Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Something ‘Savage, Uncanny and Frightening’ in the South)

“[I]t was in a small Southern city… that I once saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny and frightening rear its head. Then the surface closed again—and when I have gone back there since, I’ve been surprised to find myself as charmed as ever by the magnolia trees and the singing darkies in the street and the sensuous warm nights. I have been charmed, too, by the bountiful hospitality and the languorous easy-going outdoor life and the almost universal good manners. But all too frequently I am the prey of a vivid nightmare that recalls what I experienced in that town five years ago.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Dance,” The Red Book Magazine (June 1926), reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (March 1953)

A century ago this month, The Red Book Magazine published something unusual for F. Scott Fitzgerald: a murder mystery. He was not completely averse to genre fiction (his short stories “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and "A Short Trip Home" have Gothic/horror elements), but his foray into detective stories was another matter entirely.

How much of  it was a lark while he did the rounds of night spots in France, where he had moved so he and his family could live more cheaply? (His output for the year consisted of the short story "Your Way and Mine" and the essay "How To Waste Material.") And how much of it was part of a fascination with murder that was leading him on a dead end in his initial stages of creating the long-gestating Tender Is the Night? 

To be sure, neither Agatha Christie, with her cunning plots, nor Dashiell Hammett, with his terse dialogue and morally compromised characters, had much to fear by this interloper in their territory.

But Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, he had to bring something of himself to this exercise. There’s his fascination with the South, where he had met his wife Zelda; his almost effortlessly lyrical writing style; and his “flaming youth” characters, this time transplanted to a Charleston small-town ball.

And with a single phrase that sounds distinctly politically incorrect in our time—“singing darkies in the street”—he introduces a concern he had slipped into his novel from the year before, The Great Gatsby: race. 

Recall that from that Jazz Age masterpiece, his hideously brutal and idiotic recipient of inherited wealth, Tom Buchanan, launches into an incoherent rant about “Nordic” superiority—a precursor of the “great replacement theory” advocated most prominently today by Tucker Carlson.

In “The Dance,” suspicion of the murder that unexpectedly breaks out in this “small Southern city” falls on one of the “singing darkies” evoked by the story’s female narrator—and the threat of lynching hangs very much in the air.

“The Dance” was not included among the 43 tales collected in 1989 by literary scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli for The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But as far as I’m concerned, just about everything Fitzgerald wrote had some mark of charm or style—and this curious work of short fiction is no different.

Flashback, May 1943: Anti-Lynching Film ‘Ox-Bow Incident’ Jars American Conscience

In the middle of a war fought against foreign dictatorships, the western The Ox-Bow Incident—released in U.S. theaters 75 years ago this week—delivered a somber warning: Under the auspices of democracy, even a group of rambunctious individualists can be manipulated by a bullying poseur into overriding the rule of law. 

I remember watching The Ox-Bow Incident in sociology class in high school. It was like dunking in ice-cold water a group of adolescents whose principal preoccupations were the correct party to attend that weekend, Sunday afternoon football, and catching the eye of the opposite sex every day of the week. The movie was obvious—especially in a letter read by Henry Fonda that should have had “MESSAGE” written all over it—but it was just the type of thing that kids needed then.

Come to think of it, that lack of subtlety might be the only way to get through to some adults today who need to heed the movie’s caution that “law is the very conscience of humanity.”

The “incident” at the heart of the movie—the lynching of three innocent men on the Nevada frontier in 1885—had particular meaning for star Henry Fonda (left, in the attached image, with Dana Andrews, center), whose witnessing of a similar event on the streets of Omaha at age 14 in 1919 inspired his subsequent lifelong liberalism. (That episode is described in Scott Eyman's recent dual bio of lifelong friends Fonda and James Stewart, Hank and Jim.)

Now, with race riots bursting out in some of America’s biggest cities and Japanese-Americans compelled into internment camps, Fonda, screenwriter-producer Lamar Trotti, and director William Wellman wanted to signal, in unmistakable terms, the dangers in disregarding laws and the rights of minorities.

Lynching, though reduced in number, was hardly absent from either Americans’ memory or even short-term experience nearly a year and a half after Pearl Harbor. The three recorded in 1943, as well as the 16 that occurred in the 1941-45 war years, were, to be sure, a good deal lower than the 20 of 1935, let alone the postwar high of 83 in 1919. 

But the attempt to pass federal anti-lynching legislation had proven as futile as it was unrelenting. The last serious attempt to do so, in 1938, had foundered when President Franklin Roosevelt decided he could not support the bill lest it fracture a New Deal coalition that included a segregationist Southern contingent on Capitol Hill. 

Highlighting this situation in a western, seemingly far removed from contemporary reality, seemed tailor-made for a cinematic treatment more palatable to audiences. (Especially the year 1885, the last time that the number of white lynching victims outnumbered black ones.) But just about every studio in town rejected “Wild Bill” Wellman’s pitch. 

As a last resort, the director took the treatment to Darryl Zanuck. Wellman’s last encounter with the Twentieth-Century Fox head had ended in disaster: a fistfight on a camping trip. After getting over his surprise over hearing from Wellman again, Zanuck called him back as promised within 48 hours and agreed with him that it was a great project. 

Even so, Zanuck was dubious about the commercial prospects of such grim subject matter. He only ended up giving the green light to the project for three reasons:

*Wellman’s prior record of commercial success;

*The director’s agreement to keep a tight lid on costs, which would improve its slim chances of earning even a slight profit; and

*A commitment on the part of Wellman to direct, sight unseen, two other scripts of Zanuck’s choosing, in return for approving Wellman’s dream project.

Within these restrictions, Wellman created an admirably lean, taut western with a low budget that worked to its advantage. 

At only 75 minutes long, the movie tells its story swiftly, like a novella. The need to compress characters forced Wellman and Trotti to combine characters and make them more complex—which worked especially well for the African-American preacher Sparks (significantly, the first character among the posse to vote against the lynching) and the mob’s Mexican victim (played by a scene-stealing Anthony Quinn). 

Moreover, instead of the wide vistas that were a staple of the genre, Wellman began with shots of a small town and the bar that served as a flash point of civilization before switching to nocturnal scenes that symbolized the posse members’ individual and collective descent into moral darkness.

Although 1885 was surely chosen as the date for the novel and film because it was when the American frontier was still considered open, it also happens to be the last year in which white lynching victims outnumbered black ones. From this point on, the practice became overwhelmingly a weapon of racial control. Viewing lynching as a realistic possibility on the frontier enabled audiences to understand the stark issues this extrajudicial resort to murder posed outside of a racial context.

Zanuck was correct about the film’s poor prospects. From its earliest previews, audiences didn’t know what to expect and were not happy with the film’s tragic ending. But he was also right that it was a story worth telling. Critics hailed it immediately, and, despite its box-office failure, it earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination. (Very unusually, the movie earned no other Academy Award nomination besides that.)

Sometimes considered the first “serious” western novel, The Ox-Bow Incident is also considered the forerunner of the “psychological” and “allegorical” western film genres. It dispensed with gunfights, guys in white and black hats, confrontations with Indians, and cowboy heroes. Instead, it considered the fragile circumstances by which men in society maintained the thinnest veneer of civilization.

It starts from the first scene in the bar, and hinges on the distorted sexual dynamics that will play a role in the later resort to vigilante justice. Told that a woman he had an understanding with, Rose, has unexpectedly skipped town, a drunken Gil (played by Fonda) ends up pummeling another townsman and, in turn, is knocked out by the bartender. As much in need of the restraints of the law as anyone else in town, he is also left gravely aware that he is an odd man out. When sidekick Art Croft (played by Harry Morgan) says they didn’t have to ride with the posse, Gil responds testily: “Look kinda funny if we hadn't, wouldn't it?” 

To satisfy the Hays Office, Hollywood’s censorship arm, Twentieth-Century Fox was forced to make Gil into a less passive member of the posse. The resulting changes helped solidify the Fonda’s image as the personification of American decency and fighter against injustice, one that he would enhance with 12 Angry Men, The Wrong Man, and The Best Man.

Trotti’s script, like Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s novel, dispensed with the usual genre clichés about the goodness of the common, uncorrupted man of the West. The denizens of Bridger’s Wells are animated by displacement, fear, and resentment of the outsider—all too malleable material for a cruel man with a will to power like “Major” Tetley, who dresses up in a Confederate uniform even though, Gil tells Croft angrily, he never served a day in the army.

Carter and Croft are buffeted by the same forces afflicting the other members of the posse, though. Opening and closing shots of them riding into town establish them as solitary drifters, with no standing in the community that would allow them to effectively challenge Tetley or influence the posse’s vote on whether to string up the unlucky trio they come across at night out in the valley.

In fact, nothing stands out so much in the film as the overwhelming ineffectuality of opponents of the lynching. The fiercest of these, the elderly storekeeper Davies, is dismissed with, “Shut up, Grandma. Nobody expects you to go.” Major Tetley browbeats his son into participating in the posse with, “I’ll have no female boys bearing my name.”

The two potboilers that Zanuck got Wellman to make in exchange for the director’s special project, Thunder Birds: Soldiers of the Air (1942) and Buffalo Bill (1944), are little remembered today. But many of the great westerns to come that explored the psychology of westerners or that used the West as allegorical settings for the issues of their time were made possible by The Ox-Bow Incident: The Gunfighter, High Noon, The Naked Spur, The Searchers, Vera Cruz, Cheyenne Autumn, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven. 

In trying to show readers how Germany, the country that produced Goethe and Beethoven, could cause the mayhem of Kristallnacht, Clark set his tale of a mob that yields up their individual consciences in a setting far closer to home: the American West. 

Those who doubt that such a tragedy—featuring a leader who denounces opponents as weaklings, and followers too nervous or apathetic to stand firmly in the way—can occur in today’s America have not paid much attention to the news recently.

Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, on Lynching)

“[E]very lynching deprives its victim of his life without due process of law, and denies him an equal protection of the law. The States are charged with punishing all such invasions as the common rights of the citizens, but some of them have failed in their effort to do so, and others have not honestly tried. Meanwhile, lynchings continue, and though they do not increase in number, they show some tendency to increase in savagery.

“To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.”—H.L. Mencken, statement before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 74^th Congress, February 14, 1935

On this date in 1922, the U.S. Senate faced an opportunity not unlike the one presented to the House of Representatives in January 1865, as depicted in the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln: the chance to improve the lives of African-Americans, in the most meaningful way. Unlike the Civil War Congress, however, which would narrowly vote in favor of the 13^th Amendment, the Senate could not override determined opposition to a bill making lynching a federal crime.

A little over 12 years later, when the acerb essayist H.L. Mencken appeared before Congress to testify in favor of a similar bill, the legislation should have faced better prospects, as it occurred in the midst of a more liberal Presidency.

But Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Mencken even more reason to hold him in contempt. Unlike the columnist, who had, for the past several years, been writing searing denunciations of lynching as a violation of the 14^th Amendment and urged its criminalization, the President, fearful of alienating Southern allies in his New Deal coalition, lent the legislation no material support.

The same could not be said for Warren G. Harding, a Republican predecessor derided, then and now, as a conservative with a tin ear for words. (Mencken himself, deriding his oratory as “Gamalielese,” wrote that it was “so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”)

But let’s give credit where it’s due: In October 1921, following a campaign in which he had been smeared as possessing African-American blood, at a time of rising Ku Klux Klan membership, in the heart of Dixie itself, Harding delivered a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, in which he lambasted lynching.

A year later—when he had less political capital because of GOP reverses in the recent midterm elections—he sought to do something about it while his party was still at full strength, before a new Congress was seated. He threw his support behind a bill, sponsored by Republican Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer of Missouri, making lynching a federal crime.

Dyer’s bill had already passed the House, but it became bottled up in the Senate, whose Southern members joined a nonstop parade of procedural slowdowns and filibusters to bring matters to a standstill. In early December, the effort collapsed.

If the failure of the measure had any good effect, it might have been in shining a light on a form of domestic terrorism which, as recently as 1920, had resulted in the deaths of two African-Americans every week, according to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Thereafter, Southern elites, embarrassed, began to shun the practice, and newspapers across the South began to crusade against it. 

Perhaps FDR consoled himself with the thought that lynchings were on their way out. But two decades after the failure of the bill that Mencken supported and FDR refused to do anything about--and nearly 33 years after the Harding-backed measure died--14-year-old Emmett Till would be lynched after allegedly whistling at a white woman. The widespread revulsion following the atrocity gave greater impetus to an even more widespread civil rights movement.

This Day in African-American History (White-on-Black Violence in the Land of Lincoln)

August 14, 1908—A white woman’s spurious claim of rape led to the start of three days of violence directed against the African-American citizens of Springfield, Ill. By the end of the rampage—which featured racial wolfpacks that burned 40 homes and 24 businesses, not to mention pummeling more than a dozen people and leaving at least seven dead (and probably more) in their wake—the governor of the state had declared martial law and five thousand troops were needed to restore order.

I’m sure there are more extensive studies of these days of mindless rage, but for the time-pressed, I can recommend two short accounts: George F. Will’s column from earlier this week and a short vignette in, of all places, an extremely fine baseball book that doubles as a fascinating social history of early 20th-century America: Crazy ’08, by Cait Murphy.

It’s impossible to ignore the great irony of this orgy of looting, rioting, and lynching—it happened in the town that launched the political career of Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” and which also serves as the site of his final resting place. To be sure, Lincoln was careful in his debates with Stephen Douglas not to challenge the politically privileged position of whites over blacks in the virulently racist society of his time. But had he lived several decades more, as the crime of lynching entered American society like a virus, it’s inconceivable to me that this most humane of men would not have denounced it.

There was only one positive development from the violence, in my opinion: it so shocked the opinion of liberal whites that they joined with African-Americans the following year to form the NAACP.

I have to admit to some impatience on the subject of the labels we have for people and their views—fascist, communist, liberal, conservative. Whatever shorthand use they provide us is lessened by the ways in which so many people close their minds to an argument simply according to such labels, without any regard to the complexities of a person’s background, position or overall views.

Lynchings provide one demonstration of this very situation. A post on a blog called “O.U.P. (for Oxford University Press), “Why Is H.L. Mencken Relevant Today?” discusses the seeming contradiction of a great columnist, editor, memoirist, and lexicographer whose private musings have led posterity, not unreasonably, to see him as racist and anti-Semitic.

African-Americans first began to desert the GOP during FDR’s administration, as the New Deal provided desperately needed employment for this most economically marginalized of groups. Unlike Mencken, who tossed around terms like “blackamoor” pretty freely, F.D.R. did not, to my knowledge, use racial epithets.

Anyone who’s read my posts on Roosevelt knows my respect for the way he gave hope to Americans during the Depression, conserved America’s resources, and led the global coalition that halted the seemingly unstoppable march of the Axis powers. He amply deserves his reputation as one of America’s greatest presidents. Yet on the issue of lynching legislation, Mencken was far braver than the political titan of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Even without pressing for voting rights or equal public accommodations—perhaps a political non-starter given the times—F.D.R. could have made a signal difference for African-Americans in the very fact of their lives by pressing to ban lynching. It would have signaled unmistakable that nobody was above the law and would have dealt a body blow to racism in this country. It might even have been politically possible to pull this off—while many white politicians were willing to go along with segregation, lynching revolted many—including more aristocratic southerners—as crude. Instead, he did nothing, hoping that the employment boost provided by the New Deal, as well as the constant advocacy of his wife Eleanor, would be enough to convince African-Americans that his heart was in the right place.

Contrast that with Mencken, whose protests against lynching on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, coupled with his advocacy of federal legislation against the practice in front of Congress, led to threats against his life. In light of this stance, historians who’ve denounced him for racism might want to reconsider whether FDR was all that much enlightened than Mencken.

This Day in Southern History

March 14, 1891 – Outraged by a jury’s refusal to return a guilty verdict on any count involving the murder of the city’s police chief, a New Orleans mob stormed the prison where the Italian-American defendants were being temporarily held.

The resulting Crescent City Lynchings represented more than another sorry example of Southern vigilantism, inter- and intra-ethnic group tensions, or even the rise of an Italian-American component of the underworld. It also ignited an international incident that, before grown men came to their senses, almost brought the United States into a state of war with Italy.

For more than a generation, dating back to the Civil War, the growing Italian-American presence on the New Orleans waterfront had coincided with the rise of organized crime in the Big Easy. The city’s attempt to maintain its status as a leading port in the antebellum era led it to import as much cheap labor as it could.

In the pre-war era, much of that labor would have been supplied by Irish emigrants willing to work in high-risk jobs such as digging a canal around a vast cypress swamp for the New Orleans Canal and Banking Co. in the 1830s. Thousands of the emigrant workers in this last project perished from yellow fever, cholera and malaria, but slaveowners were glad that their African-American “property” were protected. As time went on, posing little or no threat to the established order, the Irish made their way up the socioeconomic ladder. Italian emigrants were ready to fill the void.

Two trends occurring simultaneously began to affect Louisianans’ attitudes toward the newcomers: the rising commercial presence of the group on the waterfront and the large number of young, often unmarried and at-loose-ends, men in these occupations—a group often subject to temptation and criminal activity. These young men increasingly found themselves recruited by the two sides hoping to dominate the waterfront: Charles and Tony Matranga, aided by their lieutenant Joseph Macheca, and the Provenzanos. The two factions even looked outside the country, back to Italy, for further muscle, with the Provenzanos drawing on the group whose name became virtually synonymous in time with Italian-American underworld activity: the Mafia.

Things came to a head in the spring of 1990 with the “midnight massacre”—the ambush of stevedores from the Matranga and Locasio fruit importing company on their way home from the docks. The stevedores’ identification of the Provenzanos as their assailants—a major break with the traditional Sicilian “code of silence”—went for naught when the judge threw out the attempted murder convictions.

No police witnesses were called by the prosecution at the trial. Indeed, as the retrial neared, speculation grew that New Orleans police chief David Hennessy—who had futilely tried to mediate the struggle between the two Italian-American groups—had uncovered something in his own investigation of the incident, and would testify on behalf of the Provenzanos.

On the night of October 15, 1890, Hennessy –who had assumed his post following a mandate to clean up the city—was gunned down only a block from his home. All through the night, despite the pleas of friends that he describe or identify his attackers, Hennessy did nothing more than to say that it was “the dagoes” who were responsible. That left a vacuum of testimony and evidence that was filled following mass arrests, forced searches and beatings. The nineteen men who ended up being charged with planning or executing Hennessy’s murder would be tried in two separate groups.

The trial was a fiasco for the prosecution, with famed defense attorney Lionel Adams—a former D.A. himself—keeping them off-balance with successful challenges to the various charges, alibis for all the defendants, and suggestions that there must be a problem with the prosecution’s case if they didn’t call two witnesses who could testify to key incidents on the night of the murder. With the prosecution unable to introduce a single piece of evidence against them, the judge ordered the jury to find two defendants, Charles Matranga and Bastian Incardona, innocent.

In the end, three of the defendants got mistrials while the other six in that phase of the proceedings were acquitted. This did not sit well with a public that, for the last several months, had been driven to a state of frenzy over stories featuring Sicilian brigands, unsolved killings in the emigrant community, and the use of the term “Mafia”—perhaps the first time that a large group of Americans even heard of this word. Rumors spread of jury tampering by Adams’ detective associate, Dominick O’Malley.

On the morning after the verdict, the defendants were being held to await trial on a lesser offense when a mob of over 6,000 broke into Orleans Parish prison. Four of the defendants who had been tried were shot. Five others—not yet having stood trial –met a similar fate. Two met particularly grisly ends—one, hung from a lamp post, where his lifeless body served as target practice; the other, strung up from a tree.

Heinous as it was, the lynching attracted further unwelcome attention because two victims were Italian nationals. President Benjamin Harrison, having explained that the case lay outside federal jurisdiction, became incensed by the demand by the Italian ambassador to the U.S. for an indemnity to be paid. Both the U.S. and Italian governments withdrew their ambassadors.

At last, with the Italian government giving up on its ban on imported American pork, Secretary of State James G. Blaine had the opening he needed to push for a settlement. In March 1892, a year after the Crescent City Lynchings, Harrison sent the American ambassador back to Rome. A month later, after the U.S. government paid an indemnity of $25,000, Italy sent its minister back to DC.

This Day in American History

March 9, 1892—Early in the morning, a white mob seized three African-American prisoners from a Memphis jail, took them to a rail yard and shot them, in retaliation for their alleged part in the wounding of three white sheriff’s deputies.

The murdered prisoners, owners of the black-owned People’s Grocery Company, had been friends of a 30-year-old former schoolteacher. But the young woman, Ida B. Wells, was now a journalist, and the death of her friend launched her on a decades-long crusade to document and destroy domestic terrorism against African-Americans in the Jim Crow era of southern segregation.

Lynchings, the particular focus of Wells’ work, were open murders of individuals often suspected of criminal activity, usually carried out spontaneously by mobs, and perpetrated publicly as a warning to others. The origins of the practice have been traced to Ireland and to colonial-era North and South Carolina.

At their worst, lynchings involved not just hangings and shootings, but also burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture.

As heinous as the crimes themselves was their routine nature. Nearly five thousand Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1951, an average of more than one a week, according to the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. (That number included 1,200 whites who were murdered in the South for voting Republican or for being sympathetic to blacks.)

Though whites cited sexual crimes—overwhelmingly trumped-up charges—as justification for twisting the law for their own purposes, the lynching involving the People’s Grocery Company illustrated another motivation: blacks’ assertion of political or socioeconomic rights. The People’s Grocery had dared to compete against a white company that had previously enjoyed a monopoly of blacks’ business in an area on the edge of Memphis then known as “The Curve” (named for the arc made by streetcars).

Daily white-black arguments led to threats against the People’s Grocery. Their plea for police protection was met with a that’s-not-in-our-jurisdiction response (the grocery was right outside city limits) and a suggestion that the owners use guns to protect themselves. The shooting of three whites then resulted. The owners—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—seemed to be safe, at least momentarily, in jail. But when a black contingent guarding them decided after three days that they needed no further protection, the white mob abducted and lynched the black businessmen.

As co-editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech, Wells swung into action. A blistering series of articles chronicled the extent of lynching as local social control (eight lynching cases in the Memphis area in just one month of 1892), contended that a Winchester rifle should have a “place of honor in every black home,” and advised readers of their last resort: “save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Eventually Wells was run out of town over a particularly pointed editorial noted that, contrary to the notion that lynchings were often justified as defenses against the rape of white womanhood, some involved black men who had engaged in consensual sex with white women. But she merely continued her crusade elsewhere.

In Britain, Wells delivered 102 lectures in an attempt to bring international pressure to bear on the United States to enact anti-lynching legislation. In Chicago, she married an attorney who sold her his shares of the Chicago Conservator, enabling her to become full owner of the city’s first African-American newspaper.

As fearless as she was indefatigable, Wells tangled with not only racists but also with other advocates for women’s or civil rights. She upbraided Frances Willard when the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in an attempt to recruit southern women, accepted the rape myth and condoned lynching and the color line. And, in a low point in an otherwise often-brilliant career, W.E.B. DuBois bragged about marginalizing her influence within the NAACP, an organization that she (along with him) was instrumental in establishing.

In a time when reporters have devolved into gotcha pestering of Presidential candidates when they’re not chasing celebrities on their way in or out of rehab, it’s important to recall an era when journalists made a difference in the lives of others.

Shakespeare wrote that some men “are born great, others achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” The daughter of slave parents, Wells assuredly was not born great. It was the unfortunate times in which she lived—a true dark age for African-Americans—that thrust greatness upon her. But she also continually achieved greatness over and over again. Her life and work stand as monuments to what one person can do armed only with facts and courage.

This Day in American History

March 9, 1892—Early in the morning, a white mob seized three African-American prisoners from a Memphis jail, took them to a rail yard and shot them, in retaliation for their alleged part in the wounding of three white sheriff’s deputies.

The murdered prisoners, owners of the black-owned People’s Grocery Company, had been friends of a 30-year-old former schoolteacher. But the young woman, Ida B. Wells, was now a journalist, and the death of her friend launched her on a decades-long crusade to document and destroy domestic terrorism against African-Americans in the Jim Crow era of southern segregation.

Lynchings, the particular focus of Wells’ work, were open murders of individuals often suspected of criminal activity, usually carried out spontaneously by mobs, and perpetrated publicly as a warning to others. The origins of the practice have been traced to Ireland and to colonial-era North and South Carolina.

At their worst, lynchings involved not just hangings and shootings, but also burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture.

As heinous as the crimes themselves was their routine nature. Nearly five thousand Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1951, an average of more than one a week, according to the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. (That number included 1,200 whites who were murdered in the South for voting Republican or for being sympathetic to blacks.)

Though whites cited sexual crimes—overwhelmingly trumped-up charges—as justification for twisting the law for their own purposes, the lynching involving the People’s Grocery Company illustrated another motivation: blacks’ assertion of political or socioeconomic rights. The People’s Grocery had dared to compete against a white company that had previously enjoyed a monopoly of blacks’ business in an area on the edge of Memphis then known as “The Curve” (named for the arc made by streetcars).

Daily white-black arguments led to threats against the People’s Grocery. Their plea for police protection was met with a that’s-not-in-our-jurisdiction response (the grocery was right outside city limits) and a suggestion that the owners use guns to protect themselves. The shooting of three whites then resulted. The owners—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—seemed to be safe, at least momentarily, in jail. But when a black contingent guarding them decided after three days that they needed no further protection, the white mob abducted and lynched the black businessmen.

As co-editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech, Wells swung into action. A blistering series of articles chronicled the extent of lynching as local social control (eight lynching cases in the Memphis area in just one month of 1892), contended that a Winchester rifle should have a “place of honor in every black home,” and advised readers of their last resort: “save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Eventually Wells was run out of town over a particularly pointed editorial noted that, contrary to the notion that lynchings were often justified as defenses against the rape of white womanhood, some involved black men who had engaged in consensual sex with white women. But she merely continued her crusade elsewhere.

In Britain, Wells delivered 102 lectures in an attempt to bring international pressure to bear on the United States to enact anti-lynching legislation. In Chicago, she married an attorney who sold her his shares of the Chicago Conservator, enabling her to become full owner of the city’s first African-American newspaper.

As fearless as she was indefatigable, Wells tangled with not only racists but also with other advocates for women’s or civil rights. She upbraided Frances Willard when the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in an attempt to recruit southern women, accepted the rape myth and condoned lynching and the color line. And, in a low point in an otherwise often-brilliant career, W.E.B. DuBois bragged about marginalizing her influence within the NAACP, an organization that she (along with him) was instrumental in establishing.

In a time when reporters have devolved into gotcha pestering of Presidential candidates when they’re not chasing celebrities on their way in or out of rehab, it’s important to recall an era when journalists made a difference in the lives of others.

Shakespeare wrote that some men “are born great, others achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” The daughter of slave parents, Wells assuredly was not born great. It was the unfortunate times in which she lived—a true dark age for African-Americans—that thrust greatness upon her. But she also continually achieved greatness over and over again. Her life and work stand as monuments to what one person can do armed only with facts and courage.