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Chapter 4 The Platform, the Pamphlet, and the Press: Ida B. Wells’s Pedagogy of American Lynching From a consideration of black feminist labors within woman’s rights reform circles through a particular focus on Sojourner Truth, I wish now to turn again to black feminism as it takes the international stage and thereby keep firmly in sight the way in which early black feminism reached beyond “local ” concerns, rhetorics, and politics. The transatlantic links and focus black feminism built through abolition would become an approach to activism that informed late-nineteenth-century agitation for black women’s and black civil rights. Though the antebellum work of midcentury abolition seems rather removed from late-nineteenth-century anti-lynching activism, African American women faced strikingly similar issues while pursuing both reforms. Abolition and anti-lynching together saw African American women reaching across the color line and gender divide as well as crossing the Atlantic to reach British audiences, thereby creating greater pressure on Americans to abolish slavery and, later, outlaw lynching. While their work in the United States and their subsequent lecture tours in the UK were separated by over forty years and aimed to advance different causes, the abolitionist work of Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond and the anti-lynching crusade of Ida B. Wells raise similar issues for our consideration.1 As was the case for Craft and Remond, reports of Wells’s lectures in British papers focused on her appearance and manner. Frequently praising her for her “womanly” and earnest appeals, the British press distinguished Wells not only as an exemplary individual but also as an oddity, the attractive though unusual product of American “miscegenation .” In the United States, Wells’s womanhood was frequently cast as suspect by both a white southern press “defending” that section of the nation against her “attacks” and African Americans who believed Wells’s tactics risked too much for “the race” as a whole. Yet as Craft and Remond did at midcentury, Wells was able to manage and effectively channel British interest in her person into transatlantic support for anti-lynching near the century’s close. And 132 The Platform, the Pamphlet, and the Press like Craft and Remond before her, Wells studied the British reform scene, strategically pitching her appeals so that they would gain the greatest rhetorical force. What is more, Wells’s extensive experience as a newspaper editor and journalist meant that she was savvy in how she used the British press to bring the moral authority of international outrage to bear upon a United States blithely condoning lynching. Historians and scholars agree that Wells’s anti-lynching work would not have had the effect it did in the United States had she not created an international audience for it on her British lecture tours of 1893 and 1894, yet that work commands little scholarly attention in criticism that isolates Wells in reform rather than considers her connections within a developing black feminism. The connection between Craft and Remond’s abolition work and Wells’s British anti-lynching crusade is more than convenient. Not only are the stakes of embodiment significant in these women’s work—both its risks and management—but Wells also called her audiences to connect abolition with anti-lynching across the decades that separated their appeals. Wells undertook what I would call a pedagogy of American lynching, carefully schooling her audiences and readers to reconsider the common justification for such violence. Drawing on the codes of domesticity, alluding to eugenics, invoking debates in both the United States and Britain on the age of consent, and directly quoting “facts” from white southern newspapers, Wells drew attention to the realities of lynching and rape, its victims, and the work of a press actively inciting mob violence rather than merely reporting it. Ida B. Wells’s entrance into anti-lynching agitation is by now infamous, thanks in no small part to the incendiary editorial she published in the May 21, 1892, issue of the Memphis paper she co-owned with J. L. Fleming, the Free Speech. In early March 1892, Calvin McDowell, Will Stewart, and Thomas Moss were lynched by a white mob said to be as small as ten men. Prominent black Memphians who were members of the People’s Grocery Company cooperative, a black-owned store competing with a white-owned grocery in Memphis’ racially mixed neighborhood known as the Curve, these men were accused of injuring three deputies in an armed standoff incited by rumors...

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