“Color Line Justice” Remembered? ^{Footnote 1}

On the evening of June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for its historical obstruction of federal legislation to outlaw lynching. Three times, the Senate had thwarted the enactment of anti-lynching bills passed in House of Representatives; indeed, Senators withstood repeated demands by seven presidents, members of Congress, and civil rights groups to pass a law prohibiting lynching. Remembering the lives lost because federal inaction had emboldened the states to do nothing, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu reminded her colleagues that “first and foremost, we must acknowledge the pioneering journalism of Ida B. Wells. Though personally threatened with death, Ms. Wells continued to document these outrages before justice, so that future generations might know the history of this era.” ^{Footnote 2} After years of obscurity and disregard, it appeared that Ida B. Wells had arrived.

From the 1880s until her death in 1931, Wells fought fiercely. Not only did she risk her own life repeatedly to document and decry the broad scope of lynching, but she also campaigned for women’s rights, for the full citizenship of all Americans, for employment and educational opportunities, particularly for black migrants from the South, and for a range of other social justice causes. Repeatedly side-lined by her peers—even by the national antilynching effort that grew out of her work—and largely neglected by scholars until the late twentieth century, Wells has enjoyed a belated surge of attention. She is the subject of several recent biographies and is widely acknowledged as an icon of African American and feminist political thought. ^{Footnote 3} If she is now claimed by the descendants of women and men who might once have scorned or ignored her, however, scholars of politics have much more to learn from Wells’s analysis of the violence—physical, structural, discursive—that defined and constrained African American citizenship in the post-Reconstruction period. ^{Footnote 4} Wells’s assessment of the political and economic causes and consequences of lynching lays bare the central role of antiblack violence in the constitution of race and gender in the U.S., and it offers a model of democratic thinking that defies the presuppositions of the “postracial” age. Indeed, I propose that Wells’s political thought offers a valuable resource for reparations arguments that are both antiracist and feminist. ^{Footnote 5} By contrast to Wells’s own words, however, the Senate resolution exemplifies most Americans’ continuing unwillingness to grapple with the living legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.

A closer look at the context and text of the Senate resolution shows how an effort to produce a “new understanding [of U.S. history], on which improved racial relations can be forged” could forestall public confrontation with either the full weight of the past or its implication in the conditions of the present. Consider the setting: the Senate debated its apology in the evening, in a largely empty chamber. And the decision not to hold a roll call vote shielded 20 Senators, who did not sign on as cosponsors, from exposure as opponents. ^{Footnote 6} More importantly, the wording of the resolution signals the limitations of contemporary understandings of the relationship between historical forms of racial domination, on the one hand, and a polity now defined by staggering black-white disparities, on the other. Describing lynching as “the ultimate expression of racism in the United States following Reconstruction,” ^{Footnote 7} the Senators’ statement captures the extremity of the violence against which Wells battled; and it offers a stunning, quantitative indictment of their predecessors’ failure to act: “at least 4,742 people, predominantly African-Americans, were reported lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968”; “documented incidents in all but 4 states”; “99 percent of all perpetrators of lynching escaped from punishment by State or local officials”; “nearly 200 anti-lynching bills”; “7 presidents”; “3 strong anti-lynching measures.” Despite the power of the numerical evidence, which recalls the lynching statistics that Wells used so ingeniously to demonstrate the scope of racial terror and to trouble the complacency of her readers, the Senate’s numbers obscure as much as they disclose.

Without the kind of interpretive labor that Wells performed, the numbers remain isolated from the broader realities of the polity they helped to construct, and meaningful historical reckoning is obstructed. For example, the aggregation of victims elides the mob killings of women and children and precludes an examination of the gendered dimensions of mob rule. Further, the resolution’s reference to the impunity of the perpetrators disguises the degree of official complicity in the killings and the educative role that such public acts of violence played in the making of white and black citizenship under Jim Crow. Crucially, the resolution is silent about the effectiveness of lynching as a mechanism for suppressing black political participation on the one hand, and stifling the economic prosperity of African American individuals and communities on the other. The acknowledgment that victims were “deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States” neither mentions how lynch mobs participated in entrenching mythologies about sexually predatory black men with the assistance of U.S. newspapers, nor addresses the nation’s longstanding silence about the sexual crimes—widespread and unpunished—that were committed against African American women and girls.

The resolution thus joins a narrow account of the history of lynching to an expression of sympathy and regret that is individualized, symbolic, and safely cordoned off as part of the American past. Focusing on the harms done to the immediate victims of lynching and their descendants, the resolution’s recognition of the lives and livelihoods that were destroyed reinforces a juridical notion of historic injustice as the work of individual perpetrators and the suffering of individual victims. ^{Footnote 8} What the juridical approach does not address is the degree to which “violence directed against African American people had become so entrenched a practice that it was a normal routine in national life” at the turn of the twentieth century. ^{Footnote 9} Moreover, the absence in the text of any concrete measures of repair for lynching’s enduring economic and political legacies suggests that symbolic accounting is sufficient. The only hint of a link between history and present policy is the comment that a failure to address past crimes hobbles U.S. efforts to “champion human rights abroad.” In this regard, the Senate’s statement resembles many of the legislative apologies and expressions of regret for racial injustice that proliferated in the early twenty-first century. ^{Footnote 10} It exemplifies what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls “abortive rituals”: “a particular kind of historicity, notably the possibility of freezing chunks of an allegedly unified past, as in the storage model of memory and history.” ^{Footnote 11} In the face of recent widespread protests against the devaluation of black life and the readily available evidence of crushing racial inequalities, such rituals appear empty by design.

Yet Landrieu’s appeal to Wells’s antilynching campaign points toward an alternative possibility. Insisting that democratic life depends on a willingness to investigate the roots of injustices taking place in the present and to reckon with their links to policies and citizenly habits that have been sedimented over generations, ^{Footnote 12} Wells’s writings are historical, critical, and reconstructive. More specifically, Wells provides an analysis of the relationship between past practices and present-day instantiations of white supremacy that both discerns the entanglement of racialized forms of political and economic power with gender and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century and anticipates key features of black feminist critiques that develop in the decades that follow. And she joins a concrete list of things that citizens can do to a broad account of democratic responsibility. Her writings are thus not simply an artifact of a practice whose endpoint, by the Senate’s reckoning, was “the middle of the twentieth century.” Rather, revisiting her analysis of the savage rise of Jim Crow from the embers of slavery offers important theoretical resources for situating and understanding the devaluation of black life and citizenship more than a century after she wrote and fifty years after the key legislative triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. Furthermore, I argue, her writing sharpens the meaning of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow and demonstrates why the language of reparations is critical to contemporary debates about race, gender, justice, and democracy.

Why harness Wells’s political thought to the language of reparations? There are good reasons not to do so. Many commentators have argued that reparations advocacy is politically fruitless and even dangerous; and opinion polls affirm that white Americans overwhelmingly oppose the idea of cash payments to the descendants of slaves and the idea of apologizing for slavery. ^{Footnote 13} Even committed racial egalitarians maintain that framing arguments in terms of reparations will inflame antiblack animus and undermine the prospects for progressive policies. ^{Footnote 14} For example, Ira Katznelson’s masterful account of the federal programs that produced massive racial inequalities in the twentieth century concludes that, because “the brutal harms inflicted by slavery and Jim Crow are far too substantial ever to be properly remedied,” reparations demands constitute a “utopian politics [that] seems entirely symbolic, not really serious.” ^{Footnote 15} Yet reparations remains a recurrent feature of serious black political thought and activism, its utopianism reflective of the insight that the dream of a democratic U.S. remains a dream after centuries of struggle. ^{Footnote 16}

Although the idea of reparations has been rejected as untimely or impractical or reduced in popular imagination to a one-time pay-out, recent advocates of redress for slavery and Jim Crow have built on both historical and global reparations movements to approach reparations as a political language that, echoing Wells’s work, joins a vision of a reconstituted, multiracial polity to an insistence on confronting the connections between past practices and current forms of domination. ^{Footnote 17} As Salamishah Tillet remarks, “early twenty-first century calls for reparations invoke the past as a way of imagining and constructing a model of democracy for the future.” ^{Footnote 18} Beyond the United States, the idea that political futures hinge on confronting past crimes and their ongoing effects has taken hold in multiple societies grappling with the legacies of war, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and repressive regimes. According to Ruth Rubio-Marín, reparations are “acts of recognition of people as equal citizens and right-holders which … will facilitate the recognition of the other as ‘sharing a space for politics within which citizens divided by memories of past wrongs could debate and contest the terms of their political association.’” ^{Footnote 19} Not only do they redress specific injuries, she continues, but they serve as “discursive instruments” that enable the articulation of political claims by women and men who have historically been unable to make themselves heard. ^{Footnote 20} When reparations are understood in political rather than narrowly legal terms, concurs Pablo de Greiff, they can serve as a vehicle for such broad aims as “recognition, civic trust, and social solidarity.” ^{Footnote 21} Surveying the global spread of reparations, Ruti Teitel concludes that “because of their versatility, reparatory practices have become the leading response in the contemporary wave of political transformation.” ^{Footnote 22}

The idea that reparations could contribute to political transformation in the United States acquired new plausibility in June 2014, with the appearance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic Monthly article, “The Case for Reparations.” Calling for “a revolution of the American consciousness,” Coates traces the violence, theft, and exclusion that have produced a polity that has been defined by intertwined democratic and white supremacist commitments since its founding. ^{Footnote 23} His article indicates why the kind of historical awareness that reparations advocates demand is so acutely needed now. As social scientists, legal scholars, and political theorists have documented, the age of Obama is one in which African American citizens, of all ages and genders, find themselves “overpoliced and underprotected”; ^{Footnote 24} when the racial wealth gap between white and black Americans is 13-to-1; ^{Footnote 25} when both criminal justice and social welfare policies suppress the political voice of non-white and poor citizens; ^{Footnote 26} and when racial segregation produces inequality across nearly every facet of American citizens’ lives. ^{Footnote 27} Coates’s call for a public reckoning with the accumulated effects of slavery, Jim Crow, “separate but equal,” and “state sanctioned-redlining” resonates with anthropologist Deborah Thomas’s approach to reparations as “a framework for thinking” and Michael Dawson’s view that reparations constitute “a demand for a conversation.” ^{Footnote 28} Calls for conversation may sound familiar and may appear at first to resemble reconciliation efforts that prize order over democracy. But not just any conversation will do, and not all perspectives should carry equal weight. Talk of reparations, rooted in African American history and political thought, is materialist at its core, for it requires an accounting of the ongoing costs of historic injustice and seeks concrete proposals for redress. ^{Footnote 29} Recent appeals to reparations have interpreted those costs expansively to include the political and cultural effects of white supremacy as well as the theft of black life, labor, and property. Without judging in advance what kinds of programs or investments would offer effective redress, reparations claims open the door to debates that are long overdue.

I build on these insights, arguing that the concept of reparations offers students of politics a language that challenges the evasions of race-blindness and situates political critiques of the present and plans for the future in relation to historical forms of racial hierarchy, domination, and violently policed exclusion. In the spirit of the recent proliferation of political theoretical studies of the constitutive power of race in modern liberal democracies, I hope to indicate how the close reading of historical texts can build on and enlarge the flourishing empirical literatures on the politics of race and gender. ^{Footnote 30} Although I have not encountered the word “reparations” in Wells’s work, ^{Footnote 31} I maintain that her antilynching writing enriches our understanding of reparations demands along three dimensions. First, her commitment to truth-telling, a centerpiece of reparations efforts around the world, demonstrates how to criticize received views of both the past and the present and revise them in the service of more democratic ways of life. ^{Footnote 32} Wells provides an alternative to sterile forms of apology by risking everything to speak honestly and uncovering the ways in which the truth is actively and passively suppressed. Second, Wells’s gender- and sexuality-conscious analysis of the political and economic causes and effects of antiblack violence adds an element that is missing from many reparations arguments. ^{Footnote 33} Central to Wells’s truth-telling is her examination of how the devaluation of black citizenship has transpired through practices deliberately enacted on the bodies of black women and men. Despite a growing awareness of the gendered character of many crimes perpetrated by discredited regimes and the pivotal role of sexual violence in political repression, writes Rubio-Marín, “women … have thus far rarely been the protagonists of discussions about historic injustice and reparations.” ^{Footnote 34} Just as Wells’s antilynching writings were underappreciated for too long, black feminists’ intersectional analyses of the gendered character of racial domination have yet to receive their due in discussions of reparations in the United States. Third, Wells advocates both an active conception of democratic citizenship and collective responsibility for protecting the rights of black citizens. She implicates all citizens in defeating the lawlessness and tyranny of the Jim Crow era, and her words expose the historical underpinnings of recent disavowals of responsibility for racial justice, dressed up as “personal responsibility,” and provide a powerful rebuttal. ^{Footnote 35} In short, Wells’s political thought demands the attention of contemporary democratic theorists and scholars of U.S. politics more broadly. To indicate the current vitality of Wells’s analysis of race, gender, class, and citizenship, I conclude with a discussion of the effects of and national response to Hurricane Katrina, which suggests how her writing both reinforces and enlarges calls for reparations today.

“A Stern Duty to Give the Facts” ^{Footnote 36}

Wells wrote against the backdrop of white reconciliation and black abandonment, in a South defined by racialized forms of exploitation, disenfranchisement, segregation, and terror. Her anti-lynching writings aimed not to moralize but to offer the facts as “a weapon against injustice, barbarism, and wrong.” ^{Footnote 37} This commitment to political engagement started early. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, Wells lost both of her parents and one sibling to a yellow fever epidemic when she was a teenager, and she assumed responsibility for the upbringing of her remaining five younger siblings. While working as a schoolteacher in Memphis in 1884, she refused to leave the “ladies car” and sued the railroad after she was ejected by force. Despite success in the lower court, Wells ultimately lost her case before the Tennessee Supreme Court. Undeterred by the legal defeat, Wells turned to the written word as a mechanism for protest and, according to Patricia Schechter, “between 1883 and 1892, … became the most accomplished African American woman journalist of her generation.” ^{Footnote 38}

Everything changed for Wells in 1892, when three black businessmen, including a close friend, were brutally murdered by a white mob in Memphis. She penned a scathing critique, not only of the practice of lynching but also of the myth of black sexual violence that justified it. The piece appeared in the New York Age and then in expanded form as Southern Horrors. Unable to return safely to the South, Wells continued her efforts to arouse American consciences through pamphlets, editorials, and speeches. To criticize lynching as she did was to court accusations of obscenity, dishonesty, moral depravity, and treason—in the northern press as well as southern newspapers. By adopting the by-line “Exiled” in her critique of the Memphis lynching, Wells rebutted these charges and laid claim to a history of forced displacement and a political tradition rooted in Exodus that countered the reduction of African American women to degrading stereotypes. ^{Footnote 39} In 1893 and 1894, she answered white Americans’ unwillingness to heed her cause by taking it to England and Scotland. And her campaigning never stopped. Across the rest of her life, even after she married lawyer and activist Ferdinand Barnett and raised four children in Chicago, Wells continued to clamor against injustice. She was pivotal to the emergence of the black women's club movement in the late nineteenth century and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the twentieth, although she found herself marginalized by both. She was, in Tillet’s formulation, a “critical patriot.” ^{Footnote 40}

While the immediate focus of Wells’s concern was to put an end to the “feast of crime” ^{Footnote 41} that claimed thousands of lives, she understood that her success required scrutinizing the power relations of her own era, particularly the operation of discursive practices through which lynching was justified, and linking them to prior forms of antiblack racism and the legacies of slavery. Decades before W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction advanced a blistering account of the political damage done by the “propaganda of history,” ^{Footnote 42} Wells regularly reminded readers of the deeper roots of racial injustice and the critical role of history in the creation of a free society. As her daughter Alfreda M. Duster observes, Wells’s A Red Record (published in 1895) was not simply an account of the violence taking place around her but a comprehensive record of the lawless killing of men, women, and children since the abolition of slavery. ^{Footnote 43} In Wells’s view, Reconstruction history, “which reflected glory on the race,” was lost to collective consciousness. ^{Footnote 44} Wells made this point explicit in her response to the 1898 Wilmington Riot, when she exhorted fellow members of the Afro-American Council: “We must educate white people out of their 250 years of slave history.” ^{Footnote 45} The force of her words today—when the lynching epidemic has ended but the devaluation of black life and citizenship remains too regularly taken for granted—is particularly acute. Training her sights on what Jacqueline Goldsby calls “the normalization of lynching's violence,” ^{Footnote 46} Wells calls attention to the brutal consequences of national apathy and challenges her readers to confront the ways black citizenship has been rendered unthinkable.

Part of that effort entails challenging white Americans’ understanding of the meaning of the Civil War and national responsibilities in its aftermath. In Wells’s retelling, the story of emancipation appears, simultaneously, as a tale of abandonment:

The nation thus left the freed-men and -women “empty-handed” and “in the power of a people who resented our emancipation as an act of unjust punishment to them.” ^{Footnote 48} The spread of repressive legislation in the South, Wells notes, stripped black citizens of every protection put in place after the war and bred a new generation of white Southerners too young to remember either slavery or the war but steeped in their parents’ bitterness. ^{Footnote 49} This new generation, in its turn, propagated myths about black bestiality in the press. Accordingly, Wells’s writings are animated by a keen sense of the political effects produced through narrations of the trajectory from emancipation to Reconstruction to Jim Crow.

Further, Wells’s emphasis on statistical representations of lynching’s scope and variety and her extensive quotation from white newspapers, both North and South, reveal a sophisticated understanding of how discursive practices produce a multi-tiered citizenry and situate some members of society beyond the pale of concern. As Goldsby argues, Wells deliberately parodied the journalistic conventions of her day to expose the violent effects of newspapers' production of the truth. ^{Footnote 50} What could be known as true? The utter falsity of the prevailing justification for lynching, for one thing: “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” ^{Footnote 51} With this now famous salvo, Wells penetrated the heart of the sexual pretense that justified the carnival of bloodshed in the post-Reconstruction South. Without deference to the sensibilities of her readers or her own safety, Wells’s recitation of the stated justifications for lynchings demonstrates that rape constituted a mere fraction of those instances and was, in any case, rarely proved. Her writings also challenge the assumption that relationships between white women and black men could not be consensual, much less the work of “white Delilahs.” To that end, her acerbically understated chapter on the “History of Some Cases of Rape” in A Red Record juxtaposes the mundane motivations for accusations of rape (which included preserving respectability, covering up adultery, warning black men against intimacy with white women, avoiding paying a black laborer for his work, or nothing at all) with the horrific penalties paid by the accused. Re-presenting the Chicago Tribune's lynching data, she called attention to the wide range of offenses for which the penalty was mob death. In doing so, Wells both challenged the journalistic practices that effectively fixed the picture of the black rapist in the national imagination and sought redress for the “injury to the memory of thousands of victims of mob law.” ^{Footnote 52}

Wells’s anti-lynching writings go beyond detailing the lawlessness of the post-Reconstruction South and offering a kind of justice to the victims by making their stories known. They also expose the political culture that sustained this violence and interpret the savagery as an attack on African American men and women as citizens. Drawing on one of Frederick Douglass’s last major addresses, “Lessons of the Hour,” A Red Record details the shifting justifications for lynching to reveal the political character of the violence. The first phase of lynching, Wells comments, arose from a fear of black insurrection in the immediate post-war period; the second emerged in response to the enfranchisement of black men and the threat of “Negro domination”; and only after the evisceration of black political power did the rationale turn on the sexual proclivities of black men and the sanctity of vulnerable white women. ^{Footnote 53} This historical reconstruction extends Wells’s earlier comment that “the thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.” ^{Footnote 54}

In addition to the political motives for mob violence, Wells declares, fear of economic competition also took shelter behind the rape mythology. Her own intimate experience of that violence in Memphis persuaded her that the spectacular devaluation of black life was designed both to terrorize African American citizens and to circulate falsehoods about black criminality. If she had once accepted that there was some truth behind the idea that lynching victims were probably guilty—however much she decried the brutality of the punishment—the murder of her friends “opened my eyes to what lynching really was”: “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property.” ^{Footnote 55} Far from addressing any real danger to white women, lynching served to deny African Americans what Judith Shklar calls “the two great emblems of public standing, the vote and the opportunity to earn.” ^{Footnote 56} Repeatedly, Wells calls attention to the illogic of claiming that lynching was necessary to stop crime, when whites were in control of the criminal justice system and the legislatures. The underlying cause of the bloodthirst was, on the contrary, the Southerner’s “resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income.” ^{Footnote 57} Likening the prevailing order of the Jim Crow South to “all the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all the barbarism of the Middle Ages,” Wells reveals how lynching undermined any pretense that the United States was a model of enlightened democracy. ^{Footnote 58}

Even as Wells attacked mob law and appealed for an end to anarchy, she also offered a sophisticated account of American political development. Examining her treatment of lynching as “unwritten law” in the 1900 essay on “Lynch Law in America,” Barnor Hesse illuminates the force of Wells’s indictment of the liberal constitutional order: lynching was “a social institution of racial domination within a democratic polity whose formality made no reference to that institution either to endorse or to denounce.” ^{Footnote 59} “Lynch Law in America” counters the progressive understanding of U.S. history as a movement away from early exclusions toward greater and greater inclusiveness. Instead, it uncovers the operation of a shadow constitution that served to suppress black suffrage after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and then to assure the political and economic subjection of African Americans to their white neighbors.

Demonstrating the parallels between old and new injustices and explaining how the present embroiders on narratives of the past from which they emerged, Wells’s writing exemplifies the kind of truth-telling that reparations advocates demand. Furthermore, like many reparations claims, Wells’s arguments encountered fierce resistance or indifference from white audiences, within and outside the South. These audiences, she avers, were the direct descendants of the women and men who refused to believe that “slavery was not only a monster but a tyrant,” in spite of the evidence produced by abolitionists or the well-known brutality of efforts to stifle antislavery activism. ^{Footnote 60} Mimicking the antebellum era, the post-Reconstruction years witnessed a similar lack of will to confront facts that were readily available to discredit white common sense. Wells aimed to stimulate that will through her pamphlets and editorials. Concluding that “it is strange that an intelligent, law-abiding and fair minded people should so persistently shut their eyes to the facts,” Wells also foretells how such patterns of willful ignorance and misinformation would be part of the inheritance bequeathed to future generations. ^{Footnote 61} One of the distinctive features of reparations discourse is its attunement to the very concerns that Wells addresses. As Teitel observes, “legacies of state oppression do not simply go away of their own accord, though they are often temporized over a nation’s lifetime.” ^{Footnote 62} A crucial part of that action, and a centerpiece of both Wells’s political thought and recent reparations claims, is the production of more truthful stories about past injustices and their progeny. ^{Footnote 63}

“The Major Systems of Oppression Are Interlocking” ^{Footnote 64}

To tell more truthful stories, however, it is essential to take account of the fundamental role of gender and sexuality in slavery, Jim Crow, and their legacies. Whereas discussions of antiblack violence, in Wells’s day and our own, often focus exclusively on men, violence against women is too often formulated in terms that exclude African Americans and other women of color. Wells’s analysis refuses to elide the distinctive harms visited on black women and indicates the meaning of those harms, and of traditions of resistance against them, for the health of the polity. Thus while Deborah Gray White and other feminist scholars have rightly discerned that a preoccupation with lynching can too readily push black women to the recesses, ^{Footnote 65} Wells's writing enables a more complete re-examination of the role of sexual violence in producing the post-Reconstruction political, economic, and social order.

Wells may be best remembered for her fearlessness in trampling on sexual taboos and violating norms of proper womanhood to press her claims, but it is equally critical to reckon with the theoretical contributions of her documentation of the ways successive regimes of white supremacy defined gender and sexuality. In Hazel Carby's estimation, Wells was, “to put it bluntly, an 'uppity' black woman with an analysis of the relationship among political terrorism, economic oppression, and conventional codes of sexuality and morality that has still to be surpassed in its incisive condemnation of the patriarchal manipulation of race and gender.” ^{Footnote 66} First, Wells twins the critique of lynching with a detailed account of impunity enjoyed by white men who were guilty of assaulting and killing black women and girls. ^{Footnote 67} Reading these outrages into the record, she offers a counter-history of brutality and sex-related murder as a fundamental element of racial patriarchy. “This rape of helpless Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days,” she writes, “still continued without let or hindrance, check or reproof from church, state, or press until there had been created this race within a race—and all designated by the inclusive term of ‘colored.’” ^{Footnote 68} Not only does this history expose the mythical character of southern commitments to racial purity, but the lawfulness of the South, in Wells’s view, should be measured by the degree to which the integrity of black women’s lives is valued.

Further, Wells troubles the exclusive association of lynching with black men by offering statistical evidence of the many black women and girls who were also susceptible to the bloodthirst of the mobs. Her pamphlets and editorials reproduce individual stories, like that of 13-year-old Mildrey Brown, who was “legally(?) hung” because she was suspected of poisoning a white child. ^{Footnote 69} Noting that lynching is a practice in which “neither age, sex, nor decency are spared,” ^{Footnote 70} Wells’s attention to the killing of girls like Brown exposes the dangerous intimacy in which so many African American girls and women were forced to labor in white homes. At the same time, Wells enlarges her readers’ understanding of sexual assault in the South by detailing the brutal uses to which African American men’s bodies were put by the lynch mobs. ^{Footnote 71}

Wells’s writing thus takes broad aim at the inherent brutality of racial patriarchy. Crucially, when Wells says of white Southerners that “to justify their barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess,” she does not ask for a gentler, law-abiding form of male authority. And when she writes that “true chivalry respects all womanhood,” her point is not to enthrone black women. Rather, Wells discloses how white women's purported purity served as an instrument of white men's struggle to assert political and economic control and a cover for the violent disregard of both black and white women. ^{Footnote 72} Indeed, she notes that there was little uproar when white men abandoned their families to go to war. As Crystal Feimster remarks, white women and children were vulnerable to harrowing treatment during the war, but much of it came at the hands of white soldiers, rather than free or enslaved black men. ^{Footnote 73} Moreover, as Wells points out, the white women who traveled to the South as teachers after the war could testify to the hollowness of southern tributes to fragile white womanhood. Even as they courted insult and worse from the very men who proclaimed their devotion to feminine purity, these “social outlaws” received “gratitude, respect, protection and devotion” in African American households. ^{Footnote 74}

Wells’s writing examines historical precedents for the violence of her own time and reveals how the vilification of black women was an element of a larger project of white political and economic dominance. Addressing prevailing assumptions about black immorality, for example, Wells’s 1887 article on “Our Women” comments that popular judgments remain “unmindful of the fact that our enslavement with all the evils attendant thereon, was involuntary and that enforced poverty[,] ignorance and immorality was our only dower at its close.” ^{Footnote 75} Effectively, she discredits the charge that African Americans were inherently inferior and shifts attention to the ongoing effects of slavery that mandated that African American women remain trapped in conditions of economic and educational deprivation. An immorality that is “enforced,” she implies, reflects the depravity of the enforcers. And enforcement through laws against miscegenation “only operate against the legitimate union of the races.” ^{Footnote 76}

Accordingly, contemporary scholars of politics should appreciate Wells’s contributions as a “quintessential example of early intersectional theory.” ^{Footnote 77} Her investigations into lynching assist us in discerning and discrediting “discursive and political dynamics that leave the social vulnerabilities of marginalized women both unnamed and unnameable.” ^{Footnote 78} First, she makes those vulnerabilities part of the record. Second, she models a form of political critique that eschews the trope of “Black male endangerment,” which subordinates or obscures attacks on black women’s lives and citizenship. ^{Footnote 79} Where Kimberlé Crenshaw warns that “intersectional failures from an earlier era become the beachheads upon which retrenchment politics play out in the next,” Wells traces the contours of the failures that produced her own political context—detailing the violence, policing, and political and economic exclusion that developed in the post-Reconstruction era and demonstrating their gendered character. ^{Footnote 80} Her work prefigures that of Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Beth Richie, and other recent black feminist thinkers who have decried the development of anti-rape activism and white-led feminist projects that occlude the historical use of sexual violence against black women, on the one hand, and circulation of myths about black criminality, on the other. ^{Footnote 81}

More broadly, Wells’s work anticipates black feminist critiques of the patterns of inheritance through which the legacies of older habits of power have been reborn in contemporary forms of abuse and domination. ^{Footnote 82} Reading her work in conversation with Davis’s insight that the practice of rape under slavery served as instrument of “counter-insurgency,” ^{Footnote 83} or Adrienne Davis’s analysis of slavery as “one of the most extraordinary instances of gender supremacy in U.S. history,” ^{Footnote 84} permits a more capacious understanding of how racialized sexual dominance operates today. As Tiffany Willoughby-Herard contends, “without attention to the deliberate embodied violence and suffering that creates how we use the language of gender, race, and class to explain power relations, it is far too easy to think about enslavement as merely a system of forced labor.” ^{Footnote 85} Likewise, it is too easy to reduce Jim Crow to the formal signs of segregation. To do either is to fail to perceive the complex historical entanglements of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Reparations discourse, informed by Wells, offers a vehicle for raising these considerations as a crucial part of public debates about sexual violence, harassment, reproductive freedom, and a range of issues in which black women’s concerns remain sidelined or devalued.

“What Can You Do . . . ?” ^{Footnote 86}

Wells does not rest with the exposure of untruths or the analysis of the costs of unchecked racial-sexual violence. She connects the record of past abuse and present horror to a vision of political responsibility that speaks directly to the kinds of actions that all citizens have an obligation to undertake. ^{Footnote 87} Further, she advances a differentiated account of the relationship between social location and responsibility, detailing opportunities for political action that are available to her readers. What she offers, in other words, is a conception of self-help that resonates in generative ways with Iris Marion Young’s “social connection” model of responsibility for justice. To be a democratic citizen, Wells and Young contend, is not only to reckon with the fact of injustice but to acknowledge one’s implication and do something. ^{Footnote 88} That Wells insists on the duties of every individual, furthermore, in no way displaces collective responsibilities of communities and public institutions.

Much of Wells's appeal for action focuses unsparingly on what African Americans should do. In Southern Horrors, for instance, she sketches a conception of “self-help” that undermines crucial dimensions of the more familiar version articulated three years later by Booker T. Washington. ^{Footnote 89} Where Washington invoked the image of the loyal slave and urged African Americans to “cast down your bucket where you are,” Wells argued for her readers to recognize their economic power, not simply as the basis for their own advancement but as a weapon. Wells’s political thought affirms the central role of African Americans as citizens and aims to conjure in them a sense of their collective capacity to effect meaningful change. In her autobiography, she reflects back on Washington’s career and criticizes his unwillingness to campaign for political rights, his acceptance of second-class status in public accommodations, and his advocacy of industrial education as the best avenue forward for African Americans. ^{Footnote 90} Remarking that “the appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience,” Wells’s articles and pamphlets emphasize the centrality of black labor and consumption to the southern economy and urge her readers to boycott white businesses in localities that support lynching or to leave those localities altogether. ^{Footnote 91} Where Washington accepted social and political separation as the price of black inclusion in the market, moreover, Wells advocated independence; and she enjoined readers to support the black press as a key component of the effort to criticize white domination and reconstruct democracy after slavery.

Doubtless, the most incendiary among Wells’s proposals is the assertion that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” ^{Footnote 92} Women, no less than men, are counseled to take up the fight. Indeed, Wells once noted that she “had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible,” when the Memphis lynching took place, and that she would gladly “even up the score a little bit” by eliminating a would-be lyncher. ^{Footnote 93} That said, Wells consistently and adamantly rejects the path of violence for its own sake or vengeance, which she understands to be the business of the mob.

Instead, the argument for armed self-defense constitutes one element of Wells’s campaign to enable African Americans to see themselves not merely as victims but as citizens with a duty to spread the truth to stop the bloodshed and to right the perception of their place in the polity. Thus she indicts black Americans, just as she indicts whites, who essay to “avoid responsibility,” ^{Footnote 94} and her actions subvert gender norms at the same time. As Anthony Bogues observes, her willingness to risk her life and reputation “turned the notion of domestic responsibility on its head” and exemplified a conception of communal responsibility from which no African American, male or female, could claim exemption. ^{Footnote 95}

Wells's insistence that African Americans, even in the most repressive parts of the South, could and should act was joined to a rigorous account of the responsibilities of other citizens. Understanding that lynching only persisted with the support of bystanders, she thunders: “The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis, accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual lawbreakers who would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them.” ^{Footnote 96} Wells focuses here on the complicity of white Southerners and deliberately deploys the juridical language of guilt; yet when she describes the epidemic of violence as “so peculiarly national,” ^{Footnote 97} her critique also encompasses second-hand witnesses in the North, women and men whom Young might characterize as “responsible but not guilty.” As Young explains, “being responsible, but not guilty is a designation that belongs to persons whose active or passive support for governments, institutions, and practices enables culprits to commit crimes and wrongs.” ^{Footnote 98} Wells aims to activate this responsibility by attuning her readers to the democratic costs of the habitual devaluation of human life and highlighting the varied ways they could oppose the violence. In other words, she interprets the crime of lynching as a fundamental political threat: attacks on American citizens constitute “attacks on distinctive American institutions.” ^{Footnote 99}

Across her writing, Wells assails apathy and indifference as fiercely as she does the bloodthirst of the mobs. What she will not accept from her contemporaries are claims to impotence, performances of disavowal by “everybody in authority from the President of the United States down,” that sustain public rituals of antiblack violence. ^{Footnote 100} Such professions of innocence are not only false, she reasons, but they implicate whites across the U.S. in the perpetuation of southern “anarchy.” Addressing the reader directly in her formulation of “the remedy” at the conclusion of A Red Record, Wells counsels, “Let the facts speak for themselves, with you as a medium.” And she continues, insisting that “you can be instrumental” by alerting religious and civil associations to condemn lynching; withholding investment in communities where lynchings take place; “think[ing] and act[ing] on independent lines”; and petitioning Congress for action. ^{Footnote 101} The price of inaction, in her view, is not only the emotional, financial, and reputational costs borne by the victims and their communities but the possibility of democracy itself.

If lynching expresses “supreme contempt for the law,” the desired alternative is more complex than straightforward appeals to legal order. In her 1901 exchange with Jane Addams, for example, Wells deconstructs Addams’s plea for “respect for law,” which condemned lynching while reaffirming base accusations about African American men. ^{Footnote 102} Carefully, Wells strips away the layers of falsehood that misrepresent “the slandered dead” and exalts, not the law, but justice and “the sacredness of human life.” ^{Footnote 103} In addition, Wells’s writing calls attention to the role played by white officials, who actively or passively enabled the mobs to realize their ends, thereby decoupling the appeal for order from any uncritical worship of governmental authority. Responsible action in the context of vicious antiblack sentiment and violence, Wells understands, entails a regard for the law that incorporates a critical evaluation of its underside. In this sense, she demands full enjoyment of the rights of U.S. citizenship without reproducing what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “histories that either implicitly or explicitly celebrate the advent of the modern state and the idea of citizenship.” She calls on her readers to live up to modern civilizational ideas but rejects “the repression and violence that are as instrumental in the victory of the modern as is the persuasive power of its rhetorical strategies.” ^{Footnote 104}

At a time when new constitutional guarantees of citizenship were being undercut in the courts and on the ground, Wells attempted to furnish her readers with the tools to realize their responsibilities as individuals and members of the polity. Those same words alert readers to the potentially repressive character of public invocations of responsibility today, when the state has withdrawn support from so many of the civil rights promises of the twentieth century. Is it a stretch to argue that responsibility has become a crucial marker of contemporary inequality? Where some members of the polity are presumed to be responsible, in the criminal sense, others are presumed responsible in the sense of independent, upstanding, dutiful citizens. Responsibility is a term that is rarely not raced and gendered in American public discourse, a word wielded as a cudgel and an instrument for justifying public disregard. One need think only of the 1996 “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” or of the notion of “personal responsibility” advanced by conservative pundits, and by President Obama, to decry black behavior and demand an end to “excuses.” ^{Footnote 105} As Dorothy Roberts notes, “the trope of individual responsibility acts as the ‘cultural glue’ that binds together not only disciplinary policies directed at the poor, but also disciplinary policies that keep socially privileged people from seeing their suffering and the need for social change.” ^{Footnote 106} Wells’s appeal for action by all citizens, in contrast, recasts the responsibility of individuals in relation to their social location and their actual power. Her account of the obligations of public officials and her retelling of U.S. history also disallow efforts to reduce responsibility, particularly that of black citizens, to distorted conceptions of individual character or cultural deficiency with roots in racial slavery. In this sense, she anticipates Deborah Thomas’s conclusion that “this is the most obvious thrust of reparations logic—that current structural inequalities have emerged and persist as a result of real and codified institutional discrimination rather than because of cultural ‘deviations’ and ‘dysfunctions’ that are passed from generation to generation.” ^{Footnote 107} Among the cultural deviations and dysfunctions that Wells battles most fiercely are the habits of inaction in the face of injustice.

Engendering Reparations in the Twenty-first Century

“In no other civilized country in the world, nay, more, in no land of barbarians would it be possible to duplicate the scenes of brutality that are reported from New Orleans.” ^{Footnote 108} Written in 1900, Wells’s words might as easily apply to Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast less than two months after Senator Landrieu and her colleagues resolved to “remember[r] the history of lynching, to ensure that these tragedies will be neither forgotten nor repeated,” and offered “repentance” for the inaction of their predecessors. The juxtaposition of Wells’s campaign against lynching and mob rule at the turn of the twentieth century with events of the twenty-first suggests the ongoing political urgency of the three features of her thought examined in this article: her insistence on the crucial role of historical truth-telling to counter wrongs in the present, her understanding of the relationship of racial power to gender and sexuality, and her emphasis on the responsibilities of all citizens to thwart injustice. Revisiting each of these points briefly, with Hurricane Katrina in view, indicates how a conception of reparations informed by Wells’s political thought contributes to contemporary efforts to realize a more democratic polity. ^{Footnote 109}

“New Orleans is not the exception.” ^{Footnote 110} As Margaret Somers and Michael Dawson have argued, the betrayal of New Orleans’ most vulnerable residents in 2005 provides a snapshot of citizenship in the postracial epoch and reflects white Americans’ commitment to a conception of the power of race that “can only be sustained through a conscious act of political amnesia.” ^{Footnote 111} “The story of the Katrina crisis is a social parable of citizenship in America today,” writes Somers. ^{Footnote 112} Echoing Wells’s account of the post-Civil War landscape, Somers reconstructs a decades-old story of abandonment in which “those left behind in New Orleans to face the storm alone were already a rightless, stateless, and expendable population deemed unworthy of the mutual recognition due moral equals.” ^{Footnote 113} Despite the prevalence of narratives of racial overcoming and the attribution of inequalities to personal or communal failure, Somers contends that in the contemporary United States, “two different systems of inequality and exclusion—one based on immutable particularistic and arbitrary race-based attributes, the other based on market-driven class inequalities—have been grafted together to create a previously unmatched level of almost total exclusion from civil society, an exclusion that is much greater than the sum of its parts as it amounts to nothing less than nonrecognition.” ^{Footnote 114} Not even the televised, real-time evidence of the fatal consequences of this nonrecognition could shake a widespread conviction among white Americans that race no longer matters. ^{Footnote 115} On the contrary, Dawson argues, despite clear links between Jim Crow discourse and contemporary narratives that demonize African Americans, black efforts to shape public understanding of Katrina and bring racial questions to the fore have been subject to dismissal and ridicule. ^{Footnote 116} Absent the kind of historical analysis that undergirded Wells’s antilynching campaign and that animates reparations claims, many Americans focus narrowly (and often erroneously) on the individual responsibilities of Katrina’s victims or administrative incompetence. Without an understanding of the deep roots of racialized marginalization and structural inequality, in other words, the public has neither the tools to assess the causes of the disaster nor the wherewithal to imagine a just form of repair.

Taking Wells’s work seriously not only assists in such understanding, but it also stimulates investigations of the critical role of gender in shaping both the human costs of the storm and the interpretations it spawned. In New Orleans, where women were disproportionately vulnerable to the Katrina’s devastation and less able to recover from it, writes Barbara Ransby, the resurgence of “‘blame the Black poor’ rhetoric” zeroed in on a familiar “discourse that has cast Black single mothers as unworthy of public aid or sympathy.” ^{Footnote 117} Indeed, “welfare dependency” proved a popular explanation for residents’ failure to evacuate, despite empirical evidence that poverty, gender, and access to information about the evacuation order—not employment status or the desire to find work—affected the likelihood that New Orleans residents would flee. ^{Footnote 118} In an uncanny echo of late-nineteenth-century justifications for the undoing of Reconstruction, some “commentators advanced the argument that too much had already been done for the poor and that, in fact, public assistance had fostered a mentality of helplessness that set the stage for the disaster in New Orleans.” ^{Footnote 119}

Wells’s assessment of the public savagery that was underwritten by myths about black criminality and of the unremarked forms of violence perpetrated against African American women and girls further prefigures both the facts and fables of sexual violence in post-hurricane New Orleans. As Cheryl Harris and Devon Carbado explain, the pervasive sense of the city as a zone of black lawlessness was matched by official deafness to appeals for help by African American women who were the victims of sexual violence during this period. “The sexual assaults against women—the vast majority of them black—became markers of black disorder, chaos, and the 'animalistic' nature of New Orleans residents,” Harris and Carbado report; “but black women themselves could not occupy the position of victims worthy of rescue.” ^{Footnote 120} If we consider the national context in which these events took place, we see how the ongoing power of Wells’s analysis of the intersecting vulnerabilities of black women and girls—to unpunished sexual violence and to the violence of the police or their surrogates—confirms Beth Richie’s recent assessment of the United States as a “prison nation.” Even as violence against women has become a target of American law and policy, Richie contends, “women of color are more likely to be treated as criminals than as victims when they are abused.” ^{Footnote 121} Richie’s study of the combined effects of disinvestment in low-income communities, the shift from grassroots feminist activism to a focus on policing, and the lingering power of stereotypical assumptions about poor black women illuminates how the United States responded to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005 ^{Footnote 122} and intimates the lasting power of what Wells called “color line justice” over a century before. Wells’s work thus offers genealogical clues to recent disregard for the structural conditions that exposed black women to the worst effects of the disaster and the receptivity of so many Americans to the circulation of gendered meanings in its aftermath.

Where Wells admonished her contemporaries to take action and showed them that lynching was a national crime, her pamphlets and articles also disallow, in advance, the discourses of distance that enabled Americans to see Katrina’s victims as “refugees” or “displaced persons,” certainly “from somewhere else.” ^{Footnote 123} Her arguments not only recall largely forgotten or suppressed features of the past, but they indicate that the polity, no less than the flooded infrastructure of New Orleans, is in deep need of repair. More, Wells’s assessment of the connections between lynching and democracy demonstrates “how particularistic demands [are] capable of demanding a transformation so fundamental as to require the dismantling of multiple systems of subordination, not just racial subordination.” ^{Footnote 124} And not just gender subordination, either. Although produced over a century ago, Wells’s analysis effectively challenges recent critics of intersectionality who argue that the time has come to “‘get beyond’ Black women’s experiences.” ^{Footnote 125} Instead, she models a form of political analysis that links the consideration of the history and present circumstances of African American women and girls to broad questions: How could white citizens not believe the evidence, documented and often televised or streamed live, of the devaluation of black lives? Why does the respect for democratic norms disintegrate when the flourishing of black citizens is at stake? What does it mean to say that one is powerless to stop injustice, as long as one has the capacity to think critically and speak the truth?

Wells’s political thought provides rich theoretical and historical material for addressing these questions, and she intimates the kinds of contributions that the language of reparations can make to analyses of the health and future course of democracy. In an essay that appeared shortly after the Memphis lynchings that launched her crusade, Wells declares:

While the masculine pronoun appears to undercut Wells’s contributions to an understanding of racial injustice that is always also gendered, the larger body of her work cautions against such a conclusion. Not only does she anticipate recent demands for “tardy acknowledgment” (“We are Americans” ^{Footnote 127} or “Black Lives Matter”), but her thought is part of a long black feminist lineage that discredits any claim that forgets that all black lives matter.

Reparations, understood as a political language, rather than a one-time act or policy, can thus draw upon Wells’s analysis to enlarge debates about public priorities so that they address the relevance of slavery and Jim Crow to issues that challenge the polity today. These issues include, but are not limited to expectations of fair treatment by the police and the criminal justice system; access to decent healthcare, education, and financial credit under reasonable terms; non-discrimination in employment and housing; protection of the right to vote and reproductive freedom; and more. Where Wells’s offensive remarks once pierced the veneer of lynching’s “normalization,” ^{Footnote 128} the perceived effrontery of recent demands for reparations reorients our thinking, as scholars of politics and as citizens, about what is “normal” and what is “offensive” in democratic life. ^{Footnote 129} For scholars, the language of reparations, like Wells’s analysis of her own times, offers an alternative to cultural and biological explanations for black deviance and replaces them with an openness to questioning the longstanding forms of physical, structural, and discursive violence aimed at African Americans that have produced the polity but often go unnoted. To all readers, Wells bequeaths an example of democratic citizenship and an ongoing injunction to reckon with our responsibility for justice. As historian Elsa Barkley Brown remarks, “Before we can construct truly participatory discussions around a fully democratic agenda where the history and struggles of [African American] women and men are raised as issues of general interest necessary to the liberation of all, we have some powerful lot of reremembering to do.” ^{Footnote 130}