Name ______Date ______Period _____
Primary Document:
Ida B. Wells Ejected from a Segregated Train Car
Directions: Read and analyze the primary document and answer the accompanying questions on a separate sheet of paper.
Ejected from a Segregated Train Car - Ida B. Wells (1884)
1. What did Ida B. Wells do when the conductor tried to drag her out of her seat?
2. Based on what she wrote in the first paragraph, why might she have felt that she had a legal right to stay where she was seated?
3. How did the other passengers respond to her eventual removal?
4. Why was Wells unable to procure the services of the African American lawyer in town?
5. What was the outcome of her case in the circuit court?
6. How do you think Wells felt about the headline reading 'Darky Damsel Gets Damages' about her case?
7. Despite the fact that it ended up costing her more money, why do you think Wells continued to fight the railroad's appeal of the case at the State Supreme Court rather than taking a deal to drop the case? What would you do in her position? Remember that $500 was over a year's wages for a typical worker in that time period.
8. Why does Wells feel that it was so significant that the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act in 1877 and placed the responsibility for dealing with Civil Rights issues in the hands of the state courts?
Ejected from a Segregated Train Car - Ida B. Wells (1884)
I secured a school in Shelby County, Tennessee, which paid a better salary and began studying the examination for city schoolteacher, which meant a greater increase in salary. One day while riding back to my school, I took a seat in the ladies' coach of the train as usual. There were no Jim Crow cars then. But ever since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill by the United States Supreme Court in 1877 there had been efforts all over the South to draw the color line on the railroads.
When the train started and the conductor came along to collect tickets, he took my ticket, then handed it back to me and told me that he couldn't take my ticket there. I thought that if he didn't want the ticket I wouldn't bother about it so went on reading. In a little while when he finished taking tickets, he came back and told me I would have to go in the other car. I refused, saying that the forward car was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies car I proposed to stay. He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand.
I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggage-man and another man to help himand of course they succeeded in dragging me out. They were encouraged to do this by the attitude of the white ladies and gentlemen in the car; some of them even stood on the seats so they could get a good view and continued applauding the conductor for his brave stand.
By this time the train had stopped at the first station. When I saw that they were determined to drag me into the smoker, which was already filled with colored people and those who were smoking, I said I would get off the train rather than go in -- which I did. Strangely, I held onto my ticket all this time, although the sleeves of my linen duster had been torn out and I had been pretty roughly handled, I had not been hurt physically.
I went back to Memphis and engaged a colored lawyer to bring suit against the railroad for me. After months of delay I found he had been bought off by the [rail] road, and as he was the only colored lawyer in town I had to get a white one. This man, Judge Greer, kept his pledge with me and the case was finally brought to trial in the circuit court. Judge Pierce, who was an ex-union soldier from Minnesota, awarded me damages of five hundred dollars. I can still see the headlines in the Memphis Appeal announcing 'Darky Damsel Gets Damages.'
The railroad appealed the case to the state's supreme court, which reversed the findings of the lower court, and I had to pay the costs. Before this was done, the railroad's lawyer had tried every means in his power to get me to compromise the case, but I indignantly refused. Had I done so, I would have been a few hundred dollars to the good instead of having to pay out over two hundred dollars in court costs.
It was twelve years afterward before I knew why the case had attracted so much attention and was fought so bitterly by Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. It was the first case in which a colored plaintiff in the South had appealed to a state court since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill by the United States Supreme Court. The gist of that decision was that Negroes were not wards of the nation but citizens of the individual states, and should therefore appeal to the state courts for justice instead of to the federal courts. The success of my case would have set a precedent which others would doubtless have followed. In this, as in so many other matters, the South wanted the Civil Rights Bill repealed but did not want or intend to give justice to the Negro after robbing him of all his sources from which to secure it.
The supreme court of the nation had told us to go to the state courts for redress of grievances; when I did so I was given the brand of justice Charles Sumner knew Negroes would get when he fathered the Civil Rights Bill during the Reconstruction period.