II. Who Ida Was to Me

One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.

—Ida B. Wells

The Picture on the Living Room Wall

I grew up on a tree-lined street with manicured lawns and flowers in a modest house on the South Side of Chicago. Within a few years of my family moving there, the neighborhood gradually transformed from a predominantly white neighborhood to a predominantly Black, middle-class neighborhood, with two-parent households of family members who worked as teachers, police officers, store clerks, factory workers, small business owners, bus drivers, and other positions in the public sector. My father, Donald, worked at the electric company, and my mother, Maxine, was an English teacher. My world consisted of my neighborhood friends, who were mostly boys.

We spent our days during the mid-1960s and early ’70s playing touch football, tag, freeze, and softball. We roller-skated; skateboarded; played board games, cards, and jacks; and made up R&B songs while sitting on porches. We practiced our dance moves to Motown music, ran after the Good Humor truck, and had our own rules about sharing candy that we got from the corner store. We thought life was unfair if we didn’t get to stay out as late as we wanted, and sometimes we got angry because we couldn’t go around the block without permission.

I walked to my neighborhood school from kindergarten through fifth grade, with either my brother or my friend who lived around the corner. At my predominantly Black school with all Black teachers, we sang both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” There were pictures of Black people along the borders of the classrooms.

We went home for lunch every day, and there we watched cartoons on our black-and-white TV, which had fewer than ten channels and a “rabbit ear” antenna. We got a color TV when I was around ten years old. Some of my favorite shows were ones that had animals as lead characters, like Lassie, Flipper, and Mister Ed. There were hardly any shows that had Black characters, and the few there were lived nothing like me.

My childhood Saturdays were spent swimming at the YMCA with my two brothers, father, and grandmother. And we always had takeout food on that one day. My childhood was carefree despite the tumultuous era, fraught with assassinations of several civil rights leaders, riots that destroyed many parts of Chicago and other major cities, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon, an energy crisis, and battles about the concept of affirmative action.

Michelle Duster with her family.

I came of age during the 1970s, the years of the Black Power movement. My parents traveled to several countries in Africa, wore dashikis, and drilled a sense of pride in our heritage into us. My mother bought us Black coloring books, painted Santa Claus and the Christmas angel brown, and went on mad searches for tree ornaments that depicted Black people and culture. We had Ebony and Jet magazines throughout the house. And the Chicago Defender newspaper was a staple.

Once I hit sixth grade, my world became more expansive. My father was appointed to a position with Governor James R. “Jim” Thompson’s cabinet and spent the weekdays in Springfield. My mother became more involved in organizations focused on racial equality in education. I sat at the table with her and helped stuff envelopes, check lists, and organize papers. Most things about my childhood seemed no different from those of everyone else around me—except that I was related to Ida B. Wells. She was my great-grandmother. My father’s grandmother. And her picture was on our living room wall.

The South Side and More

As I transitioned into the tween years and transferred to a more racially diverse school, I met and made friends with people from other neighborhoods who did not look like me or come from the same background. I became fascinated with learning about other cultures and was addicted to TV shows that featured different countries. I wanted to see the world, climb pyramids, hike mountains, experience museums, explore castles, go to sidewalk cafés on cobblestone streets, and more. I daydreamed about seeing and meeting cool people all around the globe. I got pen pals in England and Norway, and our twelve-year-old selves exchanged letters, pictures, and magazine articles. At my school, I learned French and had opportunities to watch French movies and even try French food.

As I dreamed of international adventures, I became more keenly aware that people who looked like me weren’t welcome in certain Chicago neighborhoods. There were boundaries that we knew were dangerous to cross. And I started to experience being treated with subtle suspicion or disdain—having store clerks follow my teenaged self while in certain stores, or having cashiers ignore me.

A huge housing community, the Ida B. Wells Homes, in a different neighborhood was named after my great-grandmother. My father would drive us past there at times and explain the meaning of our family legacy. At that age, I didn’t grasp the magnitude of the honor. All I wanted to do was hang out with my friends. My father had no firsthand memory of his grandmother, as he was born a year after she died. Two of his siblings were toddlers and the other two were not born, so the only immediate connection I had to Ida was through my grandmother Alfreda Barnett Duster and her sister, Ida Barnett.

Michelle Duster with her grandmother Alfreda.

By the time I got to high school, Ida’s autobiography, which my grandmother edited and got published in 1970, had been out for several years. That was her thing, as far as I was concerned. I was too busy living my own life to pay close attention to what my grandmother did. I was involved in the school orchestra, track team, yearbook staff, newspaper staff, French Club; all-city band; and an all-city teenage newspaper. My world was about me and my friends.

And then reporters started coming by the house. My world started to include banquets and ceremonies where Ida was inducted into halls of fame or featured in exhibits. Buildings were named after her. People wanted to make movies or write books about her.

My father had always told us stories of his childhood, which was filled with financial struggle. He grew up during the Depression with my grandmother, who was widowed with five children to take care of. They both wanted us to be proud of our heritage, but felt no pressure to match Ida’s accomplishments. We were encouraged to develop our own interests and skills. As a result, I felt slightly disconnected from all the hoopla. We were taught to have our own identities, to not speak much about our relation to Ida B. Wells because we did not do any of her work—she did. People outside of our family tied their expectations of us to Ida more than was emphasized within our own family. Ida lived her life. And I could live mine.

In my quest for adventure, I learned about an opportunity to travel to France and begged my parents to let me go. Even though we definitely had modest means, my father scraped up the money for the trip. So, at the age of sixteen, I had my first international experience and came back to Chicago almost fluent in French. It was around this time that I started to believe I was somewhat different than my peers.

While so many around me started dreaming of getting a stable nine-to-five job, getting married, having children, and buying a house, I dreamed of traveling the world. All I wanted to do was see what was outside of Chicago. And I did—as a start, I went to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

A Different Path

Corporate recruiters descended upon the college campus during my senior year at Dartmouth. Many of my friends transformed themselves from sweat suit–wearing college students to suit-wearing corporate interviewees. I just couldn’t do it. I knew that I did not want to work in Corporate America. I did not want to wear a suit. I did not want to sit in an office. The only problem was that I didn’t know what I did want to do. I had met some of my travel goals by going to Mexico and several European countries and still wanted to see more of the world. All I could imagine regarding careers was that I wanted to tell stories. Create images. Make a difference in culture. And I always had been a good writer. In my indecisiveness, I graduated without a job lined up, making a deal with my parents that I would research careers and figure out something to do with my life.

I worked a temp retail job for a few months while trying to figure out my life. Then, finally I decided to go for a copywriter position in advertising. I put together what I thought was a portfolio and literally went to offices in person to find a job. Little did I know that this was setting me on the path that would be more closely aligned with that of my great-grandmother than I could imagine. She had endured incredible violence, racial injustice, death threats, and exile. All I wanted to do was be involved in creating more positive images of Black people. That didn’t seem radical to me.

After working at an all-Black agency for a while, I wanted to learn more about filmmaking techniques and started taking classes. While I was in film school, the pioneering director William Greaves was making the 1989 documentary film Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice for PBS’s American Experience. I joined his small crew in Chicago, then went on to Memphis, and ultimately to New York City to work with him. While working on the film, I visited locations that were specific to Ida’s life and met scholars who were experts on her. I learned more from them than I had from my grandmother, who had passed away while I was in college. I had never bothered to ask her certain questions, and it was too late then.

Michelle Duster shortly after college.

An Unlikely Connection

By my mid-thirties, I had endured something many single women do: ten whole years of being questioned about why I wasn’t married. Frustrated, I began to wonder if I was somehow more like my great-grandmother than I’d realized—and became more curious about her life. After all, she was thirty-three when she got married in 1895. She had four children and was forty-two years old when her last child, my grandmother, was born. I was intrigued by how she clearly lived her life on her own terms, in ways that were unusual compared to the women who were her contemporaries. When I read her diary to learn her inner thoughts, I realized that, in some ways, my desire to travel, have adventures, and make an impact on society seemed to be similar to hers. I may have felt like an outlier among my friends, but it seemed I had something in common with this woman I was connected to three generations away who’d lived a whole century before me.

Michelle Duster and William Greaves at a screening of his documentary, Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice.

I was drawn to and inspired by how she refused to make herself small, even when others expected that of African American women, who were relegated to being second-class citizens in many respects. And so, after years of wrestling with the idea of “fitting in,” both socially and career-wise, I accepted the fact that I was simply different than most people around me. I had been a bridesmaid more than a dozen times and still had no desire to get married. I decided to unapologetically live life on my own terms, which was a more entrepreneurial and unconventional path, just like the one my great-grandmother followed.

Carrying the Torch

During my maturation from early adulthood to my fifties, I worked in both New York City and Chicago in advertising, marketing communications, event and concert production, and film production. Always writing—for someone else. During the Great Recession of 2008, my life came to a crossroads. I was one of the millions who lost their job. In addition, the Ida B. Wells Homes had been demolished to make way for a mixed-income community. The historian Paula Giddings’s biography, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, was published. I had to decide my next move.

I decided to write about my family, and edited a book of my great-grandmother’s writings. On behalf of my family, I contacted Mayor Richard M. Daley and asked that the city do something to honor my great-grandmother as a woman. My argument was that she was a woman, not a building. And she should be remembered.

Luckily, others had the same request, and I was asked to join a committee that had already been formed. Little did I know that I was embarking on a new life path of activism. Since that time, I have advocated for the creation of a historical marker to remember the housing community and Ida. I was involved in having a major street named after her in Chicago. In her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi, my father and his siblings provided support to the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum. I decided to join them in this effort and also made never-ending requests of politicians to have signage put on Highway 78 to indicate the museum. I felt that people who were traveling to see Elvis Presley’s hometown of Tupelo should at least know that Holly Springs was Ida’s hometown.

My grandmother’s generation is gone, and my father’s generation is leaving us. I looked up one day and realized that getting these stories into the world is up to my generation and beyond. Now, my brothers, cousins, and I are the keepers of the flame, and I intend to do everything possible to make sure that my great-grandmother and other Black women who made this country what it is will have their stories told, too.