Book Discussion Feb. 23, 2019: Ida B. Wells

     The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series met on Saturday Feb. 23, there were twelve of us. In keeping up our Black History Month theme we began last year by reading various biographies or works written by Langston Hughes, this year we chose Ida B. Wells as our subject.  We were to read any book written by Ida B. Wells or about Ida B. Wells. I have to say that the participants truly stepped up to the task. At least a couple people read two different books.

Judy read To Keep the Waters Troubled and On Lynchings 

      Ida B. Wells is known as a prolific crusader against lynching through her journalism and public speaking. She also started women's' social clubs, rallying women to become politically involved and she was a suffragist. She was usually found "too radical" by the Civil Rights Crusaders of her time, but she did become a great friend to Frederick Douglass.

     

  Connie TR began our meeting by passing around a copy of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a book displaying souvenir post cards and photos of lynchings. This book, edited by James Allen, and including essays by Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack, contains a sampling of the 3,436 lynchings of  blacks between 1882 and 1950.

 Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862, before the close of the Civil War. Slavery ended six months later. Her parents, who had been married in slavery, immediately remarried as free citizens. Her parents encouraged the family to learn. In fact Ida Wells' mother went to school alongside her daughter so that she could learn to read the Bible. Wells became an avid reader, and of course the only authors available to her were white.

Kay read Strike a Blow Against a Glaring Evil

     Her parents passed away and Wells was eighteen and she became the head of her household, responsible for all of her younger siblings. She got a job as a teacher in another city to support her brothers and sisters, going back and forth to "the city" to teach and coming home on the weekends to wash, cook, clean, and make sure her siblings were doing well in school. It was on one of these return trips that she was dragged out of the Ladies' Car on the train and sued the company. The courts ruled in her favor and awarded damages but the ruling was overturned.

I read Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells 

     It was during a meeting with teachers and writers that she was given the opportunity to become editor of a newspaper. Another attendee as her if she would also contribute to his paper. Finding her calling as a writer and journalist, Wells' came to co-own a Memphis paper called Free Speech. She was dismissed from her teaching job after she criticized conditions in the black schools.







    One of Wells' good friends was lynched along with two others, when they had the audacity to open a grocery store. She wrote in Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, "Everybody in town knew and loved Tommie...he was married and the father of one little girl, Maurine, whose godmother I was. He and his wife Betty were the best friends I had in town." Wells used her newspaper to denounce the lynching and encourage Black people to leave Memphis and go out west to Oklahoma. The heated editorials condemning lynching and the mass exodus of Blacks from Memphis (bringing business to a standstill), caused an angry mob to burn down Wells' newspaper offices and threaten her life.

Debbie read To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells 

     Wells then went to New York to write for newspapers up North and was engaged for two speaking tours throughout England and Ireland, before settling in Chicago, where she married Attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett and raised a family while keeping speaking engagements, running a newspaper, and forming women's clubs. Her husband supported her in all her work, and she was known to have a nursing baby with her on speaking tours.


Connie C. mentioned that her name isn't revered during Black History Month, the way some others are. She received more honor across the Atlantic Ocean than in the United States. Shelara said that it was ironic that censure from England was doubly offensive to Southern Whites, because they thought they were emulating the English with all their "high society" traditions.

Connie TR read Ida: A Sword Among Lions 

Stacy read The Light of Truth and Southern Horrors

 The book I chose for the project was Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Wells  began writing the book in 1928 but never finished; she passed away in 1931 at the age of 68. The book was published in posthumously in 1970.