Sensational by Kim Todd (chromebook ebook reader .txt) 📕

dispatches from abroad. In one, she marveled that even in Liverpool, which had been deeply invested in the Atlantic slave trade, citizens showed up to her lectures, in venues that held up to a thousand people. After giving up its dependence on slavery, the city had been able to prosper, she noted, and also commented that for a Black person raised in America, time spent in Liverpool was a revelation: “It is like being born into another world, to be welcomed among persons of the highest intellectual and social culture as if one were one of themselves.” Her talks received positive English press in venues ranging from the Birmingham Daily Post to the Ladies Pictorial.

After returning from England, Wells had been traveling the United States, from Santa Cruz, California, to Rochester, New York, making similar speeches. She’d also published a second book—A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894. If possible, it was even more unblinking than Southern Horrors. One illustration showed a naked man hanged by a chain, well-dressed people clustered around him, pointing to the corpse. A photograph captured another crowd around another dead man, his clothes torn, body mutilated. Lists, all narrative stripped away, detailed people murdered by mobs each year under headings of their alleged crimes: “attempted robbery,” “well poisoning,” “asking white woman to marry him.” These were followed by stories of particular cases, tortures detailed remorselessly, at length.

While many reporters of the age experimented with including their own subjective impressions, Wells underscored the subjectivity of institutions supposed to be most objective—police and the courts—and the savagery of those supposed to be most civilized—white men. She put side by side the killings of Black men accused of raping white women and the acquittals of white men accused of raping Black women. The book also took on the selective nature of the South’s vaunted chivalry. The most chivalrous men seemed impervious to Black women and even to the white teachers who came from the North to educate the formerly enslaved: “The peculiar sensitiveness of the southern white men for women never shed its protecting influence about them.” Wells critiqued, at length, Frances Willard, head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who courted southern support for her causes by condemning the “great dark-faced mobs,” writing sympathetically of the need to restrict voting by uneducated Black men.

Despite the importance of her advocacy and the fact that several southern states had passed anti-lynching laws as a result, Wells’s campaign was taking a personal toll. It must have been emotionally draining and it depleted her financially. Her writing was too frank for some. There was nothing nice or polite or exalting of womanhood about her prose, no rhetorical batting of an eye. A Red Record sold few copies. Others saw her eagerness to make her case abroad as a betrayal. A New York Times columnist complained that Wells, an “octaroon evangel,” fired up the English, who already tended to be reform-minded and “meddlesome.” And even those she thought she could count on for backing were wavering. In Europe, she struggled to get a statement of unequivocal support from Frederick Douglass and had to reuse his flattering introduction from Southern Horrors for A Red Record. She told the truth. And she paid for it.

And then, a few weeks after her talk at St. John’s Church, on June 27, at the AME Bethel Church in Chicago, in front of almost a thousand people and wearing a dress trimmed with orange blossoms, Ida B. Wells married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer and founder of the Chicago Conservator, an African American newspaper. He was notable for his commitment to equality, not just for men of his own race but for everyone, writing against the Chinese Exclusion Act and in favor of women’s suffrage. He had gone out of his way to help Wells as early as 1891, before they were romantically involved, when she instigated a lawsuit to protect her reputation. And still, Wells was torn about what marriage might mean for her writing and advocacy. People weren’t shy about expressing their fears that the anti-lynching campaigns would suffer in her absence. She herself delayed the wedding a number of times, taking every lecture opportunity. With marriage, though, she declared herself “retired to what I thought was the privacy of a home.” (Her retirement didn’t last long. The Monday after the ceremony, she went to work as editor of the Conservator.)

This cluster of weddings in spring and summer 1895, as distinct as they were, demonstrates the power of demographics. Most of the women who burst into journalism in the late 1880s and early 1890s were born during or just after the Civil War.* This meant Bly, Nelson, and Wells were in their early thirties. All had been writing for ten years and supporting family members with their wages. Maybe they weren’t where they wanted to be professionally and financially. Journalism had let them travel only so far. The economy was still struggling to recover after the crash of 1893. Marriage might be a last bid for a more conventional kind of happiness. Nelson’s comment in the previous year’s all women’s issue of the Boston Post echoed through those churches and chapels, in perhaps a less scornful tone than it seemed at the time: “Next to a great, big bank account the best thing a woman could have is the strong right arm of a good man.”

In addition, Nelson and Bly, at least, were aging out of the “girl reporter” role they had helped create. What models were there for midlife career women except the spinsterism of reformers like Susan B. Anthony, a lifestyle that newspapers routinely mocked? A number of stunt reporters expressed ambiguity in print about the woman’s suffrage cause, at the same time as their actions flaunted self-sufficiency. Stunt reporters were often young women, reacting to an older generation they found stuffy and unfashionable. By mid-1895, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, high-profile movement representatives, were in their