Note: This is the second part in a series of vignettes about the roots of post-Civil War institutionalized racism in the United States, focusing on the lives of two participants– Ida B. Wells in defense of African-American lives and rights, and ‘Pitchfork’ Ben Tillman, one of the architects of Jim Crow.
Ida B. Wells, approximately 1888.
Ida Wells received quite a bit of attention for her 1884 court case against the railroad, despite its eventual failure at the level of the Tennessee Supreme Court. In her memoirs, she noted a critical point– that as the first black plaintiff to have a case reach the level of the state supreme courts since the gutting of the Civil Rights Bills of 1875, she stood to set precedent. The crux of those 1883 decisions was that African-Americans were not wards of the Federal government first, but rather wards of their states; and thus would need to seek redress for harms in state courts– courts controlled by home rule and with many former Confederates re-exerting power with the close of Radical Reconstruction. Needless to say, the vast majority of these courts would not be particularly sympathetic to the cause of black Americans who only years earlier were held as their property in chattel slavery, and whom a number who’d have owned nary a single slave would still have blamed as scapegoats for the loss of brothers, fathers, and sons in the war. The loss of Wells’ case dampened similar effort– if Wells could get no satisfaction, why should any other African-Americans expect differently? And how many could afford to not only lose their case, but also some $200 in fees ($5100 in 2015 dollars) as did Wells? (Wells, Crusade for Justice, 1970, pp. 20).
