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Truth-Telling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells

The Race Problem - Miss Willard on the Political Puzzle of the South

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1. The Race Problem - Miss Willard on the Political Puzzle of the South

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Frances Willard and the "Race Problem" In 1890, Frances Willard traveled to Atlanta for the WCTU's annual convention. The city had been chosen as part of the organization's strategy to recruit more Southern women and make the WCTU nationally powerful. In Atlanta, Willard gave the interview featured on this page, in which she commented on the South's "race problem." Though she did not know it at the time, this interview would come back to haunt Willard. Wells read it when it was published and did not forget it. The tone she chose and the opinions she expressed were at the heart of Ida B. Wells's criticism of her in the following years.

The interview is long, but we invite you to take the time to read it in full. Willard's statements in 1890, Wells's criticism of them, and Willard's defense of what she said here are at the heart of the conflict between the two women.

Willard began by highlighting her abolitionist family and her admiration for black figures like Toussaint L'Ouverture. "So far as I know," she said, "I have not an atom of race prejudice." She went on to praise the kind, welcoming white Southerners she had met during her travels there in the 1880s. They had told her, she said, what it was really like in the South at that time.

Willard went on to express support for several controversial positions, based on her understanding of Southern politics imparted by the white people she trusted. The first was her embrace of an educational restriction on voting, which she called a "safeguard on the ballot-box" that both Northerners and Southerners needed to protect democracy from "alien illiterates" and uneducated former slaves. At the moment, she said, important prohibition laws were failing because black and immigrant voters were being bribed with drink to vote against them. (Black support for temperance was actually fairly high in the South.) The only thing that could free the political process from corruption was to restrict voting to educated people.

The second was a proposal then being considered in Mississippi to allow white women who could pass an educational test to vote. If it passed, Willard said, white people would control Mississippi and protect it from "political adventurers and whiskey-logged roughs." Voting restrictions would even be a boon to black Southerners by providing an incentive for both men and women to seek out education and self-improvement.

[this is actually before the suffrage thing] Finally, Willard referred to the threat that supposedly made white Southerners so afraid of black men. Drunken mobs, she said “menaced” white women and children—a veiled invocation of the myth that justified lynching, that it happened because black men raped white women. It was this passage, especially, that Wells would force Willard to explain or defend.

[But the rest of the interview made that claim seem more precarious. Willard expressed her support for several controversial issues. The first was the colonization (or "Back-to-Africa" movement) that encouraged black Americans to resettle in west Africa. While popular with many Southern black people as racial violence peaked during the 1890s and the promises of the Civil War and Reconstruction were betrayed, many white Americans also embraced colonization as a way to make the US a white nation. CUT THIS PART?]