Ida B Wells

11 Key excerpts on "Ida B Wells"

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  Struggle on Their Minds

  The Political Thought of African American Resistance

  • Alex Zamalin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  This chapter will discuss someone who devoted her lifework to raising consciousness about lynching and in doing so became one of the most important activist-intellectuals in American history: the African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Born to enslaved parents in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, Wells came to public prominence when, in 1884, she directly resisted the “separate but equal” segregationist logic behind Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) a decade before it was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, by refusing to give up her seat in the “ladies car” of a railroad in Tennessee after she was told by the train’s conductor to go to the rear car, designated for “smokers.” Then, after one of her black friends, Thomas Moss, was lynched in Memphis in 1892, Wells become a militant antilynching activist, fusing investigative reporting with the burgeoning field of social science to argue that lynching was a form of vigilante justice that desecrated American cultural commitments to the rule of law. Wrong were those who thought lynching was nothing more than a misguided attempt to enforce antiquated, if not frivolous, codes of Southern chivalry enacted by uneducated masses who foolishly believed the machinery of justice was just too slow and procedural to mete out swift punishments. Wells theorized lynching as a form of racial terrorism aimed against the black community. Her analysis gave way to a progressive political agenda in which Wells attempted to persuade American lawmakers that lynching was a national crime that required national legislation

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  Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

  Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists

  • Jinx Coleman Broussard(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ida B.Wells-Barnett

  Militant Muckraker

  As for myself, I don’t care. I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking back what I have said. I would consider it an honor to spend whatever years are necessary in prison as the one member of the race who protested, rather than to be with all the 11,999,999 Negroes who didn’t have to go to prison because they kept their mouths shut.1

  Ida B.Wells-Barnett

  Armed with that conviction, Ida B.Wells-Barnett2 set the standard not only as a black woman journalist, but also as a journalist during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This daughter of former slaves championed causes that sought to terminate the horrific conditions under which black people lived and the impediments they faced in the years following the Civil War and into the twentieth century. Through journalistic activism, Wells-Barnett called attention to and sought an end to lynching of black men, women, and children. The muckraking journalist used her investigative skills and her pen to fashion stories, letters, and commentaries that took a nation and its white inhabitants to task for lynching and racial and gender discrimination. Wells-Barnett’s writings prodded both black leaders and the black masses to seek to elevate themselves and the race.

  During the years that she conducted her crusade for an end to lynching, as well as equal justice and rights for blacks, members of the black and white community took note of Wells-Barnett’s writings and activities. The white press regularly sought to malign Wells-Barnett, while some of her contemporaries in the black press praised her work and others criticized her personally.3 Wells-Barnett characterized the attacks against her by the Memphis Daily Commercial as exceeding all others in its “vigor, vulgarity and vileness.”4 Members of her race sometimes questioned her motives, accusing her of wanting to be “that Negro woman,” or criticized her work as a journalist.5 For example, the Indianapolis Freeman once ran a cartoon of a barking dog whose head resembled Wells-Barnett’s and whose collar was labeled “Iola,” Wells-Barnett’s pen name.6 On the other-hand, fellow journalist T.Thomas Fortune, the owner and editor of the New York Age,

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  Through the Eyes of Titans: Finding Courage to Redeem the Soul of a Nation

  Images of Pastoral Care and Leadership, Self-Care, and Radical Love in Public Spaces

  • Danjuma G. Gibson(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  1894 . It is but one example of the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual complexity that permeates the individual and collective inner world of black subjectivity in the face of racial hatred and oppression. The multiplicity of subject matter outlined by Wells in just a few sentences is far too weighty and robust to be sustained and encapsulated by the simplicity of a racial reconciliation conversation posited by many institutions that make the decision to address issues around race and racism, but perhaps lack sufficient intellectual and spiritual capital, and even moral authority, to have effective dialogue. In this one passage, Wells expresses being overwhelmed by the human atrocities, feeling abandoned and misunderstood, isolated, morally outraged, disillusioned, and ultimately, clinically traumatized.

  Ida B. Wells was arguably the leading public theologian and voice of the anti-lynching campaign at the turn of the twentieth century. Without her critical research on white racist terrorism and its nationwide campaign of lynching that propped up white supremacy, we might well be largely ignorant to this very day of the depth of the atrocities that occurred. Lynching remains a prominent historical symbol of white supremacy that was underwritten, in part, by the church in America, directly or indirectly. In the most essential expression of her personhood, Ida B. Wells was able to find her voice. Moreover, in finding her voice, she became a formidable opponent to be reckoned with, not only for those who were outright supporters of lynching (directly or indirectly through their silence), but for those who attempted to justify lynching through racist narratives of perverse black male sexuality (i.e., lynching was in response to black men raping white women).

  In this chapter, I offer up a concise psychospiritual analysis of Ida B. Wells that emphasizes the strength of her authentic self in the context of racial violence and extremity. My analysis focuses on this vital question:

  How did Ida B. Wells discover her authentic self and find her journalistic voice and moral protest against the public lynching of thousands of black people that became commonplace, a trend that swept the country towards the end of the nineteenth and well into the tw

  entieth century in America

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  Well-Read Lives

  How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women

  • Barbara Sicherman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER NINE

  With Pen and Voice Ida B. Wells, Race, Literature, and Politics

  Ida B. Wells possessed a faith in the fruits of literacy shared by many women of the Progressive generation, black as well as white. Proficiency with words was central to her development as a child and her identity as an adult. It became the source of her livelihood as well, first as a teacher, then as a journalist. By hard work and determination she demonstrated that a woman born into slavery could transcend her origins and leave her mark on history. Her masterful use of pen and voice in her campaign against lynching carried her to the front ranks of African American leaders in the 1890s.

  Wells came of age at a rare moment of opportunity for African American women. Given the conspicuous needs of a newly freed people, they had a central role to play in blacks’ entry into civil society.1 Like their white counter parts, black women clustered in teaching. By the 1880s, with the proliferation of race-based newspapers, talented women could also look to careers in journalism and to more formal literary achievement as well: a growing number of African American women turned to writing fiction in the 1890s, as white women had done in the 1850s.2 Wells would try her hand at all of them.

  With the early death of both parents, she had to make her own way in the world while supporting younger siblings. She was better educated than most African Americans of her generation, but to attain full command of her speaking and writing voice, she supplemented her years of schooling with education of an informal kind. In pursuit of expressive literacy, she was more fortunate than Rose Cohen, for she had full support from the African American community, for whom literacy was a collective enterprise.

  A seeker after culture throughout her life, Wells displayed the passion for self-improvement common to many Americans of humble origin. As a young woman, she honed her literary and performance skills at a literary society in Memphis where she took part in diverse pursuits, oral and written, public and private. In the African American oratorical tradition in which a reader was not so much a person who pours silently over the pages of a book as one who excels in recitation, she became a noted “elocutionist.” Her oral and literary skills blended when she became editor of the group’s newsletter, which she wrote and then read aloud.3 These avocational efforts served her well in her career as a journalist and in her antilynching crusade, in which reading, writing, and speaking coalesced.4

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  Women Philosophers Volume I

  Education and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

  • Dorothy G. Rogers(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Even while weathering storms like these, generally speaking, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a cooperatively minded problem solver. She worked “across the color line,” as she and her colleagues would have said. In fact, she was often eager to establish connections with white women’s clubs and activist networks. As noted, she had great respect for Susan B. Anthony. She also enjoyed the company of Helen Pitts Douglass, the second wife of Frederick Douglass, and applauded their interracial marriage. She worked with a number of white women in Chicago’s social and political reform circles, including prominent figures, like Mary Plummer and Celia Parker Woolley—despite the fact that each had made serious missteps in confronting their own implicit bias. She also worked with Jane Addams and seems to have thought highly of her and her commitments to social reform.

  Quite likely the main reason Wells-Barnett was considered “radical” is that she was unafraid to address racism head on. And in a woman, such a straightforward approach was unfamiliar and unacceptable. It was rare to see a female in investigative journalism; it was even more rare for a woman to take on such horrifying instances of violence. In her day and time, women were expected to shield themselves from such disturbing realities—or better yet to be shielded from them by a male protector. Instead, she refused to be silenced, even in the face of death threats. She also expected—and sometimes demanded—respect, inclusion, and credit for her work. In Ida B. Wells-Barnett, we see none of the false humility we saw in Susan Blow; none of the deference we saw in Margaret Mercer; not even the hope-filled pleas of Maria Stewart. She was the first person to file a discrimination lawsuit when forcibly removed from the “white” to the “colored” car of a passenger train—though, sadly, the ruling in her favor was overturned.

  65

  She expressed frustration when passed over for leadership positions in women’s and activist networks or when her tireless campaign to end racial violence was overlooked by the African American historian Carter Woodson.

  66

  These were affronts committed by both white and black colleagues, men and women—probably at least in part because Wells-Barnett’s laser-focus on the lynching crisis was considered a detriment by more moderate colleagues with other concerns and objectives.

  When discussing the thought of women and minority thinkers, it is tempting to place emphasis on their ideas as related to gender, race/ethnicity, or culture. Given the historical failure of philosophy to recognize how culture bound and devoted it is to its white masculine traditions, it might be preferable to err on the side of emphasizing diversity. The aspects of a thinker’s ideas that relate to nonwhite, non-Western, and non-male experience are an extremely valuable contribution to the discipline, after all. And Wells-Barnett did bring new ideas to the table that have not been emphasized in Western thought, though elements of these ideas certainly have existed since Plato: social/political solidarity as a form of political power, for instance, and the need to put theories into practice. But like many women and minority thinkers, Wells-Barnett engaged in discussions of “mainstream” ideas within social/political and legal theory—specifically: egalitarianism, the need for an informed populace, and due process. She did so with the aim of bringing an end to the gross injustices African Americans were subjected to in her time (some would say still) , but she also firmly held that these democratic practices were essential to maintain a just society for all.

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  The Other Reconstruction

  Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nella Larsen

  • Ericka M. Miller(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Wells-Barnett refuses to fit neatly into the category of “integrationist” or “black nationalist,” and so defies a popular mode of classifying African American intellectuals. I argue that Wells-Barnett’s writings on lynching also resist conventional codification, in content as well as form. This resistance reflects the scope of her vision regarding mob violence in American society. Her writings indicate that any approach to ending such violence must be multi-faceted and must speak to all members of society, for all have played a role in sustaining it.

  Born to Elizabeth and James Wells in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, Ida Wells lived her first two years as a slave. The Civil War ended shortly after her birth, bringing with it the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, and later she attended Rust College, where she excelled. But Ida’s youth was short, for in 1878 a yellow fever epidemic spread through Holly Springs, taking her parents, Elizabeth and James, as well as a brother and sister with it. As the oldest of six remaining children, Ida became the sole supporter of the family at the age of sixteen.

  Seeing that employment prospects were dim in Holly Springs, Ida Wells moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she accepted a teaching job and attended Fisk University and the Lemoyne Institute. Soon thereafter, a sharp awakening to the legal, institutional, and social discrimination African Americans still faced 30 years after emancipation and a compulsion to address it inspired a long and illustrious career in journalism. Writing under the name “Iola,” her talent attracted much recognition. The Reverend William J. Simmons, president of the National Baptist Convention and editor of the Negro Press Association, hired Wells as a correspondent for his paper, and later she became the elected secretary to the National Press Association, acquiring high praise from colleagues such as I. Garland Penn and T. Thomas Fortune for her courage, sharp mind, and eloquence. In 1889 Wells became part-owner and editor of Free Speech and Headlight

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  Black Leaders and Ideologies in the South

  Resistance and Non-Violence

  • Preston King, Walter Earl Fluker(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the 1890s, she was an international figure and (for many) a celebrated heroine (McMurray 1999). But the fact that she occupied past space has not and should not generate sweeping concessions regarding her historical salience. The acclaim posthumously accorded Wells falls far short of that accorded to the many figures with whom she might be compared, such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, not to mention Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Wells, rightly or wrongly, has for long been largely written out of the script, taking account of her role as a social thinker and reformer in Afro-America. Only recently has she been identified by some as a subject fit for significant biographical reconstruction. The question arising is whether the narrative space from which she has been excluded, or in which her role has been ‘down-sized’, is a form of historical falsification, intentional or inadvertent. Her case provides an interesting example of how history may falsify or distort – which is the same as failing to be representative – of the past it supposedly depicts. The eminent and admirable Du Bois was one of the first and most notable of those who consigned Wells to the anteroom of historical silence and narrative anonymity. In a brief obituary notice, appearing in the NAACP house organ, The Crisis (June 1931), he reduces Wells to the role of an ‘easily forgotten’ pioneer in the anti-lynching cause. Du Bois in effect makes a brisk case for her historical truncation, if not excision, along three lines. First, he implies that Wells had only one arrow in her quiver – the opposition to lynching – and perhaps not the best arrow of its kind. Second, he claimed the anti-lynching cause was, in any event, later ‘taken up on a much larger scale by the NAACP’, which in part means by Du Bois himself

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  Staging Migrations toward an American West

  From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones

  • Marta Effinger-Crichlow(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Colorado

    (Publisher)

  6

  Figure 1.1. Ida B. Wells, 1893. New York Public Library Digital Gallery ID 1248426. Photo courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

  Wells’s early, more private life provides a framework for a discussion of the ways in which she began staging mobility. She writes, “I was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, before the close of the Civil War [July 16, 1862].”7 Wells, the eldest of eight children born to Jim and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Wells, both former slaves, learned stories of bondage and freedom from her parents, who gave her “a love of liberty and self-sufficiency that characterized her throughout her life.”8 At a young age, her father, the son of his plantation master in Tippah County, Mississippi, was taken to Holly Springs, to serve as an apprentice in carpentry to a Mr. Bolling. Her mother’s roots began in Virginia, but her master eventually sold her to a planter in Mississippi. Although married in slavery, Wells’s parents remarried after emancipation, which signifies their attempts to make their lives their own. Moreover, the social activism undertaken by Jim, a Mason, made an even greater impact upon his daughter’s understandings about freedom and mobility: “I do not remember when or where I started school. My earlier recollections are of reading the newspaper to my father and an admiring group of his friends. He was interested in politics and I heard the words Ku Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant. I knew dimly that it meant something fearful, by the anxious way my mother walked the floor at night when my father was out to a political meeting.”9 As Wells read the newspaper to her father and his friends, she devoured the words. She took “the stage” before the male audience as a recipient and a distributor of knowledge. Her voice was thus validated in this black masculine community. In addition, Decosta-Willis remarks that Wells “learned lessons on religion, discipline, morality, and housework at home from her mother,” but she chose to model her life after her father and other black men in Holly Springs, who gave her “political and civic training.”10

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  A Refugee from His Race

  Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy

  • Carolyn L. Karcher(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  113

  Through her Inter Ocean dispatches, Wells finally succeeded in disrupting the complacency of the white U.S. press by confronting her compatriots with the horror and disgust the British public expressed at her revelations about lynching. The Independent , a Congregationalist weekly with a heritage of abolitionist advocacy, cheered. “Foreign criticism will affect us here in America when, perhaps, home criticism will not,” it admitted.114 More typically, mainstream newspapers responded with howls of rage at her perfidy in tarnishing her country’s image abroad. The Congregationalist , a conservative religious weekly, deplored the “exaggerations of Miss Ida Wells, who is stirring up the English Christians.”115 The New York Sun , a Democratic Party organ, reiterated the rape myth and redirected censure from white to black morals: “The moment the colored criminal of the South gives up his favorite crime, that moment ninety-nine per cent of the Southern lynchings will cease. Instead of defaming the white women of the South, Miss Ida B. Wells might better try to tame the brutal and bestial natures of too many men of her own color in the South.”116 The Republican New York Times , bristling with patriotic indignation, castigated Wells for “shrewdly” arousing the “inherent meddlesomeness . . . in the English nature” through “salacious” and “lurid” allegations that “skillfully mixed” truth with falsehood.117 Memphis newspapers, of course, reacted the most viciously. The Memphis Daily Commercial called Wells a “Notorious Courtesan,” a “strumpet,” a “malicious wanton,” and a “saddle-colored Sapphira”; claimed that “rumors had been rife about her unchastity” throughout her career; and misrepresented her as the “paramour” of her coeditor. Seemingly unaware of exemplifying the sin it denounced, it charged her with “foul and slanderous tirades.” Like the Sun , the Commercial attributed lynching to “a perfect epidemic of outrages perpetrated by negro men upon white women.”118

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  Ethical Prophets along the Way

  Those Hall of Famers

  • Rufus Burrow(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  In fact, when Tom Moss and his two companions were lynched, she bought a pistol in order to defend herself from those who might come after her because of her outspokenness against lynching. She frequently had the pistol on her desk as she wrote articles on lynching. Her strong sense of her own dignity and sacredness convinced Wells-Barnett that her life was just as valuable and precious as any and that it was better to die fighting against injustice and trying to preserve one’s life than to passively allow oneself to be taken by the mob and lynched. 316 Aware of her own fundamental dignity, she would simply not give up her life without a fight to preserve it. In this she anticipated Malcolm X, whom we will meet in chapter 5. Wells-Barnett knew that among whites it was not considered a crime to kill blacks, which is why she counseled that the Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home. In addition, she declared that “God expects us to defend ourselves.” 317 Wells-Barnett proclaimed that any persons who are interested in the welfare of humanity as such, as well as “the good name of our country,” will resist lynch law with all their might, including their life. She was also eager to point to the common features of the whole of humanity. 318 In addition, she was openly and highly critical of white Southerners’ failure to acknowledge the common humanity of blacks with white people. 319 Furthermore, she rightly observed that baseness is not confined to any one race or class of people and that people of questionable character exist in every group. No group of people has a monopoly on stupidity, incivility, and immorality, although every group has individuals in it that exhibit one or more of these traits. Speaking the Truth Ida B. Wells-Barnett was adamant that educated and privileged blacks had social responsibilities and obligations to the less fortunate in their community

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  Ida B. Wells

  Social Activist and Reformer

  • Kristina DuRocher(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 81.

  33  McMurry, 183.

  34  Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 21.

  35  Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely, 125; Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 85.

  36  Wells, Southern Horrors, 2.

  37  Caroline C. Nichols, “The ‘Adventuress’ Becomes a ‘Lady’: Ida B. Wells’ British Tours,” Modern Language Studies 38, no. 2 (2009): 56.

  38  Wells, Southern Horrors, 19.

  39  Simone W. Davis, “The ‘Weak Race’ and the Winchester: Political Voices in the Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” Legacy 12, no. 2 (1995): 83.

  40  Wells, Southern Horrors, 13, 4.

  41  Davis, 79.

  42  Wells, Southern Horrors, 8; emphasis in original.

  43  Wells, Southern Horrors, 3.

  44  Wells, Crusade for Justice, 81.

  45  Wells, Crusade for Justice, 82.

  46  McMurry, 175.

  47  Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions, 243.

  48  McMurry, 185.

  49  Wells, Crusade for Justice, 72–73.

  50  Quoted in McMurry, 153.

  51  Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions, 245.

  52  Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely, 136–37.

  53  Quoted in McMurry, 177–78.

  54  Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions, 245–46; Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 91.

  55  Mark Elliott, Color Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12.

  56  McMurry, 182.

  57  Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 237, 202–3. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 74. This enabled a previously impossible collectivity to form. Local and regional newspapers were also responsible for the publicity and promotion of a lynching, as well as playing a key role in the creation of a genre of lynching narratives. Stanley J. Tambiah, “A Performance Approach to Ritual” in Readings in Ritual Studies, ed. Ronald Grimes (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 497. The mob’s actions were, as Fitzhugh Brundage notes, “a highly ritualized choreography.” Brundage, Lynching in the New South

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