It’s been colder than usual these last weeks, and it’s times like that when I really start to long for green—to see it in the landscape, after the monochrome of darks and lights that make up the winter, the light low enough that color doesn’t seem to register.
A few years ago two friends of mine and I took a walking trip in England, and I think it was the first time my satiety for green may have finally been met—gloriously verdant beeches, maples, horse chestnuts, fields of green in between. I lived in England as an undergrad, and Scotland as a graduate student, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get over my love for those places—embarrassed by it sometimes, defiant about it in others. But I digress…
My friend is a religious historian, and when we came across a Quaker meeting house on the trail, she became near giddy. We thought about the people who had gathered there—people who believed that god speaks to every individual, including women. Many Quakers were advocates for gender equality, peace, abolition, and racial justice—and many Quaker women were writers and preachers in the early modern period into the nineteenth century. There are Quaker women leaders—and even non-binary prophets—who clashed with the misogynist and restrictive Puritanical morés in the early history of New England.
I was particularly intrigued when I recently read that Ida B. Wells organized a partnership with a Quaker woman across the Atlantic, Catherine Impey, who created and wrote Britain’s first anti-racism periodical: Anti-Caste.
I’ve read Isabel Wilkerson’s recent book Caste, and listened to interviews with her that specifically asked questioned about her use of caste, rather than race—and was interested to find that really, Wilkerson is paying homage to others—like Catherine Impey—who used the term caste over a hundred years ago for the same reasons: to draw attention to the fallacy of what is considered “race,” and instead find language that describes the social institutions that have been constructed to divide and oppress.
Ida B. Wells—investigative journalist, civil rights hero—was working in Memphis in 1892, when she witnessed the lynching of three black men, all of whom she knew well. Wells owned and edited the Memphis Free Speech, and in the weeks that followed she wrote blazing editorials demanding the arrest and trial of the murderers. The white press and the mob then turned their attention towards Wells—thankfully she was not in town, but her office was ransacked and creditors took possession of all that was left. Wells wrote from New York City later that “…the Free Speech was as if it had never happened.”
Based now in New York, Wells essentially launched an anti-lynching movement, as a writer for The New York Age. Wells’ belief was that by detailing the events of each case, she could show that lynching is not retribution for criminal activity but because of economic and political reasons—and that it needed political opposition.
A longer version of her work took the form of a widely circulated pamphlet, titled Southern Horrors, Lynch Law in All its Phases, with an introduction by Frederick Douglass, who wrote:
Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.
Wells was determined to reach a broader audience through participation in the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The fair was partially funded by the US government, and thousands of people across the country and from Europe would attend to witness exhibits about science, technology, and natural history. But the board of directors denied facilities for an exhibit from the Afro-American Council.
In response, Wells and Douglass raised funds to publish another book—The Reason Why The Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. Partially written by Wells, who also compiled, edited, and published the book, it outlined directly in a series of essays the continuing disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the Southern states, the issues of convict lease law, and “lynch law,” along with essays on history since emancipation. Twenty thousand copies were published, with copies distributed in French and German as well. Wells was seeking an audience beyond the boundaries of the United States.
Catherine Impey came from a middle-class Quaker family—she and her sister were well educated and grew to become prominent in their home village, including involvement in village politics, as many women in their family had before them. After their father died, Ellen ran the farm so that Catherine could continue the activism she had begun as a teenager.
Impey's Quaker beliefs were a guiding principle in her life—encompassing a philosophy of equality, pacifism, respect for the environment, and the humane treatment of animals. She was a strict vegetarian and occasionally wrote articles on the subject for the London Vegetarian Society journal Atonement. In 1864, at age sixteen, Impey had joined the National Reform Union which sought the vote for women. In the summer of 1877, writer and activist William Wells Brown visited Impey’s town on a tour of Britain to advocate for equality, and signed his name in the Impey family’s guestbook. A year later she would be his guest in America when she attended an international conference on temperance.
Impey visited the United States in 1878, traveling to Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Like many other non-American Quakers, she was concerned about the segregation and disenfranchisement that was happening in the Southern states. She stayed with William Wells Brown and learned in more detail the experiences of African-Americans and the political campaigning that Brown and his colleagues were involved with. As Impey listened to southern state delegates at the international temperance conference propose segregated chapters, she vociferously denounced them.
With Impey’s visits to America, she became fully immersed in anti-racism advocacy. She returned to London and gave short speeches about what she had seen and been told of racism and segregation in the South. But a woman from New York stood up, refuting what Impey claimed to be true, and Impey had no chance to respond—and feared that others would question second-hand reports as well. The experience inspired a desire to initiate an alliance between American and British coalitions, similar to those formed by abolitionists decades earlier. Impey hoped that if the oppression she witnessed was exposed in the UK, it would help to catalyze change in America.
In 1883, she sent a letter to Frederick Douglass, writing
I want you to help me be of more use to coloured Americans. I have really been doing my best for more than four years and though I am no great personage I do feel that my persistence has had some effects….I want to be doing more…I believe we want a great union or anti-caste society—to take up the work where the anti-slavery society dropped it….I think if English people knew one hundredth of part of what I have learned that America would be stung into activity by the indignation that England would give voice to…I mean to keep puffing until my last breath.
As Liam Drew writes, in a fantastic article about Catherine Impey and the work of Caroline Bressey, who researched and wrote about Impey in her 2014 book Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste, much like Isabel Wilkerson,
[Impey’s] use of caste—a term most obviously associated with social tiers in India—reflected Impey’s nascent desire to turn away from the very word “race” and its connotations, and to find a language that captured the social construction of divisions.
Impey was able to convince Frederick Douglass. He gave her his backing and support for her work—to create Britain’s first anti-racism periodical, Anti-Caste. The journal addressed racist atrocities in Africa, Central and South America, India, and Australia, but had a particular focus on America.
Drew goes on to write:
Constantly, Impey tried to make white readers see how white people had built the systems that supported racial oppression and the idea of white supremacy…Impey wanted to say to white readers, ‘it’s our problem to sort out—in creating these structures, we have debased ourselves.’ Once, Impey told a reporter interviewing her that ‘the emancipation of the whites’ from their prejudices and bigotry was the hardest task of all.
Four years into publishing Anti-Caste, Impey returned to America, where she met Ida B. Wells. Wells writes of their meeting in her autobiography, describing how Impey was horrified at the stories of lynching Wells shared, and even more so at the indifference of white Americans—writing:
[we] agreed that there seemed to be nothing to do but to keep plugging away at the evils both of us were fighting.
Impey invited Wells to come to the UK on a lecture tour, to build the international society that Impey had first envisioned in her letter to Frederick Douglass.
Soon after her return to the UK, Impey was sent a postcard of a lynching by Albion Tourgeé, the white civil rights activist, who had been sent the postcard as an intimidation tactic. Anti-Caste reproduced the image of the lynching on their first illustrated cover. In doing so, Impey inverted the idea of intimidation with the stark truth of the murderers’ faces, making it a condemnation. In the editorial that accompanied that issue, Impey writes
How long will the callous nation look on?
Wells completed two speaking tours through both England and Scotland, raising funds to support anti-lynching campaigns in the US, while helping Impey and others to build a British anti-lynching coalition. In 1894, through their work together, Wells had assembled a delegation of British citizens committed to taking a tour of the American South. The Southern states had other ideas, however; governors of nearly all southern states vehemently opposed Wells’ plan, and ultimately, the British delegation was aborted.
Still, Wells and Impey’s plans had a profound impact. Upon Wells’ return to the US, the Philadelphia Press published the full list of British members of the Anti-Lynching committee—including fifteen members of Parliament, nine clergymen, and the editors of the Manchester Guardian, the Bradford Observer, Contemporary Review, London Daily News, London Daily Chronicle, and the London Daily Post. Soon after the publication of these sponsors, white Americans of comparable stature joined, and as a result of the international coalition, Wells was invited to address several predominantly white organizations in the US, which had previously been inaccessible.
Pressure on anti-lynching grew as Wells continued to publish every new account in detail—both in the US and in every London newspaper—and in Anti-Caste. Soon Memphis businessmen—the city with the largest exporter of cotton—began to fear that Wells’ efforts would have a negative effect on their commercial interests. In an effort to repair the city’s reputation, Memphis newspaper editors finally condemned lynching unequivocally, even trying to make the case they had always been anti-lynching and against mob law.
By 1894, the first petitions against lynching were introduced to Congress, with many more to follow. A broader coalition to stop lynching had been born.
After Well’s British campaign, there were no lynchings in Memphis for over twenty years. And although they continued, the rate declined and was never seen in numbers such as existed in the 1880s and 1890s.
Through their determined activism, Wells and Impey, along with the support of many others, helped to organize in ways that had a lasting legacy of impact both within and beyond their own time. Voices of international friendship and shared conviction affecting change, in a time when there was no other way to communicate across the globe than through mail and telegram. Thank goodness for paper and the pen.
One of the things I love in reading about Wells and Impey’s work is the presumptions about the past that the voices of these women outright contradict. These were women who used their voice, busted stereotypes, refused to be stopped, and had clarity on what equality is. There was no “it was the time period,” where we have to accept that people of the past accepted racism and misogyny. There have always been voices that speak truth. As Bressey states, Impey believed
‘We are all god’s children, we are all equal.’ That’s it.
It’s the “that’s it” part that I love—the lack of nuance, equivocation. She knew and believed in the clarity of her own conviction. Given the persuasion, misinformation, propaganda we are so barraged with, I so admire those who refuse to go along with status quo because they know status quo is what helped create the inequity and injustice we witness, experience. Wells and Impey were matter-of-fact truth-tellers, despite living in a world that did all it could to disenfranchise and dismiss the voices of all who were not white men.
When I’m feeling particularly cynical, these are the types of stories I really love to seek out. There is so much more gold in the past and around us than we get reflected back to us. The world is a dumpster fire, but that there are still these voices, of people who always tried, who are still trying, makes me feel a bit less lonely than I feel when I doomscroll for too long. A reminder to have a cynical sense of faith that all is not always as it seems.
Although the majority of editorials related to Wells’ lectures on her return to the US were overwhelmingly favorable, there were some that questioned her motives or accused her of overstepping her bounds as a woman. The New York Times went as far as to label her
a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress, who does not scruple to represent the victims of black brutes in the South as willing victims.
Catherine Impey, of course, had a much different opinion to share, and wrote the following about Wells:
There is great cause and thankfulness and encouragement in the evidences which reach us of awakening consciousness and invigorated action on the part of our sister nation. The consciousness of white America has, we believe, now been too deeply stirred for this matter to be allowed to rest. Moreover, Miss Wells, the National Citizen's Rights Association, and others on the spot are ceaselessly agitating for justice to the outraged race. The old objective that British protests won't avail with independent Yankees, &c., meets us less frequently since it has been recognized that Miss Ida B. Wells's voice has been better heard in America from the platform of Exeter Hall, than from any American platform that was previously open to her. It has been recognized now, that where a whole nation is under the spell of such sentiment, the awakening must come from outside.
That Nikole-Hannah Jones—whose twitter handle is Ida B. Wells—has been vilified and fought against for the 1619 project, seems familiar, frustrating as hell, and hopeful at the same time. These are all women who demand change and have been determined that others also recognize the truth. That the New York Times was behind Hannah-Jones on it, feels a bit like poetic justice.
Thank you for your research and beautifully written article. It’s hard to understand the then and what still goes on In today’s world.
This is another example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Powerful stuff.
I also like to think about other stuff going on in the same time frame. Like that 1892/93 time frame, with the lynchings and the discrimination ... that was the same year as the McCumber Commission in North Dakota, which made my people "landless Indians" until 2019 via an illegal land grab.
This is all the stuff They don't want people to know because it is outrageous and still needs reckoned with.
I love your work. Thank you.