Willard and Somerset Respond
Ida B. Wells's speech at the BWTA went on, and the assembly passed an anti-lynching resolution. But the issue of Fraternity containing the Voice interview had already been printed and was scheduled to be distributed.
In her autobiography, Wells wrote that she told Florence Balgarnie, one of her hosts and a BWTA member, about the Fraternity issue. Balgarnie felt that it might backfire against Wells if the interview were published without Lady Henry Somerset's knowledge, since Willard was her guest and close friend. She called Somerset to tell her. Years later, Wells described what happened next:
Instantly there came over the phone…the statement from Lady Henry that if that interview appeared in print, she would use her influence to see that I got no further opportunity to be heard in Great Britain.
At Balgarnie's request, Wells sent a letter to Somerset explaining her reasons for having the interview published. She never got a reply, but shortly thereafter, Lady Somerset sympathetically "interviewed" Willard about her views on race and lynching and her comments from 1890. Her report of this conversation appeared in the London newspaper the Westminster Gazette. It was reprinted in the WCTU's paper, the Union Signal, on June 21, 1894.
After again mentioning her abolitionist upbringing, Willard pointed to an anti-lynching resolution recently passed by the Methodist church in the United States--the denomination to which she belonged.She argued that vigilante justice was not unique to the American South, and that lynchings were far less widespread than Wells's listeners might believe. Due to the importance of "state rights," the national government could only do so much to stop lynchings:
It is really much the same as though London had been held responsible for atrocities in Bulgaria.
Somerset then gave Willard a chance to speak about her comments in 1890. Willard maintained that she had not been talking about lynching at all--only about restricting voting to keep out uneducated people. She repeated her support for an educational test for voting. She and Somerset also drew a parallel between that policy and the British empire keeping Indians from participating in government there.
Add pull quote from Wells's response the next day in a letter to the editor of the Gazette.
