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

Girls in the North”—warned against the duplicitous employment agencies: “Let women and girls become enlightened, let them begin to think and stop placing themselves voluntarily in the power of strangers.” The talk concluded with the suggestion that southern women might be better off staying in the South. But she argued against this position as well, writing a letter to the Sun: “The city does not need to throw back from her borders the flocking ignorant, but rather to bring to a sense of duty those whom her bounty, her patience, her indulgence has redeemed from the humdrum of rural common place.” Her mother had once been one of these women running to the North after all.

To remedy problems she’d uncovered on her 1895 trip south, she had launched the White Rose Mission, a settlement house promising lodging and food, a chance to socialize, and a better start than the employment agencies offered. The mission provided a kindergarten and classes for adults, including a “race history” course taught by Matthews, featuring a bookcase for the use of her students. It contained a 1773 edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poems, a magazine featuring the Harper’s Ferry uprising, and an 1836 edition of Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans by Lydia Maria Child. As she told the Evening Telegram: “The White Rose Mission was organized for the single purpose of breaking up this traffic in Southern colored girls.”

It wasn’t smooth sailing. Money was a constant concern. Demand stretched the resources of the small building and volunteer staff. She would later use her ability to pass as white to rent a better facility. But at the docks, these concerns fell away as Matthews scanned the disembarking passengers for a woman wearing hope too nakedly on her face, eager to offer her a steady hand.

Matthews had long given up traditional journalism for activism, but as stunt reporting waned, other female journalists cast about for what to do, what role to play, in the new journalism landscape. The decline of the form that launched them, though few commented on it directly, presented a challenge. If they wanted to keep writing, they would have to find something that paid as well as the “sensational” articles previously in such high demand. With yellow journalism now out of fashion, could they turn their skills to new endeavors? For some, this involved parlaying their contacts into different jobs. For others, it meant personal reinvention.

In 1899, Elizabeth Banks did one last stunt. And it didn’t involve lying to anyone’s face or getting elbow-deep in a stranger’s laundry. It was a campaign waged by mail. Two years before, a rumor had begun to swirl about a Vassar student. Right before graduation, Anita Hemmings confided to a faculty member that the speculation was true—she was mixed race. Her roommate had discovered her secret and demanded a new room. After a flurry of meetings, administrators let Hemmings graduate but not without a lot of hand-wringing and newspaper headlines. Banks had noticed that while northern whites congratulated themselves on open-mindedness and condemned atrocities in the South, they often avoided associating with Black men and women themselves. She explored these disparities in a piece for Nineteenth Century: “Says the Northerner, ‘We have no place for the negro. We don’t like him. Take him away!’”

Then she wrote, “Oh no! I forgot! The Northerner does not say this! He thinks it and feels it.” So she put these liberal sentiments to the test. She wrote letters to several dozen colleges in the United States and England, presenting herself as a nineteen-year-old woman with light skin and blue eyes but with a Black ancestor. “Everybody took me for a white girl,” she insisted to the schools. Would they admit her?

Results were conclusive. Western colleges suggested she might be more comfortable in the East. Eastern colleges suggested she might fit in better in the West. Oberlin College, one of the first to admit Black students, proud of its abolitionist credentials, admitted her, then recommended a boardinghouse in town run by a mulatto woman. Couldn’t she stay in campus housing with the other students, Banks asked? She didn’t get a reply. Meanwhile, colleges in England welcomed Banks’s imagined student with the lack of prejudice Banks had noted when living there. In Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl,” she drew her Black maid, Dinah, in the broadest strokes as a stereotyped caricature who spoke in dialect. At the same time, when Dinah wanted to return to the States, Banks advised her against it. In London, she said, Black and white servants went shopping together, attended each other’s parties, shared sleeping quarters, something not possible in Alabama: “America is not a land of equality for the negroes, Dinah. You and I know that.”

The college letter was a perfect Banks stunt, designed to uncover hypocrisy. But the conclusion she drew from her experiment was grim. After revealing the hollowness of the northern attitudes and acknowledging the violence of the southern ones—the deeply imbedded notions of racial inequality, efforts at voter suppression, and lynchings (though she claimed Ida B. Wells-Barnett exaggerated)—her takeaway was that Black people would never be accepted in America and should move. In her mix of patriotism and critique of her home country, she recognized that many white people in the United States were prejudiced, and then admitted she shared those prejudices. The finished piece was called “The American Negro and His Place.”

At the same time as Banks was sending out her applications in fall 1898, Ida B. Wells-Barnett reentered the fray, though only months before, the birth of her second son prompted her to publicly declare she was staying home to commit herself to motherhood. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, who had offered her a job after she determined she couldn’t return to Memphis, called a meeting to give new energy to the Afro-American League. He wanted Wells-Barnett to attend, and she did, leaving the baby with a grandmother while Wells-Barnett stayed with Susan