An influential Black journalist and anti-lynching advocate, Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) is known for her principled commitment to racial justice and reluctance to consider concessions in her anti-lynching advocacy.Footnote 1 Both Wells’s contemporaries and commentators celebrate her courageous efforts to confront white supremacy and racial violence in the face of extraordinary oppression.Footnote 2 In his preface to Southern Horrors, Frederick Douglass calls Wells “brave” (Wells Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 59), and elsewhere, T. Thomas Fortune describes her as “sharp as a steel trap” (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 30).Footnote 3 Influential intellectual biographers of Wells (Bay Reference Bay2009; Duster and Giorgis Reference Duster and Giorgis2021; Giddings Reference Giddings2008; Schechter Reference Schechter2001; Thompson Reference Thompson1990) stress her fearlessness in the face of alarming threats made against her for her anti-lynching journalism.Footnote 4 Political theorists also highlight her commitment to racial justice, ranging from her endorsement of “truth-telling” (Balfour Reference Balfour2015, 683) to her defense of Black self-armament (Rogers and Turner Reference Rogers, Turner, Rogers and Turner2021b, 12). This received view of Wells as a courageous advocate for racial justice is hardly unwarranted. Wells links Black leadership with “sacrificial death,” arguing that resistance to racial injustice often entails—in real, practical terms—a meaningful risk of, and even actual, death.Footnote 5 She urges Black leaders to make enormous sacrifices, even of life itself, in the pursuit of a more just world.Footnote 6 Wells’s call for sacrificial death is hardly an abstract intellectual exercise. As Lawrie Balfour (Reference Balfour2015, 680) stresses quite aptly, Wells “risk[ed] her own life repeatedly to document and decry the broad scope of lynching.” Her career as an anti-lynching advocate and journalist was mired by profound risk and immeasurable sacrifice of the kind that she lauds in her political writings.Footnote 7
In her autobiography, however, Wells offers a competing model of political resistance and Black leadership that complicates this received view of her as a courageous agitator who unequivocally embraces sacrificial death. In Crusade for Justice, Wells anticipates violent retaliation for her first anti-lynching editorial in her newspaper, Free Speech, based in Memphis, Tennessee.Footnote 8 There, she condemns lynching as a technique of racial terror and challenges the prevailing defense of lynching as justified retaliation against Black men for sexually assaulting white women. Wells is hardly naïve to the ramifications of her editorial and secures a firearm in anticipation of retaliation, suggestive of her remarkable willingness to die for the cause. Yet her self-armament is not merely a strategy of self-preservation but also a calculated expression of political resistance. She does not necessarily hope to evade death but to “sell [her] life as dearly as possible” by inflicting the “cost” of death on her assailant, rendering her death a final act of defiance against white supremacy (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 54). Indeed, Wells was right to anticipate violent retaliation. After publishing her first editorial, her life was threatened, her business was destroyed, and she was displaced from her home and community without warning. Wells paid an enormous price for her anti-lynching advocacy, yet she did not embrace sacrificial death when confronted with the possibility of facing the white mob. She chose life—both her own and the lives of her Black neighbors who volunteered to die trying to defend her—over martyrdom. What might we learn about Wells’s political resistance to racial injustice from her reluctance to embrace the sacrificial death that she so powerfully celebrates in her political writings?
This moment of hesitation, I argue, reveals the constraints placed on principled action under conditions of racial domination and foregrounds the ethic of communal care that grounds Wells’s political resistance. Wells remains steadfast in her commitment to sacrificial death until she is forced to confront the unanticipated—and, for her, ultimately unacceptable—consequences of her political resistance for the broader Black community. Though willing to die for the cause, she refuses to take others down with her and ultimately hesitates when her anti-lynching advocacy threatens to expose her Black colleagues and neighbors in Memphis to racial violence.Footnote 9 In these moments, she chooses the preservation of Black life over sacrificial death. This decision reflects a profound ethic of care: she is prepared to sacrifice herself but is unwilling to ask others to bear the costs of her political resistance.Footnote 10
Read through the lens of her autobiography, Wells’s account of sacrificial death offers a model of what I call “principled negotiation,” a mode of political resistance that acknowledges the binding force of principle while also navigating the fraught and often perilous conditions under which that principle is pursued. Wells’s decision not to return to Memphis after the destruction of her newspaper, I argue, exemplifies this negotiation. She neither renounces the principle of sacrificial death nor revises her conviction that racial justice may demand it, yet she refuses to impose its tremendous costs on her community. Wells’s autobiography therefore does not merely illustrate how lived experience shapes theory but showcases how theory is negotiated in practice.Footnote 11 By attending to the structural constraints that shape Wells’s enactment of sacrificial death under conditions of racial domination, I recover how marginalized actors navigate profound ethical and strategic constraints under conditions of extraordinary oppression—constraints that do not necessarily undermine their principles but circumscribe how those principles are pursued in the world.
This revised account of Wells has two broader implications for our understanding of African American politics. First, it situates Wells within and complicates contemporary debates on sacrificial politics in African American political thought. Influential commentators, such as Danielle Allen and Juliet Hooker, disagree on the proper role of sacrifice in Black resistance and democratic citizenship. Allen (Reference Allen2004, 28–37) argues that sacrifice is an inescapable feature of democratic politics, requiring citizens to accept loss for the sake of the whole. Hooker (Reference Hooker2023, 5), by contrast, resists the idea that Black citizens should be asked to make still more sacrifices, insisting that those who have disproportionately borne the costs of democratic politics should not be called on “to continue to [make sacrifices].” Wells shares Hooker’s sensitivity to the asymmetry of sacrifice under racial domination, yet her argument rests on distinct premises. Unlike Hooker, who emphasizes accumulated historical injustice, Wells argues that her own sacrificial death would unjustly incite violence against other vulnerable members of her community. Her refusal is thus communal rather than individualistic, rooted in an ethic of care that weighs the collective consequences of her own death. Even Wells, one of the most extraordinary advocates of racial justice in American history, thinks of her colleague, not the cause, when confronted with the threat of violence. She neither embraces sacrifice as a precondition of democratic politics nor rejects it as an unjust demand placed on the historically marginalized. Instead, she reframes it as a problem of collective vulnerability.
Second, this article reframes Wells not simply as a fearless agitator for racial justice but as a deft negotiator of political principles under conditions of racial domination. By tracing the tension between her early celebration of sacrificial death and her later reflections on the communal costs of resistance, Wells invites us to consider how political principles themselves are constrained and renegotiated under oppressive conditions. Many influential scholars of African American politics, such as Darlene Clark Hine, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Lawrie Balfour, Melvin Rogers, Jack Turner, and Desmond Jagmohan, have shown how Black figures enlist compromise, conformity, and dissimulation as strategies of survival in a world structured by white supremacy. For Rogers and Turner, Wells lives under “a condition of racial domination,” meaning that she is “exposed to forms of harm that exceed democracy’s normal level of exposure” (Rogers and Turner Reference Rogers, Turner, Rogers and Turner2021b, 23–24).Footnote 12 Jagmohan (Reference Jagmohan, Rogers and Turner2021) similarly argues that the precarity of Black life forces Black figures to hedge their critiques of white supremacy to survive.Footnote 13 These accounts illuminate how racial domination constrains political agency by forcing the vulnerable to evade, temper, or modulate their critiques of white supremacy.Footnote 14
Yet Wells broadens this understanding of vulnerability itself. Rather than solely moderating her speech to avoid retaliation, she reveals how racial domination can also constrain the very principles that guide political resistance. In her anti-lynching advocacy, she discovers that her pursuit of racial justice may endanger the very community that it seeks to defend. When Wells remains in New York after the destruction of her newspaper, she does not renounce her principle of sacrificial death; rather, she confronts its incompatibility with the safety of her community. In this way, Wells invites us to see racial domination not only as a condition of vulnerability but also as a constraint on principle itself.
This article proceeds in three sections. I begin by examining Wells’s view of Black leadership and sacrificial death in several speeches and pamphlets, such as “The Requisites of True Leadership,” Southern Horrors, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” “The Requirements of Southern Journalism,” and Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death. Footnote 15 I then turn to Crusade for Justice—Wells’s autobiography, written near the end of her life (1928–31)—to consider how Wells narrates her leadership of the anti-lynching movement and the political choices that she was forced to navigate.Footnote 16 And finally, I conclude by considering the implications of Wells’s negotiation of sacrificial death in practice for our broader understanding of African American political resistance. I now turn to Wells’s early political works on Black leadership and sacrificial death, where her political principles first take shape.
Wells on Sacrificial Death and Black Leadership
The theme of Black leadership is central in Wells’s political and autobiographical writings, both in her analysis of broader efforts among Black activists to combat racial oppression and her own leadership of the anti-lynching movement.Footnote 17 In “The Requisites of True Leadership,” Wells argues that Black activists must be willing to make enormous sacrifices, even of life itself, in the pursuit of racial justice. She does not try to soften or obscure the staggering dangers that lie ahead for Black leaders in an attempt to assuage them of the risks of political resistance but celebrates martyrs throughout Western history for their willingness to die for truth, justice, and freedom.Footnote 18
Many Black activists, Wells acknowledges, falter under these enormous pressures.Footnote 19 Despite their resolute determination in the early stages of their careers, they are “choked by worldly cares and disappointments, or wither away under the fierce sun of persecution.” Black leaders, she suggests, are like budding plants struggling to thrive in hostile soil that are “choked” by the “thorns” of racial oppression (Wells Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 37). Quite reasonably so, she concedes, these leaders are discouraged by the calculated restraints that they are forced to navigate or deterred by staunch opposition to racial justice, ultimately abandoning the cause when confronted by racial terror and economic disenfranchisement.
Wells insists that Black activists must continue to pursue racial justice, even in the face of extraordinary violence, and even when such a pursuit requires profound sacrifice. These leaders must be brave and persistent in their efforts to undermine white supremacy:
The main requisites of such leadership are first, devotion to principle or courage of conviction. No great reform in the world’s history has ever been successful or far-reaching in its influence without an earnest, steadfast devotion which so takes hold of its leaders that they willingly brave the world’s censure—aye, even death itself in its defense. (Wells Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 38)
In a striking endorsement of sacrificial death, Wells urges Black leaders to embrace suffering and martyr themselves to demonstrate their commitment to the cause and inspire support for racial justice. These sacrifices are not merely the profound loss of economic independence, professional success, and personal satisfaction, but even of life itself, arguably the most meaningful demonstration of commitment. She does not equivocate in her suggestion that political resistance will not be bloody or grief stricken but attempts to recast sacrifice as an admirable ambition. Even before Wells herself was forced to make enormous sacrifices for her anti-lynching advocacy, she anticipates the meaningful sacrifices that will be demanded of Black leaders who must endure condemnation, violence, and even death in their efforts to pursue a racially just world. She understands that resisting racial injustice means, in practical terms, an enormous loss of life. Wells’s endorsement of sacrificial death is grounded on a sober recognition that Black resistance to white supremacy would, inevitably, incite fatal violence.
Wells does not merely recognize the pragmatic costs of pursuing racial justice in Jim Crow America—steep, surely—but also conceptualizes a deeper link between sacrificial death and racial justice. She frames sacrificial death as a deliberate act of Black political resistance and redemptive suffering that undermines the logic of white supremacy and asserts the dignity of the Black body. In this way, she anticipates a paradox at the heart of lynching’s violent spectacle—one that historians and sociologists of this extraordinary display of brutality would investigate decades later (Bederman Reference Bederman1995; Cone Reference Cone2011; Goldsby Reference Goldsby2006; Gorup Reference Gorup2020; Patterson Reference Patterson1998; Waldrep Reference Waldrep2009; Wood Reference Wood2011). For Wells, sacrifice—even the sacrifice of life itself—can be situated in a “long Christian tradition that values suffering” (Bromell Reference Bromell2013, 117). She appeals to iconic martyrs who willingly died, especially early Christians and American abolitionists, urging an association between Jesus’s disciples and advocates for racial justice in America. Their deaths, she insists, are not offered “in vain,” but confer legitimacy on the struggle for racial justice, bestowing “impetus to the cause of liberty and Christianity.” These activists “died to make men free,” like Jesus Christ who “died to make men holy” (Wells Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 39). By invoking Jesus’s sacrifice of his earthly body to cleanse mankind of its sins, Wells invokes the Christian paradigm of redemption through suffering.
Wells’s theological lens resonates with the broader Black Christian tradition that recasts racial violence through the redemptive symbolism of the cross. As James Cone (Reference Cone2011, 18) powerfully suggests, the “lynching tree joined the cross as the most emotionally charged symbols in the African American community—symbols that represented both depth and the promise of redemption, judgment and the offer of mercy, suffering and the power of hope.” In Black churches across the South, Sunday sermons, prayers, and songs “spoke back” to the white mob, affirming that racial terror would not determine the meaning of Black life.Footnote 20 Just as Christ’s resurrection testified to the divine power of God, the cross symbolized God’s presence with Black people “even in suffering on lynching trees, just as God was present with Jesus in suffering on the cross” (21–22). While lynching undoubtedly constructed and reproduced the logic of white supremacy (Gorup Reference Gorup2020, 819, 822–24; Wood Reference Wood2011, 4, 48), Black communities also claimed its victims as a kind of “Christian sacrifice.” Wells and many other Black writers redescribe lynching “as a Crucifixion and its victims as Christian martyrs.” Black Americans are cast as the “inheritors of Christian salvation and redemption,” who died like Jesus Christ, for the sins of the American nation (Wood Reference Wood2011, 48). In reframing lynching as a site of redemptive suffering rather than passive victimhood, Wells reclaims the crucifixion narrative to assert the dignity of the Black body.
This embracing of sacrifice, Wells insists, is crucial for the more outspoken Black leaders, especially journalists who publicly take on white supremacy in the press. The possibility of a racially just America, Melvin Rogers (Reference Rogers2023, 201) argues, hinges on the awakening of the conscience of white Americans, so Black journalists must be willing to brave the gravest censure on the front lines of public discourse.Footnote 21 Even more than other Black leaders in their communities, Black journalists must be willing to “sacrifice time, pleasure and property to a realization” of racial justice (Wells Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 91). The public disavowal of lynching in print incites retaliation, Wells argues, such that they should anticipate enormous sacrifices. Again, Wells does not suggest that this burden is unfair or attempt to downplay the necessary sacrifices; rather, Black journalists must be willing to speak “in defense of right no matter what its apparent cost” (39, emphasis added). As public-facing advocates, journalists will be asked to make enormous sacrifices for the cause; yet they should not back down from the fight.
While Wells engages more abstractly with sacrificial death in her early writings on Black leadership, she reflects on sacrificial death more concretely through her analysis of the life and death of Robert Charles, a Black man in New Orleans who committed the kind of sacrificial death that she lauds in her earlier political writings. In Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death, Wells (Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 386) describes Charles as a “hero of New Orleans,” both in her own eyes and in the eyes of “people of his own race,” affirming her admiration for Charles’s willingness to embrace sacrificial death when confronted with the white supremacist police.Footnote 22 Charles understands that to be arrested by the white police officers would mean certain death at the hands of the state, so he chooses to die fighting against his assailants rather than surrender to his inevitable death.Footnote 23 For Wells, the logic of empowerment in Charles’s death lies in his active decision to embrace sacrificial death on his own terms.
Wells begins the pamphlet by establishing the “facts” of Charles’s death, reasserting her commitment to truth-telling and resisting charges of Black criminality to justify the policing of Charles (Lester Reference Lester2022; Wagner Reference Wagner2009).Footnote 24 Charles and his friend and neighbor, Leonard Pierce, are two Black men engaged in conversation while sitting on the stoop of a neighborhood home. The white policemen, Wells (Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 342) assures her reader, do not have reason to suspect them of a crime or have a warrant for their arrest:
The colored men had left their homes, a few blocks distant, about an hour prior, and had been sitting upon the doorsteps for a short time talking together. They had not broken the peace in any way whatever, no warrant was in the policemen’s hands justifying their arrest, and no crime had been committed of which they were the suspects.
Charles and Pierce are victims of unjust policing, or what Wells describes as an “inexcusable and unprovoked assault” by white police officers (342). They are targeted for “talking” while Black, anticipating the contemporary paradigm of Black criminality.Footnote 25 Their “crime,” to the extent that they had committed one, is being Black in America.
When the white police officers approach Charles and Pierce, Wells narrates, a violent struggle ensues. Pierce is quickly shot and killed. Charles resists arrest, is shot by the police officers, and flees the scene. Over the next four days, the New Orleans police engage in a “hunt” for the “wounded fugitive” (Wells Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 342). Charles and the police officers engage in multiple shoot-outs, and several police officers are wounded and killed in the process. As the police search for Charles, a white mob grows frustrated by its inability to “vent its vindictiveness and bloodthirsty vengeance upon Charles,” and lynches other Black residents in New Orleans “who happened to get in the path of its fury” (352). Charles had not yet been killed for his refusal to acquiesce to white supremacist violence, so a white mob takes out their frustrations indiscriminately on other Black members of the community.
On the fifth day of this bloody exchange, Wells recounts, Charles finally suffers a sacrificial death. He is found in a local New Orleans home, and another massive shoot-out ensues between him and the police. Charles refuses to leave, so the police set the house on fire to force him out of the building. In a visceral and disturbing account of the final moments of Charles’s life, Wells (Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 358) describes him as appearing at the front door, “rifle in hand, to charge the countless guns that were drawn upon him.” She calls his courage in this moment “indescribable,” as he bravely faces the white mob head on and “a hundred shots riddled his body” (359). Even in the final seconds of his life, Charles actively shoots at the policemen and attempts to kill his attackers.
Wells suggests that Charles understands the inevitability of his death in this moment. His resistance to the police officers is not necessarily motivated by self-preservation but by an attempt to undermine a white supremacist institution that undergirds the “lynch law” of America. He “intended to die fighting” against his white assailants, embracing sacrificial death rather than attempting to evade violence when confronted with racial injustice in his community. In a powerful endorsement of Charles’s resistance to the police officers, Wells (Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 343–44) describes him as “bravely determined to protect his life as long as he had the breath in his body and strength to draw a hair trigger on his would-be murderers.” Charles “knew” that “to be captured” by the white policemen “meant [that he would be] killed,” so he “resolved to sell his life as dearly as possible” (348). Charles continues to shoot at the white police officers while running out of the burning building, trying to “even up the score,” with his white assailants, even while accepting his imminent death. Charles’s life, Wells argues, has a “price” put on it, but Charles tries to make that toll costlier by retaliating against his assailants. Wells describes his “death-dealing rifle” as “add[ing] another victim to the price which had [been] placed upon his life” (358–59). It is worth registering here that Wells enlists this same economic language to describe her own self-armament and political resistance in her autobiography, written decades later, framing her death as a calculated cost that she is willing to bear in the fight to undermine white supremacy.
For both Charles and Wells, self-armament is not merely a strategy of self-preservation but a means of retaliating against white supremacist violence. Wells’s use of similar language to describe Charles and herself suggests that she identifies with the kind of sacrificial death that Charles embodied in his final stand. Yet Wells does not critique Charles for failing to protect the Black residents of New Orleans who are brutally lynched while he evades arrest. The Black men and women who are lynched are not, of course, attempting to shield Charles in the way that Wells’s friends and neighbors might have done to protect her had she returned to Memphis. Their deaths do not serve to protect his life but are collateral to his resistance. Like Charles, Wells embraces the possibility of sacrificial death, but unlike Charles, she ultimately recoils when she learns that it would mean the endangering of her community.
To conclude, Wells is committed to sacrificial death as a necessary and noble feature of political resistance to racial injustice. Her invocations of Christian martyrdom and celebration of Robert Charles in her political writings demonstrate her commitment to courage and sacrifice in the face of white supremacist violence.Footnote 26 For Wells, Black leadership demands a willingness to endure violence—even to die—for the sake of the cause. Sacrificial death empowers Black Americans by asserting the dignity of Black life and challenging the logic of the disposability of Black life underlying Jim Crow. To risk death—or to die fighting against racial injustice—is to refuse the narrative that Black people are worthless. In this way, sacrificial death is an act of existential and political resistance that affirms the humanity of Black Americans within and for the Black community.
Yet as her own political life and career unfolds, Wells is forced to grapple with the tragic calculus that such sacrifice entails, not only for herself but also for the broader Black community. While she frames Charles’s death as heroic, she remains silent on the mob violence it incites against the Black community in New Orleans. Yet this fear becomes central to her experience of political resistance as recounted in her autobiography. As Wells is forced to grapple with her ideas in practice, her account of Black leadership deepens—not abandoning sacrifice but struggling with its uneven consequences and the competing demands of principle and survival. Wells engages in “principled negotiation,” deepening our understanding of what Black political resistance requires of its leaders under conditions of extraordinary injustice.
Wells’s “Principled Negotiation” of Sacrificial Death
This section turns from Wells’s early articulation of sacrificial death in her political writings to her autobiography, in which she recounts the individual and communal consequences of those principles when tested by real threats of racial violence and the demand for extraordinary sacrifice. Influential commentators in African American political thought account well for Wells’s documentarian critique of racial criminalization in her anti-lynching editorials (Balfour Reference Balfour2015; Erlenbusch-Anderson Reference Erlenbusch-Anderson2022; Murakawa Reference Murakawa, Rogers and Turner2021; Rogers Reference Rogers2023; Rogers and Turner Reference Rogers and Turner2021a), but less attention has been paid to the constraints that Wells navigates in the pursuit of those political commitments, constraints that come fully into view in her autobiography.Footnote 27 Without her account of her first anti-lynching editorial and its aftermath, we might assume that Wells would have embraced the sacrificial death that she celebrates in the example of Robert Charles. Yet her autobiography reveals a more complex story of political resistance. There, Wells reflects with ambivalence on the calls for her lynching and threats made against the broader Black community in Memphis. She agonizes over her business partner whose livelihood is destroyed because of her editorial and even questions whether publishing her Free Speech editorial was the right decision. Many of Wells’s female friends and neighbors urge her not to return to Memphis, fearing that their husbands would sacrifice their lives to defend her, leaving them widowed in the aftermath. While Wells remains deeply committed to sacrificial death and condemns Black leaders for retreating from the cause when confronted with the demand for extraordinary sacrifice, she ultimately chooses to stay in the North rather than return to Memphis and face certain death. This autobiographical episode offers us a different perspective on Wells—one that we could not see without engaging her autobiography—revealing a thinker who does not abandon her principles but reconsiders engaging in sacrificial death when its practical consequences prove more far reaching than she had initially understood under conditions of racial domination.
This revised view of Wells, I suggest, has implications for contemporary debates on sacrificial politics in African American political thought. Commentators have long grappled with the ethical and political meaning of sacrifice as both an inherent demand of democratic political life and a practice of Black political resistance. Allen (Reference Allen2004, 28–37) famously argues that sacrifice is an inescapable feature of democratic life, contending that citizenship requires a willingness to bear loss for the sake of the common good. Hooker challenges the presumed necessity and justice of such sacrifice, asking why the burden of loss should disproportionately fall on Black Americans who have already been brutalized by the American polity (Hooker Reference Hooker2023, 83–126). Why must this sacrifice fall on figures like Charles or, hypothetically, Wells? Why is Black life so often positioned as the cost of political transformation in American democracy?
In many ways, Wells’s early writings do precisely what Hooker accuses Allen of doing: of romanticizing sacrifice as the highest expression of political courage or democratic virtue. Yet in her autobiography, Wells comes to recognize the dilemma that Hooker identifies. She acknowledges the injustice of asking the most vulnerable individuals in Jim Crow America to shoulder further burdens for the sake of the democratic polity. Unlike Hooker, however, Wells does not reject sacrificial death by claiming that the Black community has already suffered too much. Rather, she refuses to demand that her friends and neighbors sacrifice their lives in an attempt to preserve hers. Wells’s ambivalence reveals that her critique of sacrificial politics is ultimately communal and relational—unlike Hooker’s critique, which is historical and structural. Wells comes to see that the “cost” of her resistance would not be paid by her alone but also by those closest to her, her friends, her colleagues, and her neighbors, whose security would be jeopardized by her return to Memphis, as well as those who would be forced to live on in their absence, fatherless and husbandless.
To borrow Alexander Livingston’s (Reference Livingston and Bromell2018, 211) language, Wells is remarkably willing to act as a “sacrificial agent,” but is not willing to incite violence against “sacrificial victims.” Wells distinguishes between those who assume the risks of political resistance for themselves as she intends to do from those whose suffering is instrumentalized by others. Put otherwise, Wells accepts the possibility of her own death as a cost of political resistance, but she refuses to shoulder the deaths of others on her behalf. This distinction powerfully illuminates her position. She does not abandon her commitment to sacrificial death as a political ideal, but she is forced to negotiate it under the conditions of racial domination that constrain her ability to enact her principles without endangering others in her community. In this sense, Wells models “principled negotiation,” the process by which an individual sustains commitment to a principle while also confronting the circumstances that render its realization fraught. Her refusal to accept that cost does not necessarily mark a retreat from principle, but rather a reorientation of what principled resistance requires in practice. Wells occupies the uneasy space between self-sacrifice and collective safety, insisting on the dignity of risking one’s own life for the cause while refusing to make others bear the price of her political resistance. Her decision thus models a refusal to perpetuate the cycle of disposability demanded by white supremacy, even as she continues to affirm the power of sacrificial death for Black political resistance.
It is from this vantage point that we can turn to Wells’s autobiography, where these tensions are most vividly worked out. Her autobiography reveals that principles do not exist in a vacuum but are tested, strained, and reshaped by the political realities of white supremacy. There, Wells is forced to translate the principle of sacrificial death that she defends so vehemently in her early political thought into lived reality. The result is not the abandonment of principle but its renegotiation: a recognition that sacrificial politics cannot be disentangled from the relational and communal worlds in which Black political action unfolds. Wells ultimately learns that sacrificial death, as she had theorized it, risks conscripting others into danger. In what follows, I trace how Wells’s understanding of sacrificial death evolves from her early celebration of martyrdom’s political force to her later recognition of the collective costs that such courage entails. To understand this shift in her thinking, I begin with Wells’s work in Memphis and the lynching that first compelled her to embark on her anti-lynching advocacy.
Before the Memphis lynching, Wells worked as a journalist and co-owned a local Black newspaper, Free Speech. In Crusade for Justice, she proudly highlights her financial independence and professional success as a journalist, describing herself as “happy” and “lov[ing]” her work at the newspaper. Not only does this work bring personal and professional satisfaction to Wells, but she is financially successful; she earns a “living” for herself without the financial support of a husband or her family (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 42). Despite the many barriers to Wells’s success in a predominantly white and male-dominated industry, she enjoys economic independence, professional success, and personal satisfaction as a journalist, foreshadowing the significant sacrifices that she would be forced to make for her anti-lynching advocacy. Wells’s anti-lynching editorials would cost her, among many other things, the financial independence of which she is so proud.Footnote 28
Wells’s life is irrevocably altered, she asserts, when three of her close friends and neighbors—Thomas (“Tommie”) Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry (“William”) Stewart—are lynched in March 1892. She recounts the economic tensions that precipitated their brutal murders and underscores the racialized commercial landscape of the Jim Crow South in the late nineteenth century. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart are prosperous business owners whose thriving business directly threatens a white competitor. Their deaths and the destruction of their business, Wells narrates, are inseparable from the broader project of maintaining white economic supremacy in the South. Wells herself is a business owner of a local newspaper, and the destruction of her newspaper office in the wake of her anti-lynching editorial reflects the same pattern: white mobs repeatedly targeting Black economic independence as a means of suppressing Black political resistance and reinforcing white dominance across the South.
Moss, McDowell, and Stewart had opened the People’s Grocery Store in the predominately Black neighborhood of the Curve, a business Wells (Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 42) describes as directly encroaching on the economic success of a nearby white-owned grocery store. After a tussle between some local white and Black children, an armed white mob attempts to loot and destroy the store. Moss and his partners defend their property by firing at the mob and dispersing their attackers. Moss and his partners are then arrested and jailed for shooting at the white mob. For several nights, members of the Black community guard the jail, yet after their protective presence eventually wanes, a white mob returns to the jail and is granted access by local police officers. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart are brutally lynched that evening, and the People’s Grocery Store is looted and destroyed.
The lynching of Wells’s friends is a profound moment of political awakening for her, she declares, urging her to grapple with ubiquitous social myths about lynching and reframe it as a technique of targeted racial oppression rather than a justified use of violence. It is a commonplace in nineteenth-century American society, Wells (Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 56) stresses, that lynching is linked to the “terrible crime of rape,” and that this “extra-lethal and extra-legal” violence is “justified” to punish perpetrators of sexual violence (Murakawa Reference Murakawa, Rogers and Turner2021, 212–13). Even Wells herself acknowledges that she had assumed that lynching was an “irregular” attack on a deserving target of sexual violence (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 56). Yet the lynching of her friends urges Wells to rethink her assumptions about lynching, rooted in the “myth of black sexual violence” (Balfour Reference Balfour2015, 683) and “racial criminalization” (Murakawa Reference Murakawa, Rogers and Turner2021, 214). The Memphis lynching “opened [Wells’s] eyes to what lynching really was,” another manifestation of racial oppression. After all, Wells’s friends had been lynched but they had “committed no crime against white women” (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 64), so Wells begins the work of “redirect[ing] the gaze of criminality from Black people toward their white counterparts” across the South (Rogers Reference Rogers2023, 180).
In the aftermath of the Memphis lynching, Wells struggles to process the violent death of her friends and begins speaking out publicly against lynching. She fully understands the risks that her advocacy poses and becomes increasingly consumed by the looming possibility of her own death. She accepts that her anti-lynching advocacy might provoke retaliatory violence and secures a pistol—not necessarily in an attempt to save her life, but to ensure that, if killed, she could exact a cost:
Although I had been warned repeatedly by my own people that something would happen if I did not cease harping on the lynching of three months before, I had expected that happening to come when I was at home. I had bought a pistol the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers. I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit. (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 53–54)
Here, Wells does not center her desire to preserve her life but rather a willingness to confront and kill her assailant even at the cost of her own life. Her declaration that it is “better [to] die fighting” and her determination to “sell [her] life as dearly as possible” reveal her readiness to transform her death into a form of resistance against white supremacy. She intends to make her own death “costly” and disrupt the racial economy of lynching by inflicting a countervailing loss against the white mob. She even echoes the economic language that she uses to describe the “cost” of Charles’s death by suggesting that her own death, if inevitable, might similarly be made to “count.” Through this economic framing, Wells inverts the logic of racial hierarchy that lynching dramatized by disrupting its ritual economy: instead of a one-sided spectacle of Black subjugation, her death would impose a real and destabilizing “cost” on the white mob.
The logic of self-armament that Wells articulates in her autobiography differs in emphasis from, but ultimately enriches, her defense of armed Black resistance in Southern Horrors (Rogers and Turner Reference Rogers, Turner, Rogers and Turner2021b, 22). There, Wells (Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 80) extols the capacity of armed resistance to preserve Black life and deter white mobs, citing examples of Black communities in Florida and Kentucky that “prevented” lynchings by meeting white aggressors with force: “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.” She argues that a “Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home,” explaining that only through such readiness for violence can Black Americans secure “that protection which the law refuses to give.” Yet even here, Wells connects self-defense to an economic logic of deterrence. By raising the physical costs of racial violence on white assailants, Black actors force their white aggressors to consider their own vulnerability and thereby unsettle the one-sided calculus of racial domination. As white aggressors come to realize that they risk “biting the dust every time [their] Afro-American victim does,” Wells hopes, they might “have greater respect for Afro-American life.”
In Southern Horrors, therefore, Wells emphasizes two intertwined justifications for Black self-armament. The first is defensive: the immediate aim of saving one’s life when political and legal institutions—police, courts, and the press—refuse protection and instead promote “lynch law” in American democracy. The second is strategic: by making white supremacy “costly” to the white mob, Black armed resistance works to deter future racial violence. My account of Wells’s autobiography does not necessarily aim to undermine this dimension of self-preservation. Indeed, it underscores her belief that self-armament is a necessary technique of survival when the American legal order is complicit in racial terror. But her account of her own self-armament in her autobiography expands that logic to highlight alternative explanations for Black self-armament. In describing her own preparation to “take one lyncher” with her, Wells imagines a situation where survival is unlikely, and the sacrificial act of trying to kill one’s assailant in the final moments of life is an act of political resistance.
To return to her autobiography, Wells conceives of self-armament not merely as a means of preserving her life but also as a means of asserting her dignity even in the face of likely death. She anticipates the likelihood of her own lynching and treats that inevitability as an opportunity to strike back at the very structure of racial domination that lynching seeks to affirm. By preparing to “take one lyncher” with her, she transforms the Black body from the passive victim of white terror into an active instrument of political resistance. Wells’s pistol, as an extension of her, is not merely a tool of self-preservation but a weapon through which Wells reclaims her dignity, even in death.
A few months after the lynching, Wells (Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 57) writes a brief editorial—only four sentences—condemning lynching in the Free Speech:
Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech. Three were charged with killing white men and five with raping white women. Nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will over-reach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.
In response to her editorial, calls for Wells’s lynching are immediate. One white male author urges the “chivalrous white men of Memphis” to lynch her in a local white newspaper: “The black wretch who had written that foul lie should be tied to a stake at the corner of Main and Madison streets, a pair of tailor’s sheers used on him and he should then be burned at the stake” (66). This extraordinarily brutal incitation of violence to tie up, dismember, and burn the author alive in downtown Memphis misgenders Wells, revealing that the white author does not know that Wells was the author of the editorial. Yet his ignorance does not stop him from urging violence against the Black community. Elsewhere, Wells (Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 106) describes a “leading white lady [who] remarked that she was opposed to the lynching of those three men in March, but she did wish there was some way by which [Wells] could be gotten back and lynched.” The stark dissonance between this woman’s view of lynching—hardly an impassioned condemnation of the practice, but at the very least an acknowledgement of its illegitimacy, coupled with her aspiration that Wells might be lynched herself—reveals the deep vitriol that Wells faces after her Free Speech editorial.
By happenstance, however, Wells is not in Memphis when her Free Speech editorial is published. She is traveling to New York for a conference and is met at the train platform by her friend, T. Thomas Fortune, whose greeting strikes her as strange. While it had taken her “a long time” to make it to New York, Fortune insists that she would now “have to stay.” Puzzled, she presses him to explain, and he hands her a New York newspaper reporting on the destruction of the Free Speech office and the many threats made against her life (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 53). By recounting the destruction of the Free Speech office as she herself learns of it rather than following the chronological order of events, Wells imbues her autobiography with her experience of confusion. We, the reader, learn of Wells’s sudden displacement and the disturbing calls for her lynching as she herself learns about them. This disorienting moment of loss—after which her life would never be the same—is delivered through the vehicle of a newspaper in a cinematic scene on a busy train platform. The newspaper, also a vehicle for truth-telling in Wells’s anti-lynching advocacy, informs Wells that she would never be able to return to Memphis safely.
Despite the danger that awaits her in Memphis, one might expect Wells to return home from New York to publicly confront the horrors of lynching and perhaps even embrace sacrificial death as a final act of resistance to racial injustice. After all, Wells had long denounced the retreat of Black leaders in the face of white supremacy and celebrated Charles’s sacrificial death. Yet in this pivotal moment, she refuses to ask her friends and neighbors to risk their lives for their shared cause. Though she might have chosen to “sell her life dearly,” Wells ultimately stays in the North. Her decision is not motivated by self-preservation; she makes clear that she does not fear death for herself, but that her death would draw others into fatal danger. In choosing not to return, Wells models “principled negotiation.” Though she remains willing to sacrifice her own life, she refuses to demand that others bear that cost, insisting that resistance must not come at the expense of the vulnerable lives it seeks to protect.
Wells’s first thought after learning of the destruction of the Free Speech is not of the cause, but of the safety of her business partner and colleague, J. L. Fleming, in Memphis. She describes her strained relationship with her partner, who is angry with Wells for her editorial and blames her for the loss of their newspaper: “To lose everything … was almost more than Mr. Fleming could bear. He blamed me very bitterly for that editorial, and perhaps he was justified in doing so” (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 58). In one of the few qualified statements in her autobiography, she acknowledges the legitimacy of Fleming’s frustration with the costs of Wells’s editorial. Instead of reaffirming her decision to condemn lynching in their newspaper, Wells accepts that Fleming’s anger is warranted. In light of Wells’s celebration of Black leadership and sacrificial death, we might expect her to condemn Fleming for privileging their business and financial well-being over her advocacy for racial justice and defend her publication of the editorial even in the wake of such enormous loss. Yet Wells acknowledges that Fleming’s frustration is fair. This concession is remarkable in the context of Wells’s broader corpus; it is one of the few qualifiers in Wells’s many writings and reveals her difficulty with the consequences of her advocacy on other figures in the Black community. Wells is willing to make enormous sacrifices, even the loss of her business, but she hesitates when those sacrifices affect Fleming, devastatingly so. She remains committed to truth-telling, yet recognizes that under the conditions of racial domination, the pursuit of principle cannot be disentangled from the harm it causes to her cherished colleague.
Wells also struggles with the consequences of her advocacy on the broader Black community in Memphis. Many of Wells’s friends send her telegrams up North to warn her of the threats made against her life; for example, the train station in Memphis is being watched “by white men who promised to kill [her] on sight.” Many Black men in Memphis are prepared to “protect [her],” but her friends and neighbors beg her to stay up North, insisting that her return would only lead to “more bloodshed” and guarantee “more widows and orphans” (Wells Reference Wells and Duster[1970] 2020, 54). Not only would Wells be killed if she returns to Memphis, but her return would mean that many Black men would die trying to protect her and that many Black women and children would be forced to live on with their deaths and absences. In her early writings, Wells advocates for the “violent extreme” of the sacrifice of life (Livingston Reference Livingston and Bromell2018, 215), but the risk of violence against her community urges Wells to back down from sacrificial death. Again, Wells engages in “principled negotiation,” weighing her devotion to sacrificial death against her responsibility to safeguard the most vulnerable members of the Black community whose lives and futures would be imperiled by her return.
Wells’s concern with the safety and security of her neighbors and friends is, again, not an abstract intellectual exercise. She was close with the Moss family and was photographed with Moss’s widow, Maurine, and their young children, Betty and Thomas Jr., in 1894, two years after Thomas Moss and his colleagues were lynched. She was a significant source of support for the Moss family in the months and years after the lynching and bears witness to the deep and generational trauma of racial oppression. Thomas Moss’s grieving family—a symbol for many Black families in Memphis and across America—is on Wells’s mind on that New York train platform. Although Wells remains committed to sacrificial death, she hesitates when her actions risk provoking violence against others in her community. In this crucial moment, despite her celebration of sacrificial death, she ultimately enacts a Black feminist ethic of care that centers on “survival, care, and resilience,” not necessarily for herself but for others in her community (Livingston Reference Livingston and Bromell2018, 226). By refusing to hasten the “premature death” of her Black comrades, Wells chooses to preserve Black life over sacrificial death when the stakes become immediate and collective (Finch Reference Finch2022, 2).
Wells does not merely reflect sentimentally on the ethics of sacrificial death at the end of her life; rather, she actively grapples with this tension in real time in her anti-lynching editorials of the late nineteenth century. In “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Wells elaborates on her refusal to embrace sacrificial death in Memphis. While she reaffirms her readiness to die for the cause, she is unwilling to make political choices that risk inciting violence against others in her community. In Livingston’s (Reference Livingston and Bromell2018, 211) terms, Wells is prepared to act as a “sacrificial agent,” but she refuses to make others into “sacrificial victims” by triggering their suffering on her behalf:
I could no longer hold my peace, and I feel, yes, I am sure, that if it had to be done over again (provided no one else was the loser save myself) I would do and say the very same again. (Wells Reference Wells, Bay and Gates2014, 106; emphasis added)
Wells reflects on her choice to condemn lynching—after all, her editorial had cost her so much—and insists that she would make the same choice again. At first blush, she appears to waver. She momentarily questions her decision before reaffirming it, but her certainty is conditional. Wells’s conviction hinges on the qualification that only she—and unequivocally not others—should bear the cost. Her principled commitment to sacrificial death comes under pressure by her competing pledge to safeguard other vulnerable members of her community. Wells concedes that she would have regretted her choice if it had led to more bloodshed and violence against the Black community in Memphis. She draws a clear ethical line when the burden of her sacrifice risks harm to others, regardless of their willingness to stand with her in death. In doing so, Wells’s political resistance reveals the difficulty of navigating competing principles under conditions of extraordinary oppression. After all, Wells’s truth-telling incites violence against the very people that she seeks to protect. Her anti-lynching advocacy thus invites us to reflect on the political liability of those who call on others, explicitly or implicitly, to share in its cost. Wells’s discernment heightens these stakes by insisting that resistance should not replicate the logic of disposability that it seeks to oppose. Her care for her community thus emerges not in opposition to principle but as the moral horizon within which principled action must be measured and enacted. Wells’s decision to stay in the North therefore represents an act of discernment: a recognition that the integrity of her principle depends on her refusal to endanger others in its pursuit.
Wells’s political thought reveals a profound tension at the heart of Black political resistance: the conflict between a principled commitment to sacrificial death and an obligation to protect the lives of others in one’s community. While her early writings affirm the nobility of death in the pursuit of racial justice, her autobiography complicates this principle. In the face of real threats not only to herself but also to her friends, colleagues, and neighbors, Wells chooses care over sacrifice. Her decision to remain in the North after her Free Speech editorial does not signal a retreat from principle, but rather a recalibration of what resistance requires when political vulnerability is shared. There was, in reality, no scenario in which Wells could sacrifice herself without implicating others. While she is willing to die, she is unwilling to risk the lives of those around her. Her decision to stay in the North should not be read as self-preservation when confronted with a violent death or a retreat from her endorsement of sacrificial death, but as the only option available to her if she wished to protect others. Even reflecting on this decision later in her career, Wells is clear that she does not regret it precisely because it means protecting others in her community. Wells’s enduring insight into Black political resistance is not limited to her decision to die or to survive but emerges through her weighing of competing principles under conditions of extraordinary constraint.
Ultimately, Wells offers a model of Black leadership that refuses to elevate principle above community. Her refusal to return to Memphis, knowing her presence would endanger others, is not a failure of nerve but a deliberate act of care. She is deeply committed to her anti-lynching advocacy, but she is equally committed to caring for Tommie Moss’s widow and their children. Wells teaches us that caring for ourselves, for one another, and for the communities we seek to protect is essential as we pursue a more racially just world.
Conclusion
In her autobiography, Wells models a form of political resistance that reveals how principles themselves must be negotiated under sustained pressure from institutions and norms that uphold white supremacy. As a Black woman in Jim Crow America, Wells’s commitments are not merely difficult to sustain but are mutually constraining. Unlike political actors who might act with greater relative independence, Wells’s life is deeply entangled with the lives of others in her community. Her vulnerability, and the vulnerability of those who would risk their lives to defend her, renders the principle of self-sacrifice untenable for her—not because she fears death, but because her death would imperil others. The “cost” of her resistance cannot be borne by her alone, and in practice she is not afforded the privilege of acting as if it could be. Her risks are shared, and her choices are necessarily collective in their consequences.
Wells does not fully anticipate this entanglement in her early writings, but she is forced to confront it in the aftermath of her Free Speech editorial. Her vulnerability thus functions as a constraint on her principles: she can choose to sacrifice her life, but only at the risk of sacrificing others. She cannot fully enact the demands of her own commitments without violating other commitments that she holds dear. Her death, she comes to understand, implies the death of others who would try to protect her, just as she had tried to protect the Moss family after Tommie’s murder.
This shift does not signal a weakening of commitment or a retreat from the principle of sacrificial death. Rather, what evolves is Wells’s understanding of the conditions under which she can pursue that principle—conditions that include whether she can do so without compelling others in her community to bear the same sacrifice. Before the Memphis lynching, Wells imagines that she can bear the “cost” of resistance alone. But after the destruction of the Free Speech, this expectation collapses. She realizes that even an individualistic act of defiance reverberates outward, causing harm she never intended for others to pay. Fleming’s devastating losses reveal that she is not the only “loser” after her editorial but that the “cost” of her advocacy is inflicted on her community. In this recognition, Wells encounters what Livingston (Reference Livingston and Bromell2018, 221) calls the “paradox of sacrifice and survival,” a predicament that Hooker (Reference Hooker2016, 449; 2023, 5) reminds us is not equally distributed among all political actors. A more privileged actor might possess the freedom to act without endangering others, but Wells’s resistance is shadowed by the reality that every act of courage reverberates across the fragile networks of Black communities in the Jim Crow South. Wells remains unwavering in her commitment both to sacrificial death and to the preservation of Black life, yet she ultimately learns that the simultaneous pursuit of both is not afforded to her.
This more nuanced portrait of Wells is especially important as she becomes increasingly centered in the discipline of political theory. As Adolph L. Reed Jr. (Reference Reed1997, 4) rightly warns, marginalized figures are often presented “without tension and irony, as hero[es] for our time.” Madeline Hsu (Reference Hsu2018, 71) similarly cautions against the romanticization of marginalized figures who are too often reduced to either “heroes” or “victims.”Footnote 29 In upholding Wells as a symbol of uncompromising heroism, we risk obscuring the profound constraints that she navigated as a Black woman confronting racial terror in the Jim Crow South.
Wells’s “principled negotiation” reminds us that not all political actors enjoy the same strategic or ethical latitude. The most vulnerable are often compelled to reconcile competing and even incompatible principles within a world structured against their humanity. Racial domination, Wells teaches us, functions not only as a constraint on self-preservation but also as a constraint on principle itself, forcing those most committed to justice to rethink what it means to act justly in a world that makes justice nearly impossible. In Wells’s hands, principle is not an unyielding command but a living commitment that must be interrogated amid the realities of shared vulnerability and white supremacy. This recognition does not diminish her heroism but instead illuminates the tragic choices that she is forced to make—and all marginalized actors must continue to make—in pursuit of a more just world.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Yuna Blajer de la Garza, Glory Liu, Matthew Rickard, Neil Roberts, Melvin Rogers, and Alicia Steinmetz for many generative conversations on Wells. I am especially indebted to Matthew Rickard for his deep and sustained engagement with my work on Wells and sacrificial death. I would also like to thank the participants of the Workshop on Politics, Ethics, and Society at Washington University in St. Louis, where I presented an earlier draft of this article. In particular, I would like to thank Clarissa Hayward, who served as the discussant at that workshop and helped me to hone the main argument of the article. I am also grateful to my research assistant, Chantal Ogbeifun, for her outstanding research and editorial assistance on this article. Finally, I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editorial and copyediting team at Perspectives on Politics for their thoughtful suggestions and careful guidance in strengthening the manuscript and shepherding this article to publication.
