IDA B. WELLS, THE ANTILYNCHING MOVEMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF SEEING 77
bones become a reflection of one’s imagination: The more unique the violence, the greater feeling of identity. Recognition in public—from those who were moved in pleasurable ways—creates a community.
HORROR, DISBELIEF, AND SHAME
Describing lynching through the genre of horror was the way Wells sought to inspire citizens to act to achieve racial justice. Horror, according to the contemporary American philosopher Stanley Cavell, is a perception that relates to the “precariousness of human identity,” that this identity can be “lost or invaded,” that “we may be, or may become, something other than what we are, or take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for, and are unaccountable.”64 Horror does not immediately appear to be valuable for expanding the polity democratically. The feeling of precariousness horror encourages seems to counter the thoughtful and reasoned reflection necessary for collective rule, while visceral disgust may or may not lead one to struggle for social justice. Upton Sinclair never expressed ambivalence about horror’s democratic potential. Groundbreaking less for its narrative style, metaphor, and plot and more for its influence on American politics, Sinclair’s pseudojournalistic novel The Jungle (1906), which portrayed in fiction working-class people working under brutal conditions in the meat industry—where unsanitized factories mixed animal feces and other vectors of disease into food—helped inspire the U.S. Congress to pass both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair juxtaposed the way factory workers were “part of the machine . . . and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence” with the “thousands of rats [that] would race about” the “meat stored in great piles in rooms.”65 Horror, for Sinclair, became a genre through which to blur a sacred boundary between human and animal. Less concerned with adopting Sinclair’s attempt to create a parallel between human and animal, Wells was interested in developing what
78 IDA
B. WELLS, THE ANTILYNCHING MOVEMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF SEEING
was implied in his novel: the ways that horrifying human identities were constituted through a process over which they had no choice or control. An example of this was captured in her description of the Sam Hose lynching in Atlanta, Georgia—an African American worker who killed his white employer, Alfred Cranford, after a tense dispute about his wages: First he was made to remove his clothing, and when the flames began to eat into his body it was almost nude. Before the fire was lighted his left ear was severed from his body. Then his right ear was cut away. . . . The scene that followed is one that never will be forgotten by those who saw it, and while Sam Hose writhed and performed contortions in his agony, many of those present turned away from the sickening sight, and others could hardly look at it. Not a sound but the crackling of the flames broke the stillness of the place, and the situation grew more sickening as it proceeded. . . . He writhed in agony and his sufferings can be imagined when it is said that several blood vessels burst during the contortions of his body. When he fell from the stake he was kicked back and the flames renewed. Then it was that the flames consumed his body and in a few minutes only a few bones and a small part of the body was all that was left of Sam Hose. One of the most sickening sights of the day was the eagerness with which the people grabbed after souvenirs, and they almost fought over the ashes of the dead criminal. Large pieces of his flesh were carried away, and persons were seen walking through the streets carrying bones in their hands. When all the larger bones, together with the flesh, had been carried away by the early comers, others scraped in the ashes, and for a great length of time a crowd was about the place scraping in the ashes. Not even the stake to which the Negro was tied when burned was left, but it was promptly chopped down and carried away as the largest souvenir of the burning.66
Hearing news of the Hose lynching, Du Bois rushed to deliver a wellordered, legalistic statement about the facts of the case to the white
IDA B. WELLS, THE ANTILYNCHING MOVEMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF SEEING 79
journalist and children’s book author Joel Chandler Harris, to be published in the Atlanta Constitution. A gruesome sight made him stop dead in his tracks. Just up the road, Hose’s knuckles were being displayed in a grocery-store window. Turning back immediately, Du Bois became convinced that the detached social-scientific work that had informed The Philadelphia Negro was unconscionable.67 The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the collection of essays published four years later, expressed Du Bois’s conversion from naïve social scientist to political activist. In that text, critical analysis mixed with experimental prose to create a stream-of-consciousness account of the lived experience of race as a kind of double consciousness: of being both black and American.68 Rather than simply humanize black Americans as did Du Bois, Wells described how black dehumanization was less an a priori truth and more a meticulous white supremacist social construction. Highlighting the intensity and methodical accuracy with which they dismembered Hose’s body piecemeal also reflected the wish to excise black people from humanity. Publicly destroying black bodies communicated white anxiety about black equality. If black inferiority were truly a biological phenomenon that could not be changed (according to social Darwinist theories of scientific racism that were taken seriously, black men were hypersexual, intellectually feeble, lazy, immature, duplicitous, and criminal), then the symbolic act of lynching seemed unnecessary.69 Dehumanization thus had to be achieved. Wells’s language illuminated this clearly when she told how six black men in Memphis “were made the target of murderous shotguns, which fired into the writhing, struggling, dying mass of humanity, until every spark of life was gone.”70 Strategically using the passive voice—black men were “made the target of” as opposed to them “being targeted”—emphasizes the process of how human beings were made lifeless despite their protests. Giving agency to an inanimate instrument of violence—it was the shotgun, not the person that “fired”—blurred the line, if not creating striking parallels, between the lynchers and the guns they used. Lynching, in other words, had brutal effects on lynchers. The imagined white masculine moral virtue that led to lynching was the same thing that eroded white Americans’ moral sense. What at first
80 IDA
B. WELLS, THE ANTILYNCHING MOVEMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF SEEING
was expressed publicly and in racially specific ways could soon come to know no boundaries. “The beast of prey which turns to destroy its own is not considered less,” she wrote in another context, “but more bloodthirsty and ferocious than when it preys on other animals. The taste for blood grows with indulgence, and when other means of satisfying it fail he turns to rend his own household.”71 Violence offers no durable sense of identity, but it entirely infuses one’s personality and social relationships.72 People “forget that a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime,” Wells told readers, “concedes the right to lynch any person for any crime.”73 Identifying this interconnected process of black and white dehumanization was part of Wells’s larger unifying rhetorical objective: the creation of disbelief. The following statement captured this perfectly: When that poor Afro-American was murdered, the whites excused their refusal of a trial on the ground that they wished to spare the white girl the mortification of having to testify in court. This cry has had its effect. It has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law throughout this “land of liberty.” Men who stand high in the esteem of the public for Christian character, for moral and physical courage, or devotion to the principles of equal and exact justice to all, and for great sagacity, stand as cowards who fear to open their mouths before this great outcry. They do not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country.74
Disbelief upends conventional ways of understanding the world. Linking the distorted body of the lynched victim with that of the passive citizen in the above passage—whose “closed” heart and “stifled” conscience parallels the lifeless heart of the dead lynched victim whose conscience no longer exists, whose “warped” judgment parallels the contorted body of the lynched victim, whose silence and gaping mouth parallels the lynched victim’s limp face—Wells forced American readers, who stood by idly without agitating politically while their fellow
IDA B. WELLS, THE ANTILYNCHING MOVEMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF SEEING 81
compatriots were being lynched, to see themselves in jarring ways. If Americans were prepared to ask themselves the questions that such recognition might yield—Is this really what we’ve become? How can we support this?—Wells hoped that they would find a way to change. This passage, however, also revealed Wells’s thinking about shame. If Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom was optimistic that white males’ sense of shame at violating their masculine and racial superiority could create a space for black freedom—Covey was ashamed to let any of his friends know about the fight with Douglass, which allowed Douglass to continue plotting his escape—Wells worried that it would do exactly the opposite. The sense of character deficit that shame conjures could be paralyzing, forcing people to withdraw from critical examination rather than engage in it.75 Shame at violating the expectations that arose from the misogynistic view that women were too fragile and too traumatized to speak about the trauma they experienced kept in place, rather than exploded, these misogynistic assumptions.76 “The white people won’t stand for this sort of thing,” she wrote, “and whether they be insulted as individuals or as a race, the response will be prompt and effectual.”77 This extended across racial lines. “Even to the better class of Afro-Americans the crime of rape is so revolting,” Wells wrote, “they have too often taken the white man’s word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it deserved.”78 Shame had a chilling effect on democratic deliberation: No one wanted to talk about rape, examine whether it truly occurred, or force the alleged victim to relive her experience because doing this would challenge the expectation of women’s lack of agency and threaten the fantasy of male chivalry. Neither lynching nor the masculine myths upon which it rested could ever fully be examined and rejected.79
THE BONDS OF INTIMACY
Jim Crow segregation is usually recalled for its tactics of political disenfranchisement, its racially based economic inequality, and the public humiliation to which it subjected Southern blacks. But it was also about