June 28, 2024 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, born into slavery during the Civil War, Ida B. Wells is best remembered as an American journalist who fought tirelessly against lynching during the Jim Crow era. What most people don’t know is that she defended the right of blacks to own arms.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, the story of Ida B. Wells. Born into
slavery during the Civil War, she is best remembered as
an American journalist who fought tirelessly against lynching during the
(00:31):
Jim Crow era. Here to tell her story is our
frequent contributor, Ashley Lebinski. Take it away, Ashley.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
The name Ida B.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Wells is most often associated with Black American advocacy in
the post Civil War period. She has had a presence
that has extended all the way into modern day. But
it's kind of interesting to understand her entire story because
a solid portion of that has been largely forgotten by
(01:03):
the American public. And that was that not only was
she a civil rights advocate, not only was she an
advocate for women's rights, but she also had a lot
to do with the Second Amendment advocacy in terms of
self defense and firearms training for African Americans. Ida B
Wells was born in eighteen sixty two in Holly Springs, Mississippi,
(01:25):
and she spent her first three years of life as
an enslaved person. But after the War, the family became
active in the Republican Party, so she was a part
of a family that were activists really from the start.
Once African Americans gained their freedom, she attended Rust College
for a little bit, but she ended up having to
take care of her family because her parents and her
brother died in eighteen seventy eight from yellow fever, so
(01:48):
she had.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Several other siblings. She decided to get a job teaching school.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
In order to help support their family, and they'd ultimately
moved to Memphis, Tennessee to be near an ant so
to be a near a new family. And her advocacy
story really starts.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Because of a legal.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Battle involving a ticket that she purchased for a train ride.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
She was taking a train.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Ride into the city, and so she decided that she
wanted to buy a first class ticket for herself, but
the train company, because of laws at the time, the
train company was allowed to segregate the carts, and so
they told her that despite the fact that she was
able to buy the first class car, that she was
going to have to move and she refused and was
physically removed from the train, and so this started a
(02:30):
legal battle that she ultimately settled with the train company,
and then two years later the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned
her victory.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
So she definitely got the shaft.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
In that scenario, and that inspired really the beginning of
her work and what she's more well known for, which
is journalism. So she started bringing attention to African American
issues in America in the post Civil War period, but
also specifically.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
In the post Civil War South.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
She became editor and co owner of a Memphis paper
which was known as The Free Speach and Headlight, and
she initially was writing under a pen name, which was
kind of a smart idea for a while because she
was bringing up so many difficult issues that she was
ultimately fired from her teaching job, so she went in
a full time in a journalism and activism. Now she's
(03:17):
known for African American activism in general, but her Second
Amendment advocacy really got started and took off by the
eighteen nineties. And there's a really famous quote that she has,
and I'm actually going to read the entirety of the
quote rather than the one line that you often hear
from any kind of gun rights group. But she really
thought that African Americans needed to learn and train in
self defense, because at that point in time she really
(03:39):
felt that the government was not there to protect her,
and there was a lot of instances where that was
the case.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
And so one of the most famous things that.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
She wrote was called Southern Horrors, and within this in
the eighteen nineties she wrote, of the many inhuman outrages
of this present year, the only case where the proposed
lynching did not occur was where the men are themselves
in Jacksonville, Florida, and Patica, Kentucky, and prevented it. The
only times an Afro American who has assaulted got away
(04:08):
has been when he had a gun and used it
in self defense. The lesson this teaches in which every
Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle
should have a place of.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Honor in every black home, and it.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Should be used for that protection which the law refuses
to give. When the white man, who is always the aggressor,
knows he runs at great risk of biting the dust
every time his Afro American victim does, he will have
greater respect for Afro American life. The more the Afro
American yields and cringes and begs. The more he has
to do so, the more he has insulted, outraged and lynched.
(04:42):
So a lot of times when you hear kind of
this quote from I tob Wells, you only hear the
part about the Winchester rifle, but it comes within a
much larger context.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
And this attitude that she has in.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
The eighteen nineties, it's personal tour, and I'll talk about
that in a second, But at the same time, she
is really going off of A. S. Tree's long tradition
in American culture and American history of firearms laws that
are overtly racist, so to give kind of a perspective
is even dating to the colonies. So before the creation
(05:13):
of the United States of America, there were laws specifically
regulating race and ethnic groups from owning firearms. So it
wasn't like you had to guess the interpretation of the law.
The law specifically said that, you know, you could not
sell guns to Native Americans, you could sell guns.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
To African Americans.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
And some of these laws were so intense that if
you were caught selling to one of these groups, then
you actually could be sentenced to death.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
And there were several cases of that happening. But what
happens around the.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
End of the Civil War is that the federal government
starts intervening in terms of black rights in America. And
so in eighteen sixty six you get the Civil Rights Act,
and so that initial act basically said that you could
no longer create these laws based on race. And so
what you see exactly that same year, you see the
laws going from black people can't own firearms to now
(06:05):
we have a regulation on a specific type of firearm.
So those firearms were usually cheaper, smaller, inexpensive guns.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
So if you know any about gun laws, you know
that in the.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Post World War Two period, in the latter half of
the twentieth century, you hear this term Saturday Night Special,
which is a regulation on cheap imported foreign firearms. And
so this is kind of a really early version of that.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
And you've been listening to Ashley Lebinski and if the
voice sounds familiar, well, she's the former co host of
Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, and she's telling the story
of I. B. Wells and a part of it that
a lot of people don't know about, and that is
the civil right that mattered a lot to African Americans
in the South living in dangerous circumstances and not being
(06:50):
able to count on that local sheriff for defense, if anything,
for malice and for worse. And when we come back,
you're going to hear more about this story of I
to B Wells, her defense of the Second Amendment, and
so much more. And it's a local story. We broadcast
from Oxford, Mississippi, of an hour south straight as a
(07:11):
crow from Memphis. So this is a local story for us,
one close to the heart. When we come back, more
of the story of I to B Wells, her defense
of our Second Amendment rights All Americans here on our
American Stories. Lee Habib here the host of our American Stories.
(07:35):
Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from
across this great country, stories from our big cities and
small towns. But we truly can't do the show without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. If you love what you hear, go
to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button.
Give a little, give a lot. Go to Auramerican Stories
(07:57):
dot com and give and we continue with our American
Stories and Ashley Lebinski telling the story of id B.
Wills and your defense of the Second Amendment. Let's pick
(08:19):
up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
You see the laws going from black people can't own
firearms to now we have a regulation on a specific
type of firearm. So those firearms were usually cheaper, smaller,
inexpensive guns.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
So the laws were called Army Navy laws.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Colloquially, and so basically it said you could own a
specific type of handgun.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
A revolver, as long as it was an Army Navy model.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
So this is a larger, usually handgun, and it's a
more expensive handgun. But then there were revolvers that were
made by other manufacturers that were a lot less expensive,
a lot more affordable for an entire economic class of people.
And while those guns had the exact same capacity and
the same function as the Army Navy guns, they were
regulated and the.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Army Navy models warked.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
And so a lot of people interpret this as being
a transition from you can't be overtly racist now, so
now you're going to legislate based on an economic class.
And so she's alive during the time period although she's
very young, during the Civil Rights Act and then the
Fourteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty eight, which grants African Americans
equal rights under the Constitution.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
But you see that even though these.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Laws are changing, they're still having a massive negative impact
on African Americans. And the specific example that inspired her
to get into Second Amendment advocacy was the lynching of
her friend Thomas Moss. So, her friend, Thomas Moss owned
a grocery store and initially one day got into an
argument over a marble's game that turned into a neighborhood fight,
(09:51):
and that fight escalated into a group of people who
were from kind of a white owned grocery store nearby
that decided to come and try to attack Mosses door,
and they were met with gunfire on the opposite side.
And so Moss and several other people were jailed for this,
and the really, I mean just you can see how
(10:12):
an African American during this time could not feel safe
because Mass is in jail with several people, and a
mob of seventy five masked men descended on the jail
and they dragged the men that were there from their
cells and took them to the rail yard and murdered them.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
And before being.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Shot, Moss was quoted to say, tell my people to
go west. There is no justice here. And this is
actually kind of as an aside. Is an interesting thing
to point out because one of the circumstances that you
do see in this really violent post Civil War South,
as you do see African Americans starting to go west,
and they also start carrying Winchester rifles with them. And
(10:49):
in direct response.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
To what happened, I B.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Wells puts in her memoir, 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.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Than to die like a dog or rat in a trap.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I had already determined to sell my life as dearly
as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take
one Lincher with me, this would even up the score
a little bit. And she was right after Masa's lynching,
she started really talking about African American rights in her newspaper,
and she did get retaliation about two months later in
response to these anti lynching articles, and when she was
(11:27):
out of town, the office for the newspaper was attacked
and ransacked, and so Wells ended up deciding to move
to New York City. So she moves north and she'll
stay north. She ultimately end up in Chicago for the
rest of her life. But there's a really interesting example
of kind of the impact that she had really to
frighten lawmakers, especially in the South, which is that after
(11:49):
she wrote Southern Horrors and came out basically saying that
African Americans should have a Winchester rifle as kind of
their pride and joy in every black home.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Interestingly, in Florida.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
In the next legislative session after this article comes out,
Florida creates a law regulating the carry of Winchesters. And
this is the first time in all of American history
where a law has specifically gone after something like this. Now,
it didn't ban Winchester's, but it imposed a hefty fee
in order to get a permit to carry a Winchester,
(12:21):
And the way that the law was written basically said
that even though you pay the fee and fill out
all the forms and are completely capable of passing all
the checks within this law, it is up to the
sheriff to determine whether or not he wants to give
it to you. And there's been some criticism whether or
not because it does not say race, because it no
longer can say a race, whether or not this would
(12:41):
have been, you.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Know, inherently a racist act.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
But it seems suspicious timing that right after she writes
this article then they decide to regulate Winchester's, which there
is absolutely no precedent on that whatsoever in the entire country.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
So it does show that she has a lot.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Of power in the South, even though she vacates and
goes to the North. And so ultimately, all of this hardship,
all this advocacy, all of this trauma, doesn't stop her,
and in eighteen ninety three she founds the Negro Women's
Club in Chicago, and the main objective of that was
to educate and empower black women with skills such as
first aid and firearms training.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
So the firearms.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Component of it continues, even though her advocacy.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Is much broader than that.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
And in eighteen ninety five she marries an attorney and
journalist named Ferdinand Barnett, and he's from Chicago, and so
she ends up working for his paper for a while,
and her writings ultimately get noticed by another really significant
civil rights figure from this time who was a former slave,
and that was Frederick Douglass and in nineteen oh nine
she helped to establish the NAACP. It's an interesting piece
(13:49):
of history when you look at not just Black American history,
but then the role of the black woman in American history.
And if you know anything about kind of the civil
rights movement that occurs in the post World War two period,
there have been a lot of writings by black feminists
from this time period where they feel like they don't
really have a place within either the black movement, and
(14:12):
in some respects, you know, the Black panthers initially had
kind of a hierarchy system against women that they ultimately
ended up getting rid of, but there was this hierarchy system,
so in some respects they didn't feel like they were
equals within the black civil rights movement. And then they
also didn't feel like equals within the feminist movement because
it was predominantly white women, and white women tended to
keep the black feminists kind of at bay. And so
(14:35):
this is something that you hear a lot about in
the nineteen sixties, but this is also what id B.
Wells was going through when she was fighting for women's suffrage.
So during the women's suffrage movement, you often hear about
white women fighting.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
For the right to vote, and they often did.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Exclude black women from this conversation because they felt that
it would detract from the movement. And so Ida b Wells,
like in all other circumstances, not to be deterred. She
ends up creating the Negro Women's Club because she feels
like it's an opportunity also for black women to be
able to participate in what would have been kind of
a white led social club, and so she was trying
(15:12):
to give them the ability to have a.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Voice and to protest. And even it gets so crazy.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
That at one point she goes to march in DC
and the activists Women's Suffragettes, they actually from her state,
ask her and her women to march separately at the
end of the parade, and of course she does not
do that. So even though they're trying to exclude her
and the women that she kind of represents, she always
finds a way to kind of push herself into a
(15:40):
much more diverse conversation and storyline, and this creation of
these Negro Women's clubs ultimately expands to other cities. During
her lifetime and she helps establish a branch in Memphis, Tennessee.
She does try to run for office, but that ultimately
doesn't work out and she passes away in nineteen thirty one.
So this is an era ordinary story that has so
(16:01):
many different layers.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
You have a woman in the.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Post Civil War period who has such a prominent role
in a society that is very male dominated and very
male controlled. But then you also have a black woman
who is trying to find a place for herself within
the black community, but then also the women community within
the United States. And so she does so much to
impact all of American society that I think to some
(16:27):
extent it is unfortunate to lose such an important part
to her life, which is her.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Self defense advocacy.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
And it may not be the most popular part of
her advocacy when you talk about the politics bind firearms today,
but I think in order to understand her story, but
then also the history of regulation and African American activism,
you can't separate that from the early days of self
defense advocacy.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Ashley Lebinski, our frequent contributor here at Our American Stories
and co host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, the
former curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, and
co founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law's
(17:20):
Firearms Research Center. And in the end, Ashley is just
a terrific historian on this important aspect and dimension of
American life and American culture, and I to b Wells,
understood the importance of this right. I once heard Condaliza
Rice share a story that was very similar to her
neighborhood and the degree of which they felt safer because
(17:43):
her dad and the dads in the neighborhood owned firearms
to protect them from the marauders called the KKK, who
were terrorizing neighborhoods, but not hers. The story of Ida
b Wells here on Our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, the story of Ida B. Wells. Born into
slavery during the Civil War, she is best remembered as
an American journalist who fought tirelessly against lynching during the
(00:31):
Jim Crow era. Here to tell her story is our
frequent contributor, Ashley Lebinski. Take it away, Ashley.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
The name Ida B.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Wells is most often associated with Black American advocacy in
the post Civil War period. She has had a presence
that has extended all the way into modern day. But
it's kind of interesting to understand her entire story because
a solid portion of that has been largely forgotten by
(01:03):
the American public. And that was that not only was
she a civil rights advocate, not only was she an
advocate for women's rights, but she also had a lot
to do with the Second Amendment advocacy in terms of
self defense and firearms training for African Americans. Ida B
Wells was born in eighteen sixty two in Holly Springs, Mississippi,
(01:25):
and she spent her first three years of life as
an enslaved person. But after the War, the family became
active in the Republican Party, so she was a part
of a family that were activists really from the start.
Once African Americans gained their freedom, she attended Rust College
for a little bit, but she ended up having to
take care of her family because her parents and her
brother died in eighteen seventy eight from yellow fever, so
(01:48):
she had.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Several other siblings. She decided to get a job teaching school.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
In order to help support their family, and they'd ultimately
moved to Memphis, Tennessee to be near an ant so
to be a near a new family. And her advocacy
story really starts.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Because of a legal.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Battle involving a ticket that she purchased for a train ride.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
She was taking a train.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Ride into the city, and so she decided that she
wanted to buy a first class ticket for herself, but
the train company, because of laws at the time, the
train company was allowed to segregate the carts, and so
they told her that despite the fact that she was
able to buy the first class car, that she was
going to have to move and she refused and was
physically removed from the train, and so this started a
(02:30):
legal battle that she ultimately settled with the train company,
and then two years later the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned
her victory.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
So she definitely got the shaft.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
In that scenario, and that inspired really the beginning of
her work and what she's more well known for, which
is journalism. So she started bringing attention to African American
issues in America in the post Civil War period, but
also specifically.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
In the post Civil War South.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
She became editor and co owner of a Memphis paper
which was known as The Free Speach and Headlight, and
she initially was writing under a pen name, which was
kind of a smart idea for a while because she
was bringing up so many difficult issues that she was
ultimately fired from her teaching job, so she went in
a full time in a journalism and activism. Now she's
(03:17):
known for African American activism in general, but her Second
Amendment advocacy really got started and took off by the
eighteen nineties. And there's a really famous quote that she has,
and I'm actually going to read the entirety of the
quote rather than the one line that you often hear
from any kind of gun rights group. But she really
thought that African Americans needed to learn and train in
self defense, because at that point in time she really
(03:39):
felt that the government was not there to protect her,
and there was a lot of instances where that was
the case.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
And so one of the most famous things that.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
She wrote was called Southern Horrors, and within this in
the eighteen nineties she wrote, of the many inhuman outrages
of this present year, the only case where the proposed
lynching did not occur was where the men are themselves
in Jacksonville, Florida, and Patica, Kentucky, and prevented it. The
only times an Afro American who has assaulted got away
(04:08):
has been when he had a gun and used it
in self defense. The lesson this teaches in which every
Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle
should have a place of.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Honor in every black home, and it.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Should be used for that protection which the law refuses
to give. When the white man, who is always the aggressor,
knows he runs at great risk of biting the dust
every time his Afro American victim does, he will have
greater respect for Afro American life. The more the Afro
American yields and cringes and begs. The more he has
to do so, the more he has insulted, outraged and lynched.
(04:42):
So a lot of times when you hear kind of
this quote from I tob Wells, you only hear the
part about the Winchester rifle, but it comes within a
much larger context.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
And this attitude that she has in.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
The eighteen nineties, it's personal tour, and I'll talk about
that in a second, But at the same time, she
is really going off of A. S. Tree's long tradition
in American culture and American history of firearms laws that
are overtly racist, so to give kind of a perspective
is even dating to the colonies. So before the creation
(05:13):
of the United States of America, there were laws specifically
regulating race and ethnic groups from owning firearms. So it
wasn't like you had to guess the interpretation of the law.
The law specifically said that, you know, you could not
sell guns to Native Americans, you could sell guns.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
To African Americans.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
And some of these laws were so intense that if
you were caught selling to one of these groups, then
you actually could be sentenced to death.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
And there were several cases of that happening. But what
happens around the.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
End of the Civil War is that the federal government
starts intervening in terms of black rights in America. And
so in eighteen sixty six you get the Civil Rights Act,
and so that initial act basically said that you could
no longer create these laws based on race. And so
what you see exactly that same year, you see the
laws going from black people can't own firearms to now
(06:05):
we have a regulation on a specific type of firearm.
So those firearms were usually cheaper, smaller, inexpensive guns.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
So if you know any about gun laws, you know
that in the.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Post World War Two period, in the latter half of
the twentieth century, you hear this term Saturday Night Special,
which is a regulation on cheap imported foreign firearms. And
so this is kind of a really early version of that.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
And you've been listening to Ashley Lebinski and if the
voice sounds familiar, well, she's the former co host of
Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, and she's telling the story
of I. B. Wells and a part of it that
a lot of people don't know about, and that is
the civil right that mattered a lot to African Americans
in the South living in dangerous circumstances and not being
(06:50):
able to count on that local sheriff for defense, if anything,
for malice and for worse. And when we come back,
you're going to hear more about this story of I
to B Wells, her defense of the Second Amendment, and
so much more. And it's a local story. We broadcast
from Oxford, Mississippi, of an hour south straight as a
(07:11):
crow from Memphis. So this is a local story for us,
one close to the heart. When we come back, more
of the story of I to B Wells, her defense
of our Second Amendment rights All Americans here on our
American Stories. Lee Habib here the host of our American Stories.
(07:35):
Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from
across this great country, stories from our big cities and
small towns. But we truly can't do the show without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. If you love what you hear, go
to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button.
Give a little, give a lot. Go to Auramerican Stories
(07:57):
dot com and give and we continue with our American
Stories and Ashley Lebinski telling the story of id B.
Wills and your defense of the Second Amendment. Let's pick
(08:19):
up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
You see the laws going from black people can't own
firearms to now we have a regulation on a specific
type of firearm. So those firearms were usually cheaper, smaller,
inexpensive guns.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
So the laws were called Army Navy laws.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Colloquially, and so basically it said you could own a
specific type of handgun.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
A revolver, as long as it was an Army Navy model.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
So this is a larger, usually handgun, and it's a
more expensive handgun. But then there were revolvers that were
made by other manufacturers that were a lot less expensive,
a lot more affordable for an entire economic class of people.
And while those guns had the exact same capacity and
the same function as the Army Navy guns, they were
regulated and the.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Army Navy models warked.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
And so a lot of people interpret this as being
a transition from you can't be overtly racist now, so
now you're going to legislate based on an economic class.
And so she's alive during the time period although she's
very young, during the Civil Rights Act and then the
Fourteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty eight, which grants African Americans
equal rights under the Constitution.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
But you see that even though these.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Laws are changing, they're still having a massive negative impact
on African Americans. And the specific example that inspired her
to get into Second Amendment advocacy was the lynching of
her friend Thomas Moss. So, her friend, Thomas Moss owned
a grocery store and initially one day got into an
argument over a marble's game that turned into a neighborhood fight,
(09:51):
and that fight escalated into a group of people who
were from kind of a white owned grocery store nearby
that decided to come and try to attack Mosses door,
and they were met with gunfire on the opposite side.
And so Moss and several other people were jailed for this,
and the really, I mean just you can see how
(10:12):
an African American during this time could not feel safe
because Mass is in jail with several people, and a
mob of seventy five masked men descended on the jail
and they dragged the men that were there from their
cells and took them to the rail yard and murdered them.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
And before being.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Shot, Moss was quoted to say, tell my people to
go west. There is no justice here. And this is
actually kind of as an aside. Is an interesting thing
to point out because one of the circumstances that you
do see in this really violent post Civil War South,
as you do see African Americans starting to go west,
and they also start carrying Winchester rifles with them. And
(10:49):
in direct response.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
To what happened, I B.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Wells puts in her memoir, 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.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Than to die like a dog or rat in a trap.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I had already determined to sell my life as dearly
as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take
one Lincher with me, this would even up the score
a little bit. And she was right after Masa's lynching,
she started really talking about African American rights in her newspaper,
and she did get retaliation about two months later in
response to these anti lynching articles, and when she was
(11:27):
out of town, the office for the newspaper was attacked
and ransacked, and so Wells ended up deciding to move
to New York City. So she moves north and she'll
stay north. She ultimately end up in Chicago for the
rest of her life. But there's a really interesting example
of kind of the impact that she had really to
frighten lawmakers, especially in the South, which is that after
(11:49):
she wrote Southern Horrors and came out basically saying that
African Americans should have a Winchester rifle as kind of
their pride and joy in every black home.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Interestingly, in Florida.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
In the next legislative session after this article comes out,
Florida creates a law regulating the carry of Winchesters. And
this is the first time in all of American history
where a law has specifically gone after something like this. Now,
it didn't ban Winchester's, but it imposed a hefty fee
in order to get a permit to carry a Winchester,
(12:21):
And the way that the law was written basically said
that even though you pay the fee and fill out
all the forms and are completely capable of passing all
the checks within this law, it is up to the
sheriff to determine whether or not he wants to give
it to you. And there's been some criticism whether or
not because it does not say race, because it no
longer can say a race, whether or not this would
(12:41):
have been, you.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Know, inherently a racist act.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
But it seems suspicious timing that right after she writes
this article then they decide to regulate Winchester's, which there
is absolutely no precedent on that whatsoever in the entire country.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
So it does show that she has a lot.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Of power in the South, even though she vacates and
goes to the North. And so ultimately, all of this hardship,
all this advocacy, all of this trauma, doesn't stop her,
and in eighteen ninety three she founds the Negro Women's
Club in Chicago, and the main objective of that was
to educate and empower black women with skills such as
first aid and firearms training.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
So the firearms.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Component of it continues, even though her advocacy.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Is much broader than that.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
And in eighteen ninety five she marries an attorney and
journalist named Ferdinand Barnett, and he's from Chicago, and so
she ends up working for his paper for a while,
and her writings ultimately get noticed by another really significant
civil rights figure from this time who was a former slave,
and that was Frederick Douglass and in nineteen oh nine
she helped to establish the NAACP. It's an interesting piece
(13:49):
of history when you look at not just Black American history,
but then the role of the black woman in American history.
And if you know anything about kind of the civil
rights movement that occurs in the post World War two period,
there have been a lot of writings by black feminists
from this time period where they feel like they don't
really have a place within either the black movement, and
(14:12):
in some respects, you know, the Black panthers initially had
kind of a hierarchy system against women that they ultimately
ended up getting rid of, but there was this hierarchy system,
so in some respects they didn't feel like they were
equals within the black civil rights movement. And then they
also didn't feel like equals within the feminist movement because
it was predominantly white women, and white women tended to
keep the black feminists kind of at bay. And so
(14:35):
this is something that you hear a lot about in
the nineteen sixties, but this is also what id B.
Wells was going through when she was fighting for women's suffrage.
So during the women's suffrage movement, you often hear about
white women fighting.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
For the right to vote, and they often did.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Exclude black women from this conversation because they felt that
it would detract from the movement. And so Ida b Wells,
like in all other circumstances, not to be deterred. She
ends up creating the Negro Women's Club because she feels
like it's an opportunity also for black women to be
able to participate in what would have been kind of
a white led social club, and so she was trying
(15:12):
to give them the ability to have a.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Voice and to protest. And even it gets so crazy.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
That at one point she goes to march in DC
and the activists Women's Suffragettes, they actually from her state,
ask her and her women to march separately at the
end of the parade, and of course she does not
do that. So even though they're trying to exclude her
and the women that she kind of represents, she always
finds a way to kind of push herself into a
(15:40):
much more diverse conversation and storyline, and this creation of
these Negro Women's clubs ultimately expands to other cities. During
her lifetime and she helps establish a branch in Memphis, Tennessee.
She does try to run for office, but that ultimately
doesn't work out and she passes away in nineteen thirty one.
So this is an era ordinary story that has so
(16:01):
many different layers.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
You have a woman in the.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Post Civil War period who has such a prominent role
in a society that is very male dominated and very
male controlled. But then you also have a black woman
who is trying to find a place for herself within
the black community, but then also the women community within
the United States. And so she does so much to
impact all of American society that I think to some
(16:27):
extent it is unfortunate to lose such an important part
to her life, which is her.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Self defense advocacy.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
And it may not be the most popular part of
her advocacy when you talk about the politics bind firearms today,
but I think in order to understand her story, but
then also the history of regulation and African American activism,
you can't separate that from the early days of self
defense advocacy.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Ashley Lebinski, our frequent contributor here at Our American Stories
and co host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, the
former curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, and
co founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law's
(17:20):
Firearms Research Center. And in the end, Ashley is just
a terrific historian on this important aspect and dimension of
American life and American culture, and I to b Wells,
understood the importance of this right. I once heard Condaliza
Rice share a story that was very similar to her
neighborhood and the degree of which they felt safer because
(17:43):
her dad and the dads in the neighborhood owned firearms
to protect them from the marauders called the KKK, who
were terrorizing neighborhoods, but not hers. The story of Ida
b Wells here on Our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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