Description:This was all happening while Rev Peter Stanford, Birmingham’s first Black Minister (see additional Faces and Places entry) was still the minister in Highgate Baptist Church. While Wells was in Birmingham she stayed at 66 Gough Road in Edgbaston [5]. Gough Road was later to be one of the places where Caribbean people settled when they came to Birmingham in the 1960s. Again, as in the case of Stanford and Highgate Baptist church, it is strange and possibly significant that the places where black people had lived and worked in the nineteenth century became the very places where black people settled in the twentieth century!
Wells-Barnett was a contemporary of Stanford and the parallels between them are striking. They were both born at the beginning of the Civil War; they were both editors of newspapers; both investigated lynchings in America, both spent time in Birmingham and Wells published the first statistical report about lynchings at about the same time as Stanford’s published his Tragedy of the Negro in America. Did Wells and Stanford meet? It seems at least possible, maybe likely, that they did, because there is evidence of connections between Wells, Stanford and another interesting politically active black person in nineteenth century Britain, J. S. Celestine Edwards [6].
Edwards, born in Dominica in 1856, went to a Wesleyan Methodist school in Antigua and became a seaman, travelling around the world before arriving in Britain in the late 1870s. A Primitive Methodist he became a temperance lecturer and evangelist especially in the north of England [7]. He was the editor of The Christian Evidence Society’s newspaper Lux, which was founded in 1870. He was also part of the Society for the Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man (SRBM), and editor of its journal Fraternity. He died from consumption in Dominica in 1894 aged only 37. Edwards actively supported and promoted Ida B Wells anti-lynching campaign.
Two small references, one in Fraternity and the other in Lux confirm that, there was a connection between Stanford, Edwards and Wells-Barnett and probably Isabella Mayo and Catherine Impey also. In Fraternity, April 15th 1894, there is a list of the SRBM’s secretaries in England. “Birmingham - Mr A. H., Clothier, 66 Gough Rd ... Mrs Peter Stanford, 38 Priestley Road, Sparkbrook;” [8]. So it is likely that Stanford and his wife knew Edwards and this is confirmed in the report on the Christian Evidence Society convention in Birmingham: “Rev Mr Stamford [sic], a Negro minister in Birmingham, complemented Mr. Edwards upon the wonderful work he had done in their city.”[9] So it seems that, as Wells stayed at 66 Gough Rd, Edgbaston and the Stanford's lived just a few miles away in Priestly Rd., Sparkbrook, they were also acquainted with her.
Again, as is the case with Stanford, Birmingham was for Wells, Edwards, Mayo, Impey and probably others who are yet to be discovered, part of a transatlantic network which brought together people who were struggling for racial justice in the late nineteenth century. And, at a time when women still did note have the vote, were generally regarded as weaker and less important than men, we have Wells, an articulate, literate and feisty black woman, working in cooperation with Caribbean and African American men in Birmingham to strike a blow for racial justice and an end to the horrors of lynching.