We wanted to end our conversation on a high note full of the prophetic fire we started with. Thus in January 2013, we met on two consecutive days to discuss first Malcolm X and then Ida B. Wells. As far apart as they are in time and as different as they are in social background, they share an uncompromising radical spirit that is expressed in fearless speech. Yet such boldness is the more extraordinary in a woman, let alone a woman in the nineteenth century. As a female voice in the Black prophetic tradition, Wells, like Ella Baker, has often been a victim of public amnesia. We want to honor her outstanding example of prophetic witness by giving her the last word.
CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: With Ida B. Wells, we go back to the nineteenth century, where we started. Historically speaking, she stands between Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, and she knew both men personally. Wells was the pioneering figure in the anti-lynching campaigns of her day, and the way in which she courageously and undauntedly took up a difficult and dangerous struggle against prejudices about the “beastly nature” of the Black man, certainly renders her a worthy candidate in our series of long-distance freedom fighters in the Black prophetic tradition. Like Du Bois, she was shaped by Victorian America, and her bourgeois background means that evaluating her from today’s point of view is difficult. We have to contextualize her, and so we will try to get at her core by doing just that. So could you start by assessing Ida B. Wells’s importance in the tradition of the Black struggle for freedom?
CORNEL WEST: Ida B. Wells is not only unique, but she is the exemplary figure full of prophetic fire in the face of American terrorism, which is American Jim Crow and Jane Crow, when lynching occurred every two and a half days for over fifty years in America. And this is very important, because Black people in the New World, in the Diaspora, Brazil, Jamaica, Barbados, were all enslaved, but no group of Black people were Jim Crowed other than US Negroes. And what I mean by Jim Crow is not just terrorized, not just stigmatized, not just traumatized, but, what we talked about before, niggerized. Black people were first reaching citizenship after the most barbaric of all civil wars in modern times—750,000 dead, we are told now.1 Black people are made slaves, then citizens, then are remade into subjects who are subjected to an American terrorist order—despite Black resistance. They are no longer slaves in the old sense, yet not citizens, but sub-citizens, namely subjects, namely Negroes, namely niggers who are wrestling with this terror.
Why is this important? Because, I would argue, Jim Crow in some ways is as important as slavery in understanding the mentality, understanding the institutions, and understanding the destiny of Black folk. A lot of people want to jump from slavery into the civil rights movement. But, no, right when the American social order was providing opportunities for white immigrants all around the world between 1881— Let’s begin with the pogroms that escalate in Russia at the time with the death of the tsar2 and the waves of white immigrants who come to the United States and who begin to gain access to some of the opportunities afforded here—that is precisely the time in which Jim Crow emerged. It consolidates in the 1890s, along with the American imperial order in the Philippines and Cuba, Guam, and other territories. So you get six million people of color outside the United States, and you get the terrorized, traumatized, stigmatized order, which is a Jim Crow order, in the United States. That’s the context for Ida.
Why is she so unique? Well, the textbook version of Black history is the following. You get W. E. B. Du Bois versus Booker T. Washington: The nice little deodorized discourse of Booker T., who is tied to the white elites, who has access to tremendous amounts of money, who has his own political machine, moving in to take over Black newspapers and pulling Black civic organizations under his control while refusing to say a mumbling word publicly about lynching, which was the raw face of American terrorism against Black people. Then you get Du Bois, who did want to talk about civil rights, who did want to talk about political rights, but in no way targeted the lynching face of American terrorism the way Ida B. Wells did. Ida B. Wells, in so many ways, teaches us something that we rarely want to acknowledge: that the Black freedom movement has always been an anti-terrorist movement, that Black people in America had a choice between creating a Black al-Qaeda or a movement like Ida B. Wells’s, which was going to call into question the bestiality and barbarity and brutality of Jim Crow and American terrorism and lynching, but would do it in the name of something that provided a higher moral ground and a higher spiritual ground given her Christian faith, not opting for a Black al-Qaeda that says, “You terrorize us; we terrorize you. You kill our children; we kill your children.” No, not an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, where we end up both blind and toothless. She said: “We want a higher moral ground, but I’m going to hit this issue head-on.”
And that is in so many ways relevant today, because we live in an age in which people are talking about terrorism, about terror, all the time. Here we have much to learn from an Ida B. Wells, who was born a slave, orphaned young—both her parents die of yellow fever in Hollis Springs, Mississippi. She makes her way with two of her sisters to Memphis, is run out of Memphis, even as she begins to emerge as a prophetic voice in Free Speech and Headlight, a newspaper that she begins to edit, and then with the lynching of three men in Memphis, brother Tom and brother Calvin and brother Will, on March 9, 1892,3 the white elite puts a bounty on her head, because she wants to tell the truth—like Malcolm X, parrhesia again, the fearless speech. Thank God for T. Thomas Fortune, who welcomed her to New York and invited her to write for his newspaper, the New York Age.4 And this was where she published the two classics, Southern Horrors, in 1892, and A Red Record, in 1895.
And it is important to use the language of American terrorism, because we live in an age where, when people think of terrorism, they usually think of a very small group of Islamic brothers and sisters, whereas, of course, terrorism has been integral to the emergence and the sustenance of the American democratic experiment, beginning with indigenous peoples and slavery. But after the Civil War, we get a new form of terrorism—crimes against humanity—that sits at the center of American life, and Ida B. Wells forces us to come to terms with that.
CHB: Maybe we should mention the interim of Reconstruction, because right after the Civil War the situation was improving in terms of political power of Blacks. And what Ida B. Wells reveals then—in contrast to the understanding of most people, including Black people, including Douglass—what she reveals is that it is in reaction to the very success of Black people, their rising on the social ladder, their becoming respectable, learned, and a political power, too, that terrorism sets in. And she saw through the story that was fabricated at the time that this was all about Black men wanting white women; she saw that it was a pretext; that, in fact, what this was all about was a reaction to a change of the hierarchical order, and, of course, especially in the South, where white people did not want Black people to rise. And I think that is the truth she told in all fearlessness, a truth that was very important even for Blacks to understand.5
CW: I think that’s very true. Actually, I would go to 1876 and 1877 with the so-called Compromise, which is a capitulation that allowed for the withdrawal of the military troops in the South, which would allow for states’ rights to become predominant, which would allow for white supremacists powers to take over so that the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils would move into positions of power culturally, economically, and politically, and so Black folk would be subject to that kind of terror. The troop withdrawal allowed for an emerging reconciliation between the former foes, the Confederacy and the Union. Now the South and the North are able to view themselves more and more as a family, and they are unified by the scapegoat, they are unified by these Black folk who are sacrificed with the withdrawal of the troops.
It had much to do, of course, with the fact that other issues were emerging, issues of depression, issues of international relations, and they were just tired of dealing with the so-called race question; they were tired of dealing with the legacy of white supremacy. So that even great figures like William Lloyd Garrison—for whom I have tremendous respect, who gave his time, energy, and life to abolish slavery—do not engage in the kind of follow-through to deal with the vicious legacy of white supremacy after the Civil War. Now that slavery is over, the notion is “Thank God, it’s all done; the business is over.”
Now, let me tell a story. I was at West Point the other day and was talking to a number of students and professors there. The biggest picture in the library they have at West Point is of Robert E. Lee, who was superintendent of West Point when he was part of the Union army, but was only a colonel in the Union army. He became a general in the Confederate army. And the painting they have of him is in Confederate attire, with a Black slave bowing in the right corner. So Lee is a general in the army of rebels and traitors against West Point. They were telling me that the reconciliation on the military front began when the soldiers from the South joined the soldiers in the North in the Spanish-American War, so that the imperial front becomes a space for them of coming together. Then, by the end of the Spanish-American War, lo and behold, West Point embraces the memory of Robert E. Lee. Then, in 1971, President Nixon tries to force them to have a monument to Confederate troops and Confederate soldiers. Nixon appoints Alexander Haig to establish the monument. There was Black opposition—they had just admitted Black soldiers to West Point in the sixties—the Black cadets strongly rejected the idea; there was tremendous disarray, and West Point gave up on the idea. So you see, this tribute to the legacy of white supremacy remains integral to West Point, past and present.
So on the imperial front, after Reconstruction, the white Southerners and the white Northerners were able to come together, subordinate the peoples of color in Hawaii, in Guam, in the Philippines, in Puerto Rico, and domestically subordinate the Black folk, so that, lo and behold, the Confederate and the Union view themselves as part of a cantankerous family not really at odds over whether the Union ought to exist or not, but a cantankerous family whose members have more in common than what separates them. And there is a united front against Black folk internally and brown folk externally, and to me this is really important, because Ida B. Wells is willing to speak courageously and sacrificially and candidly about the brutality of American terrorism at home and acknowledge the terrorism abroad.6
Unlike Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells publicly denounced lynching. Du Bois is not really hit by the issue until he sees the knuckles of lynching victim Sam Hose on display in Atlanta, gives up his detached, disinterested, scientific orientation and becomes a political activist—now this is seven years after Ida B. Wells has a bounty on her head!
CHB: True. But it needed that confrontation, and he reacts to the experience, whereas Ida B. Wells has that experience earlier; she is in the South. And in the Memphis lynching, one of the three victims, Tom Moss, was one of her close friends; she was godmother to his daughter. So I think it is about the immediate confrontation, and when Du Bois is confronted, it changes his life just as much as it changed her life.
CW: That’s true. But you know, Du Bois is in Nashville in the 1880s as a student at Fisk University and then teaches those two summers there in a small town in Tennessee, so he must have heard about the lynching and the terror.
CHB: In his autobiography he writes about that very different kind of— He would not call it terror but a kind of discrimination of Blacks in the South that he was not used to. But as far as I remember, he does mention lynching, but it is the lynching of Sam Hose that, as he puts it, “startled me to my feet.”7
CW: Exactly. But there is something about—and I love it—sister Ida B. Wells’s rebellious spirit. As a youth, she had a deep suspicion of authority.8 She reminds me of Malcolm, and Malcolm reminds me of her in terms of this willingness to be candid and honest about any sources of pain and suffering, and you speak to it directly regardless of the price, regardless of what burden goes along with it, or whatever cost you have to pay.
CHB: The first time she was so courageous was when her parents had just died and the community decided to distribute the children, her five younger siblings, to be adopted by other families, and as a young girl of sixteen, she says: “No. No way. You can’t do that. Give me a job instead, and I will take care of my brothers and sisters.” It was unheard of for so young a woman to be the independent head of a family, and it was highly suspicious, and she got the reaction of the community in the form of really vicious slander: when Dr. Gray, a white physician, returned the savings her dying father had entrusted to him, and when the community noticed the transaction taking place in the town square, she is immediately suspected of prostituting herself. So we see early in life the bravery of a young woman who would take the responsibility for her family, which was something that did not fit into the Victorian model of womanhood, and thus people resented it and consequently suspected her of a transgression of quite a different type. That is the first moment when you see her courage.
CW: So true. Then we get her Rosa Parks–like act of protest on the railroad train. That’s still very early in her life. She refuses to give up her seat in the first-class ladies’ coach and is removed by force. She takes it to the court; she wins; the case goes to a higher court; she loses; she must pay fees, but she takes a stand. You are so right about this willingness of this young, militant, uncompromising, bold, and fearless woman.
CHB: And she sacrifices, because she can’t finish school, and when later she attends a graduation ceremony at her former school, she is in tears because she was not able to graduate. That was the price she had to pay. She makes up for it with her own tireless efforts to learn and to read, but it is a price she has to pay for speaking out and for taking care of her family.9
CW: And as a teacher taking care of the family, she discovered that she was being paid thirty dollars a month and the white teachers are being paid more than twice that much. She could already see the deeply racist practices there. And we should note, of course, her summers at Fisk University. Like Du Bois, she did spend time at Fisk University. But it also shows she has a tremendous drive for studying and love of learning, not just for knowledge in the abstract but also the very process of coming to know, the very process of being committed to exploring, a sense of intellectual adventure, trying to be culturally cultivated in a variety of different ways by means of voracious reading, conversation, dialogue.
CHB: As a young woman teaching, she reaches out to young men. In part, of course, she is looking for a partner; that was natural at her age. But sometimes what she wants is a companion to talk with and to be inspired by, someone who is an intellectual, and she loves these discussions but has the problem of decorum, because she is admonished that this is not done. You need a chaperone, all these rules of etiquette against which she often rebels.10 Another point, though, in terms of learning and aspiring to more learning: she is never allowed to teach above the fourth grade, and at one point she realizes that this is unsatisfactory—and here her activist side comes to the fore. She wants to be more influential by becoming a journalist and discovers that this is her true vocation. She writes: “It was through journalism that I found the real me.”11
CW: You know, Ida B. Wells was the first Black correspondent to a major white newspaper, the Daily Inter-Ocean in Chicago, when she was on her tour in Britain, forming the British Anti-Lynching Society—not because Britain had a lynching problem. Britain was deeply racist, but they never had a Jim Crow system. Yet progressive British whites were deeply concerned about the lynching taking place in America. And Ida went there in the 1890s twice and helped form that society and wrote various articles back to that Chicago newspaper. But as a journalist, she had a vocation to tell the truth at an observational level. It reminds me in some ways of the great text of Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimké, American Slavery As It Is,12 which became a best seller in 1839. And it was observational; it was like William Cobbett13 in England or Harriet Martineau,14 where you observe and picture for your audience in a dramatic fashion the suffering and the misery of your fellow human beings, in this case of Blacks vis-à-vis a white audience. And what Ida B. Wells does as a journalist is not just report in a regular way, but she presents these dramatic portraits with statistics, with empirical data, but also stories. Ida was saying: “Let me tell you about these seventeen lynchings, where the myth was to protect white womanhood’s purity and so forth. No, there was a fear of economic competition. No, there was a sense of arbitrary targeting of these Black men that had nothing to do whatsoever with white sisters.” So you are right about the journalistic vocation and the calling. And, my God, journalism is about dead in America today, given that most journalists are extensions of the powers that be, but in those days there was prophetic witness, and Ida B. Wells was one of the great pioneers of this prophetic journalism.
CHB: Yes, she was what today we would call an investigative journalist, because she often travelled to the places where the lynching had happened and she investigated what was going on there. And then she found out what you just said about the pretext of lynching and the truth. But sometimes she was too radical even for her time. In May 1892, in the context of the Memphis lynching, she warned her white male fellow citizens that they should not go too far:
Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech. Three were charged with killing white men and five with raping white women. Nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will over-reach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.15
But here, as in so many other cases, when she was really radical, she had to cope with the consequences, and the consequences were severe, because, in this case, with her insinuation of consensual relationships between white women and Black men, she had enraged the white elite of Memphis, who in reaction formed a “committee” of leading citizens who completely demolished the printing office of the Free Speech.16 But often she was even too provocative for her journalist colleagues, so even at a time when, as you pointed out, journalism was more substantial, she went over the top sometimes.
CW: Yes, when you think of the history of American journalism, people often evoke Upton Sinclair and even Jack London and other muckrakers who were investigating various forms of social injustice and social misery. But Ida B. Wells was there ten, fifteen years before. The Jungle was published by 1906,17 while Ida B. Wells was already there in 1892. As to her radicality, it shows in her statement about the Winchester rifle: that ought to have a place of honor in every Black household.18 Now that’s going to get our dear sister into a whole lot of trouble. She sounded like Deacons for Defense, Robert Williams down in North Carolina, the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton, which is about self-defense: arm yourself and make sure you police the police, so the police do not kill you.19
CHB: And, again, it was the incident of the lynching in Memphis, when she herself bought a revolver and said, “Well, if I’m attacked, I won’t die like a dog, but I will see to it that someone else—”
CW: “—Goes before me.”20 Now, you would not hear that out of a Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois, maybe a William Monroe Trotter.21 I could hear William Trotter saying something like that, actually. But when you are so far ahead of your time, full of so much prophetic fire as Ida B. Wells—and then, when she marries Ferdinand Barnett, Ida B. Wells-Barnett—the level of loneliness is intense. You feel all by yourself, isolated, misunderstood, and misperceived. We see this over and over again in our prophetic figures. This is something she probably exemplifies more so than any of the figures that we have examined.
CHB: And in part because she is a woman, and you expect less of that kind of blazing spirit of hers, that militancy, in a woman.22 As I said before, she did not succumb to the image of the Victorian woman, although she grew out of an education that was very strict, teaching her to adhere to that very model, and you see the impact of that education in her early years,23 before she renounced that ideal, and said, “To hell with it, I am here to do something for others.” For example, when her case against the railroad was overthrown, she said she was very disappointed because with her trial she had wanted to achieve something for her people.24 The responsibility she feels as an activist is her focus now, and she is less occupied with respectability and proper behavior. At the same time, she always has to defend herself, because she is so often attacked for being a woman who is—
CW: Independent and free-thinking. Now, of course, in that case against the railroad, her lawyer is bought off by the railroad. They pay a bribe to him, and he actually succumbs, you know. This Negro, he is selling his soul, while she is fighting for justice. So she has to get a white lawyer who has more integrity in order to fight her case, and yet at the same time she doesn’t give up on the Negro; she just recognizes how cowardly some of these bourgeois Negroes can be. When we think of two classic texts by Evelyn Higginbotham and Kevin Gaines on the politics of respectability and the difficulty of women, especially in a Victorian period in which respectability has such weight and gravity,25 we see an obsession with gaining access to status and stature, with a sense of decorum and tact. Ida B. Wells is able to show that bourgeois respectability is usually a form not just of moral blindness and political cowardice, but it is also a form of conformity that hides and conceals some of the more vicious realities going on in that day. Picture this: Ida B. Wells is focusing on the barbarity of American terrorism while the mainstream is preoccupied with the politics of respectability. Most female citizens of the time are trying to prove to the male normative gaze that they are worthy of being treated in a certain kind of way. All the burden is on them: “You have to show yourself worthy for us to be accepting of you.” And Ida B. Wells shatters that, so that the cost that she has to pay at that time is enormous, and yet she comes back to us as, in some ways, a contemporary, for we take for granted the emptiness of these forms of respectability she attempted to shatter at tremendous personal cost.
CHB: To come back to her loneliness, she was active in so very many organizations, it’s incredible, but they were bourgeois organizations, Christian organizations, that is, all middle-class organizations, and working within those groups, her base was the middle class. Especially later on, when she lived in Chicago, she was often lonely because she went too far for the middle-class sensibilities, and the sensibilities of middle-class women in particular, and she was not ready to compromise. In fact, she often scolded herself for her temper and told herself that she would have to be more reticent, and when she failed and refused to compromise, she ended up being marginalized within an organization that in some cases she had founded herself.
CW: Over and over again. I think there was a kind of a myth of Ida B. Wells-Barnett that she was difficult to get along with, when, in fact, she would advocate the truth.26 You can go right down the row: Her critique of Booker T. Washington about his reticence to say a word about American terrorism,27 and he comes at her very intensely: “Oh she is ridiculous.”28 Her critique of W. E. B. Du Bois, who did take her name off of the list at the founding of the NAACP, and she comes at him, too. Her mistreatment by Black women in the Black club movement that she had helped initiate; there was an Ida B. Wells Club in Chicago, and she didn’t get enough respect from them. Mary Church Terrell29 and Margaret Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington, both became presidents in the Black club movement organization that Ida B. Wells-Barnett created, while she herself was never, ever a national president. But also her willingness to take on powerful white sisters, like Mary Ovington in the NAACP. They clashed, and Wells was explicit about her critique of Ovington’s paternalism, her racist and sexist arrogance toward her.30 The same would be true with the famous case of Frances Willard. When Willard is in England, Wells attacks her: “Well, you are talking about woman’s rights in America, and you are pushing it here in England, you haven’t said a mumbling word about lynching.” “Well, maybe I have.” “Well, where is it then?” Willard got caught, she was exposed, and Ida was quite explicit about that.31 But we have that kind of willingness with Wells to tell the truth, Black men, white men, white women, Black women. Other than Ferdinand and the kids and the Sunday school class she so loved and taught for ten years,32 there is not a whole lot left. Jane Addams33 was a friend, of course, but Wells had a critique of Jane Addams, too. So you would want to say: “Ida, this is Socratic and prophetic all the way down. How does one cope with this loneliness?” She reminds me of my dear sister, comrade, and coauthor bell hooks34 for all of her courage, consistency, and compassion.
CHB: And yet Wells is so untiring in her activities. There is always so much she is doing at the same time, so that she is active instead of becoming discouraged or even depressed.
CW: That’s a good point: she is forever going at it. Even though, you know, there are moments in Crusade for Justice, her great classic autobiography, that bring tears to your eyes, when she feels as if she was often abandoned by her own people35 and never really appreciated by the movements that she helped initiate and create. She was willing to stand alone—her view was, “I don’t mind being the lonely Negro who stands up for truth”—and yet I also get a sense that she did yearn and long for some kind—not just of comradeship but an appreciation of the depth of her sacrifice and the breadth of her contribution to the movement.
CHB: There is something else linked to that, namely, that so many times her emphasis is on the unity of Black people, or rather the lack of it. In her autobiography, she quotes extensively from a provocative address W. T. Stead delivered at Bethel AME Church in Chicago in 1894, in which he exclaimed: “You people have not been lynched enough! You haven’t been lynched enough to drive you together! [. . .] Any ten-year-old child knows that a dozen persons fighting as one can make better headway against ten times its number than if each were fighting singlehanded and alone.”36 Wells-Barnett herself makes that point often, and like Stead, gets angry that it seems to be impossible for Blacks to show the cohesion that is needed for effective political fight. Unity, coherence in political struggle was of great importance to her, and she was often disappointed that she couldn’t make herself understood to her co-fighters.37
CW: I think that one of the loneliest roads to travel is to be a de-niggerized Black person among a niggerized people. She sees the great potential of Black people, but she also sees the fear, the insecurity, the inferiority complexes, the cowardliness, the conformity, the complacency, the apathy, the inertia among the people. I guess she felt what the great Harriet Tubman is known to have felt when she went into the belly of the slavocracy beast so many times: “I rescued many slaves, but I could have saved a thousand more if the slaves knew they were slaves.” Mentally, psychically, spiritually, they were still tied to the master, and the decolonizing of the mind, heart, and soul had to go hand-in-hand with an attempt to break from the institution of slavery, and I think this is something Ida B. Wells was wrestling with during the phase of American terrorism and Jim Crow. She was dealing especially with middle-class Negroes, because you are right that so much of her world was still circumscribed by a middle-class world. I think she had a deep love for poor Black people, but she was not a part of the organizations of poor Black people. Now as a Baptist, she was a member of the largest denomination of Black people as a whole, with large numbers of poor Black people. The best friend I have ever had—my dear brother James Melvin Washington—wrote the great book on Black Baptists called Frustrated Fellowship.38 Sister Ida was deeply frustrated with Black Baptists who were often stratified by class in local churches. This class division made it difficult for Ida B. Wells to be able to fully be what she would have liked to be, which was a freedom fighter grounded in the organizations of Black people across the board, poor, working class, rural, urban, whatever.
CHB: But although she was not based in the poor people’s organizations or activities, she would always work for them, and she went to their neighborhoods, and then, again, she was disappointed by the ladies in the clubs with whom she wanted to work in those neighborhoods, because they would say: “Oh no, we won’t go there.”39 She was ready to do just that and to be on the spot for the poor people to try to improve their situation. But it is really a question whether it was feasible for her as a member of the middle class to do what Ella Baker later did. I wonder was it feasible, historically? It’s something that we should not hold against her, because she might have risked losing what she needed to engage in a successful fight, namely being grounded in the middle class on whose support and money she depended.
CW: Scholars like sister Hazel Carby and Angela Davis40 and others have made the points—and rightfully so—that you already have a focus on the workplace in terms of the kind of violation and rapes of Black women in the white household, given the role of the white men with Black women working as domestic maids. And the women’s club movement was focused on the workplace in a way in which Du Bois and Washington were not. In the case of Ida B. Wells, you get the focus on the workplace and the lynching, and then, of course, you also have the focus on prophetic civic institutions that generate a certain kind of prophetic civic consciousness.
CHB: She also emphasizes women’s suffrage.
CW: And women’s rights, absolutely. But when you think of Black women grounded in and attuned to poor people’s struggles, as, for example, in the arts, as the emergence of the great blues singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith—and the first wave of the blues singers were primarily women before the men take over—and most of these talented sisters came from poor communities. There is no doubt that Ida B. Wells is one of the great crusaders for justice during the period of American terrorism in its raw form in the face of Black people. One can’t think of any greater figure, and yet when it comes to issues of poverty, race, and gender, we think of Fannie Lou Hamer; we think of Ella Baker; we think of Victoria Garvin;41 we think of subsequent freedom fighters, who hit those issues—legendary Angela Davis, now, Michelle Alexander come to mind. So that it is not in any way to put down the great Ida to acknowledge her middle-class context. But it is about how we appropriate, critically engage a giant like Ida B. Wells so that we can learn, and so that we can build on not just her great example but on her witness that connects us to the example of so many others at the time. But in terms of political affiliation—unlike Du Bois, King, Baker, and Malcolm X—she did not side with socialism, let alone Marxism. Yet throughout her life she stayed committed to the plight of working-class Blacks.42
CHB: There is very little about African American culture in her autobiography. It is very focused on the political situation.
CW: And you know that culture plays an important role, because she is in the church every Sunday.
CHB: Right, and that is, of course, an issue. One of the many battles she fights is the integration of the YMCA and YWCA.43 And she makes a very interesting point, namely—and I admire her sharp, analytical mind—she is discussing the crime rates in Chicago on a panel, and the statistics show crime rates among Black people are high. Now, the usual explanation is essentialism, naturalization, they are what they are. But she contradicts the common rationalization by pointing out that all the organizations of uplift that serve the white population are closed to Blacks:
The statistics which we have heard here tonight do not mean, as it appears to mean, that the Negro race is the most criminal of the various race groups in Chicago. It does mean that ours is the most neglected group. All other races in the city are welcomed into the settlements, YMCA’s, YWCA’s, gymnasiums and every other movement for uplift if only their skins are white. [. . .] Only one social center welcomes the Negro, and that is the saloon. Ought we to wonder at the harvest we have heard enumerated tonight?44
CW: It’s a social-historical explanation.
CHB: Exactly, and that is her strength in terms of her intellect, in terms of the kind of analysis she undertakes, systemic analysis, which was her forte when she revealed what was behind the lynching, because that’s a sociological argument as well. And she is avant-garde here, too.
CW: It’s amazing.
CHB: In A Red Record, for example, she explicitly refers to sociology:
The student of American sociology will find the year 1894 marked by a pronounced awakening of the public conscience to a system of anarchy and outlawry which had grown during a series of ten years to be so common, that scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments of the people of our land.45
So she talks about sociology when this is still a new discipline, and not only that, but she understands sociological thinking, and she does so when she talks about lynching and then later on when she talks about institutions of uplift in the city. She was ahead of her time.
CW: Way ahead of her time, light-years ahead of her time. That is so true. Now, when you think, though, the same figure would work with Frederick Douglass and write with Frederick Douglass in a pamphlet in protest against the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893,46 but also would work with Du Bois,47 as well as with Garvey,48 it’s very interesting, and especially with the great preacher in Chicago, Reverend Junius Caesar Austin Sr. He worked with Garvey, with A. Philip Randolph; he was pastor at the Pilgrim Baptist Church; he was called the “Dancing Preacher”—no one like him. He had Mahalia Jackson in the choir; he had Thomas A. Dorsey, considered the father of Black gospel music, playing the piano, with the Dancing Preacher preaching every Sunday in Chicago. Now, that’s culture; it’s religious culture, but that’s culture, and it would be fascinating to know what Wells actually thought about those cultural dimensions you were talking about. Now, of course, Chicago was also the great center for the blues, probably the greatest center for American blues other than the Mississippi Delta, for so many Mississippi folk went straight up to Chicago. But she doesn’t tell us too much about that more secular form of Black culture,49 but we know it had tremendous impact on her in a variety of different ways. But what a life, what scope and what depth, bringing together so much of the best of the Black prophetic tradition in terms of being willing to bear witness and lay bare the truth, speak out with courage, keep somehow a love flowing, even given the kinds of betrayals by Black men and white men, and Black women and white women. It is an extraordinary life!
CHB: I would like to raise the question that we addressed with regard to all our figures, namely, how she fits the category of an organic intellectual.
CW: I would argue that Ida B. Wells-Barnett is the most courageous Black organic intellectual in the history of the country, because when you look at what she faces: lynching, American terrorism, especially with vigilante activity of citizens condoned by the nation-state—and when the powers that be are able to use the repressive apparatus of the nation-state to come at you, you have to wait to get to Martin King to get another courageous intellectual like that, or Huey Newton. Imagine the raw power of the American racist imperial state coming down on you in that way—allowing its citizens to kill at whim, blow up homes, and so forth—and she remains as strong as ever, with her Winchester rifle and the Holy Ghost. It’s hard to think of a more courageous organic intellectual. Garvey as an organic intellectual and leader—he goes to prison, he is wrongly incarcerated, and so forth, but I don’t think he ever has to deal with the raw violence coming at him like Ida. I don’t think Malcolm had this raw repressive apparatus of the nation-state coming at him in that way. We know that it was targeting him, but not in that way. It’s not until we get to King and Huey Newton that organic intellectuals are targeted by raw state power like that faced by Ida B. Wells-Barnett. And we must keep in mind, she is a Black woman organic intellectual being targeted.
CHB: I mentioned her immensely broad activities in various organizations and the projects she takes care of. For example, she founds the first Black kindergarten in Chicago, and she also creates a social center with a reading room. This is in the Chicago phase, when she is still active in national issues like the anti-lynching campaign, woman’s suffrage, and so on, but at the same time concentrates very much on local politics and projects focusing on helping the people in her hometown. And I am wondering whether you see a parallel to the development of the Occupy movement, which started as a movement in the streets and now has shifted. Occupy still exists, but it exists in other forms, often local activities, for example, supporting people to prevent them from being evicted from their homes, activities like that.
CW: She certainly is so multicontextual in her radical activism. She is a radical reformist moving from a variety of different organizations all connected with a commitment to justice, but it’s rare to see someone involved on so many different terrains and spheres and fronts and still with a family, with children, with a husband, brother Ferdinand, who is a highly distinguished citizen and freedom fighter in his own right. I do think that the Occupy movement could learn from the kind of decentralization, the kind of differentiated forms of activism that she engaged in herself while still trying to keep that prophetic fire burning. I think you are absolutely right about that. We said that the age of Occupy is the age of Ella Baker; we could argue that the age of Occupy is Ella Baker in a deep sense in terms of organizing and Ida B. Wells-Barnett in terms of the multicontextual. Today, of course, it’s ecological, anti-corporate, critiques of globalization, of the oligarchs and plutocrats who rule around the world, but it’s still a general principle of multicontextual activism that we see enacted in Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
If Ida is to be judged by the great leaders of her time, when you think of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and T. Thomas Fortune and Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune,50 these are towering figures in their own right, but she would certainly be the most militant, the most outspoken, and, in many ways, the most courageous. Well, we don’t want to overlook George Washington Woodbey, the Black Socialist preacher who ran with Eugene Debs in 1908 as vice president.51 He was militant; he was uncompromising; and he was already connected to critiques of capitalism and imperialism and so forth. He was pastor at San Diego Mt. Zion Baptist Church for decades, a great towering figure who also deserves to be part of this great pantheon. But in the end, I think, we have to come back to sister Ida. We must learn from her in terms of moral integrity, spiritual fortitude, and political determination.