LAY ON, MCDUFF...."

“LAY ON, MCDUFF….”

            This week marks the birthday of Ida B. Wells on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  Catherine Meeks and I were scheduled to go down there this year to talk about our book on Wells and to make presentations on her at the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum in Holly Springs.  The Covid-19 made us decide not to go, much to our sincere regret.  They had a smaller celebration on Saturday.  This is a good week for birthdays for African-American history:  June Jordan was born on July 9 and Nelson Mandela on July 18.

            Wells was a powerful witness for racial and gender and economic justice all of her life, even in the face of great opposition from the structures of white supremacy and often from African-Americans themselves.  There are many stories that illustrate this, but in our current volatile atmosphere, I want to share one from 1917, when she was 55 years old, soon after the USA had entered World War I.  Congress had passed the Espionage Act of 1917, basically suppressing free speech during the war.  Leading this repression was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, with the assistance of his young aide, J. Edgar Hoover.

            The Black soldiers of the 24^th Infantry, 3^rd Battalion, had a long and distinguished history, beginning in the Civil War.  It would be 30 more years before segregation ended in the armed services.  In preparation for the war, the 24^th had been assigned to Texas, and here they ran smack into neo-slavery and segregation.  They refused to abide by the segregated seating in the trolleys, and on one occasion they had a fight with the police when the soldiers ripped down a “colored only” sign in a restaurant. 

            Tensions were high, and they came to a head in August, 1917, when Houston police invaded (prior to “no-knock” warrants) the home of a Black woman and mother of five, searching for black teenagers who had been gambling.  She objected to the invasion, and the police dragged her out of her home and began beating her before arresting her.  A Black soldier from the 24th came to her defense, and he was beaten, arrested and jailed.  The soldier’s provost guard came in to the police station to ascertain what had happened, and he was shot at and arrested.  Word spread back to the army base that he had been killed. 

            Tensions built in Houston and on the base.  A white mob of 1000 gathered to get ready to attack the soldiers, and under the leadership of Sergeant Vida Henry, the 24th marched into the San Felipe district to seek justice for their two comrades.  Shots were fired when the two groups met, and in the end 15 whites, including 5 police officers, were killed, along with 4 Black soldiers and 2 Black civilians.  As a result, the army held its largest court-martial ever of the soldiers of the 24^th, and 12 Black soldiers were sentenced to death.  The execution was carried out almost immediately, and the soldiers were buried in a mass grave.  The NAACP protested their immediate execution but not their punishment.  The power of the Espionage Act of 1917 was echoed in W.E.B. Dubois’ editorial in the NAACP magazine Crisis:

“We ask no mitigation of their punishment.”  Even Dubois was cowed by the Espionage Act.

            Ida Wells, however, was not afraid of the White supremacists, and she spoke out and sought to have a memorial service for the 12 soldiers in one of the Black churches in Chicago.  Here she encountered the power of White supremacy in a surprising place:  no Black pastors would allow the service in their churches.  She wrote a fiery article in the Chicago Defender, and she had buttons made,  memorializing the martyrs of the 24^th.  She distributed them and was soon visited by federal government officers telling her that she would need to stop distributing the buttons – if she did not, she would be charged with treason under the Act of 1917.  When she refused to give them the buttons, they backed off a bit, and I’ll conclude this story with her version from her great autobiography “Crusade for Justice”:

            “Well,” said the shorter of the two men, “the rest of your people do not agree with you.”  I said, “Maybe not.  They don’t know any better or they are afraid of losing their whole skins.  As for myself, I don’t care.  I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing, than to save my skin by taking back what I have said.  I would consider it an honor to spend whatever years are necessary in prison as the one member of the race who protested, rather than to be with all the 11,999,999 Negroes who didn’t have to go to prison because they kept their mouths shut.  Lay on , MacDuff, and damn’d be him that first cries “Hold, enough.”

            The men left but told her to get her attorney (who would be her husband and great support Ferdinand Barnett), but she never heard from them again.  This is one of many instances where Ida B. Wells ran far ahead of her contemporaries in the race for justice and equity – she was reviled, ostracized, and rejected for it.  She was nearly lost in history, but thanks to many (including her daughter Alfreda Duster, who collected her mom’s autobiography and finally talked John Hope Franklin into getting the University of Chicago to publish it in 1970), Ida Wells is not only remembered but highly prized (a Special Pulitzer this year).  Raise a cheer for her this week, and let us find our place in the path that she has set for us.