The Daily - Friday, Mar. 16, 2018

Episode Date: March 16, 2018

Ida B. Wells was an investigative reporter who exposed the systematic lynching of black men in the South. Her work made her the most famous black woman in the country. But when she died in 1931, at the age of 68, The New York Times failed to write an obituary. Obituaries in The Times have been long dominated by white men. Now, the paper of record is trying to fix the record. Guests: Amisha Padnani, the digital editor on The Times’s obituaries desk and a leader of the Overlooked project; Caitlin Dickerson, a national reporter for The Times; Michelle Duster, a professor at Columbia College Chicago and a great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily Watch. Today, she was the most famous Black woman in America who exposed the systematic lynching of Black men. But when she died, the Times failed to write an obituary. How the paper of record is trying to fix the record. It's Friday, March 16th. And, uh...

So how did the two of them meet, do you know? Op-its are about life. I think that's why people love them so much. They're relatable, they're interesting, they're little nuggets of history. At a concert with James Brown? Often about things you never knew. Okay. And the cause of death was cancer?

Do we know what kind? It's almost as though you have to be part therapist when you talk to families. Oh, boy. Repeating back what you're hearing. Was this sudden or was he ailing for a while? Kind of almost consoling them in some cases when they get very emotional. Yeah, my dad died of the same thing. I know that's tough. You're trying so hard to understand every detail about this person without ever having met them. Yeah, that's way too young, too. And it's a difficult thing to do when you're talking to somebody who's grieving. So I feel like you have to want a job like this.

Thank you. Okay. And again, my condolences. Bye-bye. I think who gets remembered and how inherently involves judgment. It's news judgment, but it's still some form of judgment. And to look back at the obituary archives can paint a picture of what society valued and who. Amy Padnani works on the obits desk at the Times, where every morning dozens of submissions pour into her inbox. Candidates for a New York Times obituary. All right, so here we have our list. At the top, we have the people we know we're definitely going to do. We're just waiting to assign them when we have a reporter free. And then underneath that, we have a list called to be vetted.

And in this case, this morning, we heard about Ethel Stein, who was credited with getting the patent for sock puppets. So we decided to sign that one right away. But we'll ask each other questions. We'll pick each other's brains about, well, did they really do this? Well, were they the first to do that? Well, is there a good story to tell? I think approximately 150,000 people die between one edition of the newspaper and the next. Of course, we don't hear about all of those.

We hear about a sliver. And then of those, we have to pick three. So it's a difficult job, for sure. Shortly after she joined the team, she started getting emails from readers who were noticing the people left out. Why don't you have more women and people of color in your pages? You focus too much on white men. And as a woman of color, this resonated with me and I wondered about it too. And I kind of

tucked it in the corner of my mind. And then one day, Amy discovered that the woman who brought tennis to the United States never got an obituary. So then I tucked that away in the corner of my mind. And it sent her on a journey to see who else the New York Times missed. We often say that obituaries are kind of a rear view look at society. They aren't representing society as we see it today. They're representing a couple of generations ago. And a couple of generations ago, women and people of color were not really

invited to the table to make a difference the way white men were. So we thought maybe this was the perfect time to tell their stories. The list was long. There were a lot of big names that surprised us. There was Diane Arbus, the brilliant photographer, Sylvia Plath, the poet. There was Charlotte Bronte, the writer who wrote Jane Eyre. Another one was Ida B. Wells. She was a journalist and suffragist who pioneered the anti-lynching campaign. She was one of the first people to create a newspaper by a Black person for Black people specifically. And she was considered one of the most successful Black people alive at the time. And oddly, we had a little notice on the front page of the New York Times when she got married, but we had absolutely nothing about her death.

When the editors came to me with this project, I can't say that I was surprised to learn that the New York Times didn't write about Ida B. Wells' death, but it was very, very striking. Kaitlin Dickerson is a national reporter for the Times. Kaitlin Dickerson is a national reporter for The Times. Ida B. Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. This is the heart of the Deep South. And the next year, slaves are emancipated. So she grows up during this period of Reconstruction, where you see dramatic Black advancement.

Black people go from being slaves to being able to vote, including Ida B. Wells' father. You even see some being elected into state legislatures. My earliest recollections are of reading the newspaper to my father and an admiring group of his friends. He was interested in politics, and I heard the words Ku Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant. I knew dimly that it meant something fearful, by the anxious way my mother walked to the floor at night when my father was out to a political meeting. Our job was to go to school and learn all we could. And then when Ida B. Wells is 16 years old, her parents and a sibling, she's one of eight, they die of yellow

fever. So she takes on caring for the rest of her siblings. She starts to work as a teacher after she drops out of high school, and she finishes her own education at night and on the weekends. And I think this experience, as hard as it was, it's really emboldening for her more than anything else, right? She's 16 years old, a Black girl in the South, but it gives her the sense that she can do a lot more than I think another woman in her circumstances might have even been able to fathom. And she applies that boldness almost right away because there's a dramatic whiplash in the South. Almost all of these advancements that come out of Reconstruction are reversed in the form of Jim Crow. This is where you see racial segregation codified into law. And with Jim Crow comes a kind of cultural acceptance of violence against African Americans.

And the worst example of this is lynching. And the worst example of this is lynching. So there's a period from the 1890s to the early 1900s when lynchings number in the thousands. And you see crowds of people gather to watch these murders take place in cold blood. Arriving here at 12 o'clock, the train was met by a surging mass of humanity, 10,000 strong. They cheer and celebrate almost as if they're watching a sporting event. The Negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne. So Ida is a journalist at the time.

She's moved from Mississippi to Memphis, and she's watching and covering and watching and covering these lynchings. Here, Smith was placed upon a scaffold, six feet square and ten feet high, securely bound within the view of all the beholders. Here, the victim was tortured for 50 minutes by red hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet, the brands were placed upon him inch by inch until they were

thrust against the face. He pleaded and writhed in bodily and mental pain. Then kerosene was poured upon him. Cottonseed halls placed beneath him and set on fire. She's observing these lynchings take place, and she views them as what she calls a violent form of subjugation to terrorize Black people so much that they become scared into submission. His clothes were torn off piecemeal and scattered in the crowd, people catching the shreds and putting them away as mementos. And even when it's over, people mutilate the body as they take fingernails

and pieces of rope as souvenirs. It was horrible. Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons. Hundreds of people turned away, but the vast crowd still looked calmly on.

Kaitlin, this sounds like an especially kind of awful beat to have covering lynchings. You have here an African-American journalist and editor who seems to have made it the focus of her journalism. How did she handle that? How does she react to it? I think it's hard to overstate how difficult this coverage must have been for her as a journalist. And in fact, there's one lynching in particular that really changes everything for her. And that's when a close friend of hers named Thomas Moss is himself lynched. He was part owner of a grocery store, and he ends up being killed over a fight that breaks out between black and white children who are playing marbles. He's arrested over this fight, brought

into jail, and then in the middle of the night, a mob shows up at the jail. They drag him out of his jail cell in his pajamas, and they murder him in cold blood. After Thomas Moss is killed, Ida B. Wells changes the course of her life. February 7th, William Butler, Hickory Creek, Texas. July 14th, Alan Butler, Lawrenceville, Illinois. October 24th, two unknown Negroes, Knox Point, Louisiana. November 4th, she decides to take on the issue of lynching

in a really aggressive way. January 21st, Robert Landry, Chicken Georgie, Richard Davis, St. James Parish, Louisiana. September 16th, Valson Julian, Basil Julian, Paul Julian, John Willis Jefferson. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. The Free Speech, Memphis, Tennessee, May 21st, 1892. Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of The Free Speech. One at Little Rock, Arkansas.

She sets out on a reporting mission across the South, and she chronicles dozens and dozens of similar cases to find out what's really going on. She conducts extensive interviews. She pulls official records. She does data analysis. August 31st at Yarborough, Texas, and on September 19th at Houston, a colored man was found lynched, but so little attention was paid to the matter that not only was no record made as to why these last two men were lynched, but even their names were not given. I mean, in many ways, Wells comes up with the blueprint for investigative journalism that we still use today. And she does it because remember, she's a black woman in the South who was born a slave. She doesn't have any inherent authority, so she has to create it,

and she does it with evidence. So this whole genre is kind of created out of necessity. So because of her position, her status as a Black woman who probably didn't have the professional networks, it sounds like that's what forces her to be so thorough, to be so enterprising, and so dogged. Exactly, to come up with these airtight arguments that white people who may not have otherwise listened to her can't deny. And what kinds of cases did she find? Who was lynched, and what was the reason given for the lynching?

Rape, attempted rape, alleged rape, suspicion of rape. The vast majority of cases she finds, they begin with a black man who's accused of raping a white woman. And so that particular allegation, she really zeroes in on. She decides to question it. allegation, she really zeros in on. She decides to question it. And she does a systematic study in which she finds that there's very rarely any evidence of a sexual assault having taken place. And instead, in fact, she very often finds evidence of what was a consensual interracial relationship. And she publishes her findings in a series of editorials in the newspaper that she compiles under the title Southern Horrors. And her findings are really upsetting to people,

not just because of what she says, but because of how she says it. She writes, nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare old lie that Negro men rape white women. I mean, she really does not pull any punches at a time when it is not accepted for Black men and white women to be together. So she's, through her reporting, showing that the rationale for what is already a kind of shockingly unjustified act is bogus. It's fiction. Caitlin, why was this important to Wells? Why did she feel the need to document these lynchings

in such fine detail? She writes about how the people who are lynched are sort of forgotten. They're very often nameless, faceless, no one knows their stories, and so that becomes really important to her. She thinks it's important to remember

that these were real people with full lives, with families. Thomas Moss had a two-year-old child and his wife was pregnant when he was killed. My eyes filled with tears as I thought of the list of unfortunates. They had no requiem. And like many a brave Union soldier,

their bodies lay in many an unknown and unhonored spot. She writes that if she didn't tell these stories, her subjects would be forgotten by all, save the night wind. No memorial service to bemoan their sad and horrible fate. How did people react to this very uncomfortable line of reporting? Very aggressively, very violently. Stories are written about her that call her a harlot and a courtesan in the press.

And she's seen as this sort of tactless aggressor, the likes of which people really have never seen before and they don't know what to do with. Her newspaper is ransacked, and she's lucky that she wasn't there. Many people think that she would have been killed. Her life is threatened, and she actually has to leave the South after these editorials are published. And she never goes back because she's not safe anymore.

Then what happens to her? She moves to Chicago, where she continues to work as an activist. She helps to found some really prominent civil rights organizations, including the NAACP. Wow. But it doesn't last. She's soon edged out of the leadership of this organization and others by names you know, like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, people who were much more conservative in their tactics, who were much more willing to be diplomatic when it came to the way that they communicated their causes. And she just wasn't. Diplomatic with the white community, I assume.

Exactly. So her popularity really ebbs pretty dramatically later in life. She runs for the state Senate in Illinois, but she loses pretty badly. And then she dies when she's just 68 years old of kidney disease in 1931. And even though she's arguably the most famous African-American woman of her time, Her death was barely noted by the public. She doesn't even get an obituary in The New York Times. It strikes me as painfully ironic that it was her life's mission to document this era and these injustices. But then she herself and her life didn't get documented. It is ironic. And she's left out of a lot of Black history.

So, you know, I think she came so far before her time, not just as an African-American, but as an African-American woman. And for as much of an impact as she was able to make, she was one person. So she knew how easy it was for this kind of thing to happen. And that's precisely why she focused so intensely on keeping records and proving the humanity of African-Americans, proving that Black people are worthy of the same treatment as whites. And in fact, she writes, The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to demand for justice to every citizen and punishment for

law by the Duster, who for 10 years has been trying to dedicate a monument in Chicago in recognition of her great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Trump administration imposed its harshest sanctions yet against Russia as punishment for its meddling in the 2016 election and as a warning against interfering in this fall's midterm campaigns. The sanctions target five agencies and 19 individuals,

freezing their American financial assets, blocking them from traveling to the U.S., and barring them from doing business with U.S. citizens. I spoke with the prime minister, and we are in deep discussions, a very sad situation. At the same time, President Trump joined Britain in accusing Russia of using a military-grade nerve agent to poison a former Russian spy on British soil in an attack that prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to expel 23 Russian diplomats earlier this week. Certainly looks like the Russians were behind it.

Something that should never, ever happen. And we're taking it very seriously, as I think are many others. And. Good evening, everyone. I'm Larry Kudlow. This is the Kudlow Report. Another record high for the Dow and the S&P. And yet there still is just no love for this market rally.

President Trump has named Larry Kudlow, a conservative TV commentator and a former Wall Street economist, as his chief economic advisor, replacing Gary Cohn. Kudlow has frequently used his TV appearances to promote the president's agenda. But like Cohn, he has strongly objected to Trump's plan to impose tariffs on aluminum and steel. You know, he's so good on taxes. He's so good on tax cuts. He's so good on deregulation, infrastructure. I haven't liked him on immigration. He's never been good on trade. The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ikeison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown,

Andy Mills, Ike Srees Kamaraja, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, and Michael Simon-Johnson, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical

manager is Brad Fisher. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, Jake Gorski, and the obituaries desk at The Times. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you Monday.