The Rope review: Ida B Wells, the NAACP and a slim thread to a murder

This is a book about an important and long-overlooked Black woman civil rights leader, and an intrepid New York City private investigator who solved a murder at the seashore in New Jersey in which a Black laborer was wrongly accused of the crime.

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“The moral audacity and persistence” of Ida B Wells and Raymond Schindler are Alex Tresniowski’s subjects, together with the virulent racism that prevailed from Tennessee to the New Jersey shore at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Wells’ story is by far the more important part of this book. One of eight children of an enslaved person, she anticipated the courage of Rosa Parks by seven decades when she refused to give up her seat in a whites-only car of the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern train line in the summer of 1883.

Although she was barely 5ft tall, the conductor who ordered her out of the coach needed the assistance of two other white passengers, after she bit him on the hand.

In 1875, Congress had passed a civil rights law that gave Black people the right to sue for discrimination in public accommodation, including railroads. And even though the supreme court had thrown that law out in October 1883, one month before Wells sued the railroad for damages, she won a ruling in her favor from a Tennessee judge, a former union infantryman who awarded her $500.

The headline in the Memphis Appeal Advocate was “A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict Against the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad – What it Cost to Put a Colored School Teacher in a Smoking Car.” But Wells’ victory was painfully short-lived. In 1887, the supreme court of Tennessee reversed the trial court’s finding, denied her damages and ordered her to pay $200 in costs.

Tresniowski easily hooks the reader with the story of this brave young African American woman, who became a journalist and a leading anti-lynching crusader. She made herself famous with an editorial in her own paper, the Memphis Free Speech & Headlight, in which she declared “nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women”.

That was more than Tennessee whites could bare. While she was out of town, up north, a mob broke into her newspaper, pistol whipped one of her colleagues and destroyed her typesetting machines. She left Tennessee for good in 1892, moving to Brooklyn to continue her work. In October of that year, a speech she gave in Manhattan’s Lyric theatre about her friend Thomas Moss – a lynching victim – brought her audience to tears.

Wells is a crucial figure in the history of the civil rights movement. In 2018, when the New York Times finally got around to running her obituary, almost nine decades after her death, it identified her as the most famous black woman of her time.

Tresniowski could easily have written a compelling book just about Wells. But for reasons that are mysterious he has decided to divide his volume in two, alternating between the life of Wells and a wild tale of the murder of a 10-year-old white girl, Marie Smith, in 1910, in the brand new beach town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, and the wrongful arrest of a black laborer, Tom Williams, for the crime.

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The main protagonist of the New Jersey murder story is Schindler, the private detective who worked for 77 days and even faked another murder in an ultimately successful effort to elicit a confession from Frank Heideman, a German immigrant and the real culprit.

The book lurches back and forth between these two stories, which are only very tenuously linked by the story of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Ida Wells had some role in the founding of the great civil rights organization, which represented Tom Williams. The reader waits for 300 pages for the author to draw a more substantial connection between his two narratives. He never does.

Tresniowski would have produced a much more compelling volume if he had confined himself to the heroism and the persistence of Ida B Wells, instead of adding the distraction of an extremely lengthy account of an unrelated crime.

• The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP is published in the US by Simon & Schuster