at least
the 1830s, and bparticularly appealed to female audi-
ences ... precisely because it foregrounded issues of
gender and power and highlighted the role of the
heroine, however passive and suffering she might
beQ(Walkowitz, 1992, p. 87).
This rhetoric, however, also implicitly positioned
the suffering slave, whether the bwhiteQslave of the
new abolitionists or the black slave of the old, as
virtuous, helpless, and in need of rescue. Such a
representation of black Americans is hardly one
Wells would have advocated, having already encour-
aged African Americans to practice bself-helpQby
withholding their trade from white-owned businesses,
refusing to use streetcars or the railway, withdrawing
their labor, leaving Southern states where the lynch
mob prevailed, and giving ba Winchester rifle ... a
place of honor in every black homeQ(Wells, 1991a,b,
pp. 40–42). Yet by emphasizing the rape and lynch-
ing of black women and girls, and ending Southern
Horrors and presumably many of her British
speeches with the lynching of thirteen-year-old Mil-
dred Brown, Wells brecontexutalize[d]Qlynching as
what Sandra Gunning has called ba state-sanctioned
violation of domesticity and femininityQ(Gunning,
1996, p. 87). Moreover, her depictions of many Af-
rican American rape victims as bgirlsQwere designed
to appeal to audiences shocked by revelations of
bwhite slavery,Qyet would also have challenged
them to see that sexual danger was not only threat-
ening white girls in England but African American
girls and women across the Atlantic. The significance
of such an appeal should not be underestimated since
lynching focused on white women, not black women
and girls, as the victims of sexual danger in the
United States. Strategically, Wells omitted the age
of rape, assault, and lynching victims she referred
to only as bgirls,Qwith the exception of beight-year-
old Maggie ReeseQand bpoor little thirteen year old
Mildred BrownQ(Wells, 1991a,b, pp. 27, 45). With
Britons agitating to raise the age of consent from
thirteen to sixteen years, and age of consent legisla-
tion across various states in America ranging from
seven to thirteen years, Wells’s black bgirlQand
bchildQvictims would surely shock her audiences as
extreme cases that exceeded their knowledge and
expectations. Looking closely at the way Wells struc-
tures the accounts of white violence against black
men and women in Southern Horrors, upon which
her British lectures were based, we see that she
frames the lynching of men with the rape and lynch-
ing of women and girls. With this framing, Wells
effectively sketches the black family – men,
women, and children – as the targets of white vio-
lence, thereby using an appeal to the racialized vio-
lation of domestic space to forward her argument. In
this kind of domestic appeal Wells both strongly
echoed abolitionist rhetorical techniques, and worked
to shift bnew abolitionistQappeals from their exclu-
sive white and working-class focus.
While scholars often characterize Wells as working
to bminimize [a] pathetic appealQin favor of ban
assertive and traditionally masculine personaQ
(Logan, 1999, pp. 86, 71),
20
her work with a combi-
nation of appeals, rather than any singular approach, is
overlooked. That combination of appeals might at first
seem contradictory. Wells’s recollection of the tears
she shed during her Lyric Hall address to African
American women as an bexhibition of ... woman’s
weaknessQshe sought to avoid is well-known (Duster,
1970, p. 80). Yet in her Inter-Ocean column, she
wrote of bthe tears rolling down my cheeksQduring
an address in Manchester as she heard someone in the
audience read a newspaper account of a woman
lynched in San Antonio (Wells, 1894c). Interestingly,
in her column Wells highlights, rather than omits, this
show of emotion. While her addresses, like Southern
Horrors, represented the lynching and rape of black
women and children through a domestic appeal that
had a strong affect on her listeners’ emotions, Wells’s
use of affect was further strengthened by her re-
strained style. Described repeatedly by the press as
speaking bwith a singular refinement, dignity, and
self-restraint,Qshe was said to bby this marvellous
self-restraint ... move us all the more profoundlyQ
(Armstrong, 1894). Wells’s seemingly contradictory
stand on revealing her emotions, and her efforts to
elicit her audience’s emotions while projecting an
image of self-restraint, indicate that she knew she
needed to work carefully to build and contain her
audiences’ empathy for black Americans. While af-
fective appeals to violated domesticity and melodra-
matic accounts of female victimization were familiar
to her British audiences, something Wells actively
worked to build upon, these were also appeals that
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273266

could result in a facile, empathic identification that
supporters, like Catherine Impey, had fallen into in the
past and might so again. In 1883 Impey had written
Frederick Douglass, saying that her trips to the United
States had caused her bsympathies [to be] keenly
alive,Qso that she could breally feel [herself] more
black than whiteQ(McMurray, 1998, p. 189). Impey’s
letter registers what Sadiya Hartman (1997) calls the
bdangers of empathy,Qevident in the responses prev-
alent amongst abolitionists and those moved by anti-
slavery appeals. bThe ambivalent... [or] repressive
effects of empathy ... can be located in the
dobliteration of othernessTor the facile intimacy that
enables identification with the other only as we dfeel
ourselves into those we imagine as ourselves,TQ writes
Hartman. bAnd as a consequence, empathy fails to
expand the space of the other but merely places the
self in its steadQ(Hartman, 1997, pp. 19–20).
Wells faced, then, the risk that empathy could
become identification, that the differences she delin-
eated between bwhite slaveryQand the lynching and
violent intimidation of African Americans would be
overlooked as these reforms came to be seen as anal-
ogous. A possible consequence of such empathic
identification was that bAmerican atrocitiesQwould
simply be compared to the conditions of working-
class Britons and girls trapped in bthe tradeQin order
to garner further attention for these reforms, rather
than understood in their own right. As a result, Wells’s
efforts to induce British reformists and the wider
public to exert pressure and influence on the United
States could go unheeded, as her audiences’ emotions
and resolve continued to be focused on the bwhite
slaveryQof Britain. This would be a particular risk, it
would seem, with those female members of Wells’s
audiences interested in social purity and bwhite
slaveryQfor the emancipationist opportunities it of-
fered them. bFeminist supporters of Stead used the
new dlicenseTto speak publicly on sexual matters to
voice their own fears about sexual danger and to
attack institutions of male power that encouraged
violence against women,Qdocuments Walkowitz.
bExclusion from the social contract, liberal feminists
insisted, made women vulnerable in public places.
They identified the doutlawed political condition of
womenTas the root cause of the crimes exposed in the
dMaiden TributeT; legal indifference and female eco-
nomic dependence, they charged, placed all women,
regardless of class, at riskQ(Walkowitz, 1992, p. 132).
Wells addressed audiences whose own investments,
particularly those in woman’s rights and social purity,
could make them more interested in analogies that
would amplify their own platforms for agitation rather
than join in her efforts to outlaw lynching in the
United States.
Significantly, Wells contained her audience’s po-
tential empathic identification through the very appeal
that elicited it. Her representation of African Amer-
icans as suffering a violated domesticity significantly
turns on its head the familiar bjustificationQfor lynch-
ing as well as narratives of the white slave’s seduction
and entrapment. In Wells’s writings and speeches the
violators of white domestic sanctity are white men or
women who blove the Afro-American’s company,Q
and particularly white women, who as seductive
bDelilahsQbetrayed bAfro-American SampsonsQ
(Wells, 1991a,b, pp. 26, 19). According to Wells,
the white race as family is betrayed repeatedly by
the white woman it claims is in need of protection,
an argument that significantly counters both white
supremacist and bwhite slaveryQrhetoric. In England,
as Cecily Devereux argues, Stead’s account of bwhite
slaveryQbmet with an immediate and spectacular re-
sponse ... because [he] had struck a chord amongst
Britons who were increasingly anxious about the
ability of ... the Anglo-Saxon draceTto maintain its
expanding empire ... [through] what eugenicists by
the mid-1880s were referring to as healthy racial
stockQ(Devereux, 2001, p. 14). The girl kidnapped
into prostitution and the rape victim were the unwill-
ing objects of desire for a non-reproductive or
bdiseasedQsexuality. However, Wells was representing
white American women as subjects, rather than the
objects, of just such a miscegenous, and so
bunhealthy,Qdesire. White women, conventionally
seen as the victims of such desire, were themselves
threatening the bpurityQof the bwhite race.QInvoking
both white supremacist and eugenics rhetoric, Wells
narrated American accounts of white wives of prom-
inent citizens, ministers, and physicians who imper-
illed the so-called sanctity and health of the white race
through their willing relationships with black men.
21
Wells highlighted the wording of the white press
accounts she offered which characterized such rela-
tionships as bfearful depravity,Qbrank outrage,Qand
bloathsome diseaseQ(Wells, 1991a,b, pp. 23, 21).
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273 267

Depicting the white family in the United States as
violated from within by its wives, mothers and daugh-
ters, Wells made it very difficult for her British audi-
ences to liken bwhite slavery’sQnarratives of
privileged men threatening white domesticity to the
dynamics of American lynching. She presented white
womanhood as a privileged and active agent in the
violation of black domesticity, rather than in peril and
in need of protection from the black male rapist.
Moreover, while the white woman violated the
white bfamilyQand race from within with her own
desire, white Americans and the mob were external
forces wrecking violence upon black domesticity from
without. Wells stressed that in their murder of fathers,
brothers, and sons and raping of mothers, sisters, and
daughters, the white mob and America’s most prom-
inent white citizens violated the sanctity of the black
family and outraged black womanhood. The domes-
ticity threatened by sexual danger in Wells’s accounts
was a black domesticity and the villains of the piece
were white men and women. Unique in her attention
to the victimization of black women and to the sexual
desire of white women, Wells gave voice to elisions
and taboos that served the interests and power of
white men within that larger network of violence
and intimidation in which lynching was a primary
tool.
Abgood-looking mulattoQof bodd racial
compositionQ
Wells marshalled reports of interracial desire and
sexual relations to not only invoke eugenics rhetoric
and recast familiar domestic appeals, but also, it
seems, to play on the sensation bmiscegenationQ
caused amongst the British public at the time. The
consequence would be the press coverage she sought
and a heightened attention to her bblackness.QWells’s
recollection of the second speech of her 1893 tour to
the Aberdeen Men’s Pleasant Saturday Evening meet-
ing indicates the interest raised by her argument that
bin spite of such laws to prevent the mixing of the
races, the white race had so bleached the Afro-Amer-
ican that a race of mulattoes, quadroons, and octor-
oons had grown up within the raceQ(Duster, 1970,p.
91). One of the other speakers of the evening was
unable to be present and Wells was asked to extend
her address by fifteen minutes. Wells’s reference to
miscegenation was preceded by her usual points on
bjim crow laws [and] ballot-box intimidation,Qand
followed by b[t]he cruel physical atrocities vented
upon my raceQ(Duster, 1970, pp. 90–91). Isabelle
Mayo, with whom Impey was financing Wells’s tour
and arranging her speaking engagements, bwas elated,
said that it was the best I had done, and urged me to
continue along those linesQ(Duster, 1970, p. 91).
Since the only change Wells mentioned to what was
a standard speech on this tour was her attention to the
white race bbleachingQthe black, it seems that Mayo
urged her to continue speaking of miscegenation in
America. During her second tour, The Westminster
Gazette published an interview with Wells entitled
bThe Bitter Cry of Black America. A New dUncle
Tom’s Cabin.TQ
22
The article opened provocatively,
quoting Wells as saying bdTaint, indeed! I tell you,
if I have any taint to be ashamed of in myself, it is the
taint of white blood!TQ The writer goes on to refer to
Wells as a bbrown-faced little woman ... who bears
strongly printed on her the partly Negro origin of
which she speaks so spiritedly, though one would
not guess that there is also a Red Indian strain in
the odd racial composition of which she is the out-
come.QFinally, the interview comes to a close with the
writer badmitt[ing] that, as a white, I was dead
againstQmiscegenation. Wells reportedly retorted,
bdWhich race has sought it? Not ours. It is yours ...
and now, having created a mulatto population, you
turn and curse itTQ (A bitter cry of black America,
1894).
Such interviews and speeches were controversial
on these tours, since, as McMurray notes, bmost
Britons were repulsed by miscegenationQ(McMur-
ray, 1998, p. 220). Repulsed, perhaps, but certainly
interested in ways that Wells could capitalize upon
to gain further publicity for her work. Wells knew,
from the clippings she kept, that British papers
focused on her appearance, calling her ba young
lady of little more than 20 years of ageQ(Tucker,
1971, p. 119), or ba good-looking mulatto, dressed
with uncommonly good tasteQ(bIda B. Wells’s
Crusade,Q1894). As she played to the fascination
with her youthful appearance by breferr[ing] to dmy
28 yearsTin the South, which ... shave[d]... four
years from her actual age of 32Q(McMurray, 1998,
p. 216), Wells’s interview in The Westminster Ga-
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273268

zette played to the interest in her appearance and
her references to bmiscegenation.Q
23
Wells was re-
peatedly singled out in press reports as extraordinary,
indeed buncommon,Qwithin a British imagination of
bblackness.QIndeed, the London Chronicle focused
not only on Wells’s bmixed blood,Qbut also on her
looks and youthfulness: bShe is a very notable product
of that mixing of the blood which is proceeding so
rapidly in the Southern States of America. She claims
relationship with the red Indian, the negro, and the
Anglo-Saxon races... . She is under 30 years of age,
very vivacious in manner, and decidedly good
lookingQ(Ida, 1894). As this article indicates, Wells,
herself, drew attention to her so-called mixed blood
and capitalized upon a continued fascination with
blackness amongst the British public that we can
trace back to the fad for fugitive slave lecturers in
the 1850s and 60s.
24
While Mrs P.W. Clayden, wife of
the editor of the London Daily News,boften remarked
that she thought that my success would have been
much greater if I had been a few shades blackerQ
(Duster, 1970, p. 214), questions about bhow blackQ
Wells was fuelled even greater interest. Wells noted
this interest upon her return to New York from her
first British tour, stressing in an interview with the
New York Sun that she encountered no brace preju-
dice anywhere in Great BritainQ:b[I]t was like being
born again in a new condition... . In fact, my color
gave me some agreeable prominence which I might
not otherwise have hadQ(Ida, 1894). While she expe-
rienced heightened attention to her looks and color,
positioning her as an oddity or as the embodiment of
exceptional bblack womanhoodQas the bNegro lady
lecturer,QWells was able to use that embodiment and
interest to her advantage. Taken to embody both
bblacknessQand its bmixingQas that bgood-looking
mulatto,QWells kept her work and not just her name
and person in the British press, translating controversy
into increased public interest in and coverage of her
lectures.
With her frank discussion of lynching, rape and
white women’s sexual desire, as well as a delivery
that both elicited her audience’s emotional response
and revealed her own at times, Wells offered melodra-
matic and bharrowingQappeals that she subsequently
balanced with an appeal to lynching’s bfactsQthrough
quotation. Complex and varied, Wells’s lectures in-
voked and remotivated existing discourses and debates,
challenging her audiences to look beyond their own
social concerns so that they not simply consider them
analogous to Wells’s call for an end to lynching and
bAmerican atrocities.QThe risks and potential success
of schooling British audiences in the lynching and rape
of African Americans, audiences for whom such vio-
lence was, to a degree, spectacle and sensation, were
many. However, in contrast to Hazel Carby’s assertion
that Wells’s bwork ...had little effect on organizations
dominated by white womenQ(Carby, 1987, p. 115).
Wells’s British activism was successful in rousing her
audiences to donate funds and form committees to
advance the anti-lynching cause as she gained the
support of such women’s organizations as The British
Women’s Temperance Association. Wells’s 1893 tour
resulted in the organization of the Anti-Lynching Com-
mittee of London; its membership included members of
Parliament and the British elite, and it aimed to raise
funds to investigate and expose lynching in the United
States.
25
Following that first tour, she returned to
America to much acclaim and launched a year long,
cross-country lecture tour (McMurray, 1998, pp. 222–
223). During Wells’s second tour in 1894, despite
gaining bthe endorsements of ... the Baptist and
Congregational Unions, the British and Foreign Uni-
tarian Association, the Aborigines Protection Society,
The British Women’s Temperance Association, and
the dwomen members of the Society of Friends,TQ
she found bChristian bodies [in Britain] less respon-
sive by far than the PressQ(Schechter, 2001, p. 99). In
particular, Wells’s indictment of American churches
for refusing to condemn, and for bactually abett[ing]
lynchingQwas controversial and drew sharp criticism
from the National Conference of Unitarians in April
of 1894. Calling it a bterrible misrepresentationQof
American Unitarians, they questioned Wells’s veracity
and, in turn, undermined her work (Schechter, 2001,
p. 100). This second tour also saw Wells publicly
indict Frances Willard, American leader of the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for her refusal
to condemn lynching while suggesting in speeches
that Southern whites were justified in bprotectingQ
themselves against the black male rapist.
26
Wells’s
exposure of Willard’s position, carried in British
papers and reprinted by the American press, angered
Lady Henry Somerset, president of the British
Women’s Temperance Association, and may have
cost her some support there. But ultimately, Wells
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273 269

was represented in the British press as the heroine of
the battle, the binsignificant colored womanQwho the
powerful American and British temperance leaders
were attempting to bcrushQ(Schechter, 2001,p.
102). Again, Wells was able to generate publicity
through controversy that threatened to marginalize
and discredit her, managing it skilfully to gain the
upper hand and advance her cause. African Ameri-
cans, particularly club women, hailed her bas the
dmodern Joan of the raceTQ upon her return to the
United States from this second tour, while the white
press attempted to neutralize the effect of her work by
treating her variously as bjust another dnegro,Ta
dproblem,Tand ... a favourite scapegoatQ(Schechter,
2001, p. 104). African American club women
remained Wells’s strongest supporters as she contin-
ued to produce pamphlets, conduct investigations of
lynchings, and to join in the anti-lynching efforts of
the Afro-American Council and the NAACP, organi-
zations that would later alienate her for what they
perceived as her outspokenness.
27
While we catch glimpses of the defiant activist
during such moments, Wells’s British lecture tours
are instructive in a revised understanding of her as a
reformer adept at working within existing reform
circles, at appealing to audiences by invoking current
debates, and at using familiar rhetorical appeals that
harkened back to great moments in reform like the
abolition of slavery. Positioning her work at the center
of British debates on bwhite slaveryQand the bnew
abolition,QWells was hardly a marginalized figure, but
instead drew the attention of reformers, the press and
the public at large as an authority on American lynch-
ing and the curious product of tabooed American race
relations. The risks she took in her work and its affect
upon British audiences, rather than another chapter in
the narrative of her marginalized militancy, should
place her in the company of African American
women working for reform both in the United States
and while on tour in Great Britain. Wells’s work to
invoke and remotivate reform rhetoric shares affinities
with the anti-slavery work of Ellen Craft and Sarah
Parker Remond who toured Great Britain some forty
years before Wells appeared before British audi-
ences.
28
Her second British tour of 1894 coincided
with Amanda Berry Smith’s London addresses, spon-
sored by the British Women’s Temperance Associa-
tion, and Wells’s lectures are an important precursor to
Nannie Helen Burroughs’s appearances in London,
where Burroughs addressed the first Baptist World
Congress and a gathering of 5000 at Hyde Park in
the summer of 1905.
29
Echoing Wells’s experiences a
decade later, Burroughs wrote to Mary Church Terrell
saying, bMy color is a helpQ(Burroughs to Terrell, ca.
1905). While Wells may have found herself the lone
militant later in her career, her early international anti-
lynching work saw her at the center of British reform
and places her in an important history of African
American women addressing British audiences span-
ning the mid-nineteenth through the early-twentieth
century.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Judy Garber, Susan Hamilton,
Lois Harder and Susan Smith for their helpful com-
ments and suggestions. Many thanks to Jackie Baker
and Christie Schultz for research assistance, and to the
staff of the University of Chicago’s Department of
Special Collections and the Schomburg Center’s Rare
Book and Manuscript Division.
Endnotes
1
Wells’s pathbreaking accomplishments as a journalist, anti-
lynching activist, and organizer within the black women’s club
movement came to be ignored by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and the National Association of
Colored Women, both of which had marginalized her by the turn
into the twentieth century. See Schechter, 2001; McMurray, 1998;
and Giddings, 2001.
2
In her speeches and pamphlets, Wells would quote statistics
published by the Chicago Tribune that documented lynchings
according to state, victim and boffenceQ. For example, in a Red
Record Wells notes that in 1892 and 1893 bnot one third of the
victims lynched were charged with rape, and further that the charges
made embraced a range of offenses from murders to misdemeanorsQ
(1895/1991, p. 156). That range included battempted robbery ...
arson ... incendiarism ... alleged stock poisoning ... poisoning
wells ... burglary ... self-defense ... insulting whites ... malprac-
tice ... alleged barn burning ... unknown offense ... no offenseQ
(1895/1991, p. 156).
3
In particular, the New York Times was quite critical of Wells.
4
Wells addressed audiences in Boston; Wilmington, Delaware;
Chester, Pennsylvania; New Bedford, Massachusetts; Providence
and Newport; New York, and Washington, D.C.
5
There is some disagreement about when Wells had Southern
Horrors reprinted in London as United States Atrocities: Lynch Law
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273270

by Lux Publishing. McMurray notes the reprint appeared in 1892,
importantly before her first tour (1998), while Schechter notes it
appeared in 1894, during Wells’s second tour, and was sold at her
lectures (Schechter, 2001). Vron Ware offers the most information
on this publication, documenting that Celestine Edwards – a black
British temperance advocate, popular speaker and editor of Lux,a
bdweekly Christian Evidence NewspaperTthat ... expressed anti-
imperialist viewsQ– wrote the introduction for United States Atroc-
ities bpublished in Britain during her second tripQ(Ware, 1992, pp.
193, 197).
6
An English Quaker, Impey knew Frederick Douglass and had
come to know Wells’s work during a visit to the United States. In
September of 1892 Impey heard Wells speak at the National Press
Association conference in Philadelphia, and met her at William
Still’s home in Philadelphia two months later. Impey published a
journal, Anti-Caste,bdevoted to the interests of coloured racesQ
(Schechter, 2001, pp. 91–92. See also McMurray, 1998.) Anti-
Caste, and particularly Impey’s reports on American lynching,
caught Mayo’s attention. She contacted Impey suggesting they
barous[e] public sentimentQon the issue. Impey favored bringing
Wells to Scotland and England as a speaker, and Mayo agreed to
finance her tour (Schechter, 2001. p. 92).
7
The same can be said of women’s access to public politics in
the United States. Gabrielle Foreman documents American female
reform societies, like bthe New England Female Moral Reform
Society [with] its bimonthly journal Friend of Virtue (1836–1891),Q
that mark the organizing of nineteenth-century white women
around social purity issues like bwhite slaveryQ(Foreman, 1997,
p. 338).
8
Shortly following her return to the United States in 1894, after
her second tour, an AME (African Methodist Episcopal) clergyman
opposed a resolution endorsing Wells and her work and warned that
the church ought to bbe careful about endorsing young women of
whom they knew nothingQ(Duster, 1970, p. 222). When it became
known that Wells would be interviewed by the New York Sun in
early August, 1894, she bwas waited upon by a delegation of the
men of my own race who asked me to put the soft pedal on charges
against white women and their relations with black menQ(Duster,
1970, p. 220).
9
In her autobiography, Wells wrote that her first address in
Isabelle Mayo’s parlor btold the same heart-stirring episodes
which first gained me the sympathy and good will of my New
York friendsQ(Duster, 1970, p. 90).
10
Wells also titled her talks during this first tour, bLynch Law in
the United States.QSee bMiss Ida B. Wells, a negro lady...QThe
Ladies’ Pictorial May 1893.
11
See, for example, Braxton, 1989; Carby, 1987; Davis, 1995;
Holt, 1928; Logan, 1999; Royster, 1995; and Streitmatter, 1994.
12
One of Wells’s most outspoken British supporters during her
second tour was the Reverend C.F. Aked, pastor of Pembroke
Chapel, Liverpool. Aked introduced Wells’s first address on this
tour to his congregants, saying bthat when [Wells] was in Liverpool
last year friends of his who had heard me speak in London ...
wished him to invite me to speak in his church. He refused because
he didn’t... believe what I said was true. Since that time he had
been to America and was in Chicago to see the World’s Fair....He
there read confirmation of all I had said in the reports of the Miller
lynching in Birdwel, Ky., July 7... .dI knew that what Miss Wells
said was trueTQ (Wells, 1894a).
13
In most of the United States at this time, the age of consent was
lower than it was in Britain: bIn most of the States ... the dage of
consent,Tin cases of assault, is ten years, in a few twelve, in Iowa
and Massachusetts it was by their last legislatures raised to thirteen,
and in Washington Territory (where women are voters) to sixteen. In
the District of Columbia, the national capital, .. it is ten years. In one
State, Delaware, it is at the shockingly low period of SEVEN years!Q
(Protection of Girlhood, 1886, p. 2).
14
Just such a slippage occurred in Britain as well between work-
ing-class conditions and enslavement as evident in the OED’s
definition of the term bslaveQbased upon its use in socialist dis-
course condemning the bwhite slaveryQof English factory work,
such as G.B. Shaw’s Fabian Essays on Socialism:b3. One whose
condition in respect of toil is comparable to that of a slave .... 1889
G. B. SHAW in Fabian Ess. 192 The white slaves of the sweaterQ
(Simpson and Weiner, 1989, vol. 15, p. 666).
15
In 1876, Josephine Butler, whose work Stead was indebted to
for his accounts of white slavery in bThe Maiden Tribute,Qpub-
lished accounts of the Paris brothels and their horrors under the title
The New Abolitionists (Butler, 1876). Stead, writing to Butler that
year, contended that prostitution bwanted its Uncle Tom’s Cabin,Q
further underscoring the link between that earlier discourse on
slavery, particularly American slavery, and the white slavery of
British and European prostitution (Walkowitz, 1992, p. 96).
16
Wells delivered a speech much like her Lyric Hall address to a
predominantly white audience in the prestigious Boston Monday
Lectureship series at Tremont Temple in Boston on 13 February
1893. In May it was published as bLynch Law in All its PhasesQin
Our Day: A Record and Review of Current Reform, a monthly
periodical whose editors included Frances E. Willard, president of
the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union). The period-
ical’s stated mission was bto provide a record that would dform a
comprehensive register of Criticism, Progress, and Reform, secular
and religious, national and international.TQ It also published the
Boston Monday lectures delivered annually in March and February,
lectures bwhich for several seasons have had a circulation of a
million copies at home and abroad, [and] will discuss, as they
have done for the last twelve years, whatever is at once new, true,
and strategic in the relations of Religion to Science, Philosophy, and
Current ReformQ(Royster, 1995, pp. 177–178). The first account of
Wells’s anti-lynching crusade to appear in a white Northern news-
paper ran in the Boston Transcript and Advertiser after this speech.
17
In praising Wells’s anti-lynching work in her The Work of the
Afro-American Woman (1894), Gertrude Mossell noted that during
her first tour Wells was bentertainedQby bMiss Eliza Wigham,
Secretary of the Anti-Slavery societyQ(Mossell, 1998; Mossell,
1988, p. 7).
18
During this second tour, Wells again visited Ellen Richardson
and wrote in detail of the meeting in her Inter-Ocean column. See
bNewcastle Notes,QChicago Inter-Ocean 28 May 1894, reprinted in
Duster (1970, p. 161–169).
19
In choosing melodrama, Stead made a bid for popular appeal
despite the fact that radicalism had, by the 1880s, turned from
melodrama to scientific and realist discourses. (Walkowitz, 1992).
20
See also, for example, Campbell (1989).
T. Zackodnik / Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 259–273 271

21
Wells cites the cases of bMrs J.S. Underwood, the wife of a
minister of Elyria, Ohio,Qbthe wife of a practicing physician in
Memphis, in good social standing,Qb[a] farmer’s wife in Alabama,Q
and a Mrs Marshall described as bone of the creme de la creme ofQ
Natchez, Mississippi (Wells, 1991a,b, pp. 20, 21, 23, 25).
22
The article’s title is evidence of the way in which the British
press, at least, was accommodating Wells’s anti-lynching appeals to
the bnew abolitionistQwork on behalf of the working poor. The
Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Conditions of the
Abject Poor, a pamphlet written by Andrew Mearns, a Congrega-
tionalist minister, appeared in 1883 and exposed the crime, prosti-
tution, and disease of slum life in London. The pamphlet caused a
public outcry and is regarded as having fuelled the 1884 Royal
Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes.
23
During her first tour, an article in The Ladies’ Pictorial also
quotes Wells as saying, bSome of the dcolouredTpeople are not
distinguishable from the whites, so far as their negro blood been
diluted, but they are all dAfrican AmericansT—that is Americans of
African descentQ(Miss Ida B. Wells, a negro lady..., 1893).
24
For more information on this fad and African American aboli-
tionist lecturers, see Blackett (1983).
25
The committee sent a delegation to the United States in August
1895 to investigate mob violence and interviewed state governors
about lynching. The black press bcredited Wells for the Briton’s
action,Qwhile the New York World polled state governors of whom
only three welcomed the committee—two southern governors,
bwho felt their states would be vindicated,Qand the governor of
Illinois, who took the opportunity to criticize Britain’s record in
Ireland (McMurray, 1998, p. 227).
26
See Hazel Carby’s (1987)summary of Willard’s remarks at the
1894 WCTU conference in Cleveland.
27
Wells’s position in the black women’s club movement was,
eventually, fraught as Patricia Schechter details. While Wells pub-
lished A Red Record (1895), Lynch Law in Georgia (1899), Mob
Rule in New Orleans (1900), The East St. Louis Massacre (1917),
and The Arkansas Race Riot (1920), many of these publications
were self-financed. She was elected head of the Afro-American
Council’s Anti-Lynching Bureau in 1899, but left in 1903 (Schech-
ter, 2001). Wells’s participation in the NAACP (National Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Colored People) was hindered by that
organization’s marginalization of her. See Schechter, 2001; and
Giddings, bMissing in Action.Q
28
On Craft and Remond’s British appearances see Zackodnik
(2002), and on Remond, see Fisch (2000).
29
Amanda Berry Smith, known as the bsinging pilgrimQand
bgod’s image carved in ebonyQwas a world-renowned evangelist
who undertook her mission under the auspices of the African
Epsicopal and the Methodist churches between 1870 and 1890.
In 1882, she undertook a twelve-year missionary trip through
Europe, Asia, and Africa, spending eight years in Liberia and
West Africa where she established churches and temperance soci-
eties. It was as a temperance activist and an evangelist that she
came to the notice of British reformers. Nannie Helen Burroughs
became secretary to the Foreign Mission Board of the National
Baptist Convention in 1900 and within the year successfully
agitated for the right of women to participate equally in the
missionary activities and, as a result, the Woman’s Convention,
Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention was organized. In
1909 she opened the National Training School for Girls in
Washington, offering vocational training to African American
women. Burroughs was also an anti-lynching activist, spoke out
against segregation, and promoted women’s suffrage. After pas-
sage of the 19th Amendment, Burroughs formed the National
League of Republican Colored Women aimed at politically mobi-
lizing African American women.
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