Temporary Hero

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.

Part I: Roots of Racism, Oppression, and Black Resistance

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).

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A protester demonstrates against police shootings in Louisiana, July 2016.

Preface: On NPR this morning, I heard a news story about one of the many series of protests of the police killings of black men across the United States, two just this week alone. Increasingly, and indeed in one of the sound clips NPR played, these killings of unarmed black men are increasingly portrayed as the lynchings of the 21st century; racist social control given a vector for expression and protection of white supremacy through violence. There is some truth to this assertion.

This all turned my mind to the historical background the story obliquely referenced, and its roots in the post-Civil War America of the soft Johnsonian readmission of the Confederate oligarchy back into the Union and  power, the more stringent Radical Reconstruction that followed, and the subsequent ‘Reconstruction of White Supremacy’ and creation of Jim Crow that carried one hundred years later, into the Civil Rights era.

With that considered, I’ll be undertaking a new project to highlight some points of this period that I’ve read on, and that may be of some interest and use for those following along. The first is to highlight a personal hero of mine, Ida B. Wells. Wells was a tireless crusader for the dignity and human rights of not just African-Americans, but also women. She endured violence, lost friends to murder, found herself sidelined and ignored– only to refuse to bend or break, and instead consistently found new ways to stand to and to fight. This first post will begin her story, and the first roots of her resistance.

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