VI. A Powerful Legacy
They had destroyed my paper, in which every dollar I had in the world was invested. They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth. I felt that I owed it to myself and my race to tell the whole truth.
—Ida B. Wells
Defending and Embracing Our Authentic Selves
At just sixteen, Ida had to join the world of adults—and navigate the scrutiny and danger that greeted late-nineteenth-century women—all on her own. That meant adhering to the so-called cult of true womanhood, in which “the ideal woman was seen not only as submissive, but also gentle, innocent, pure, modest, and pious,” as the historian Linda O. McMurry writes in her biography of Ida, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. With such strict social codes guiding her life, the teenage Ida would have taken great care to avoid slanderous rumors and protect her reputation.
Once her siblings had been nursed back to health, Ida thought about the daunting task of taking care of everyone financially. Luckily, her sister informed her that their father had trusted his doctor to keep a sum of money safe for use in the event his wife or children needed help. According to her autobiography, Ida met him one evening shortly after her parents died in 1878 to get the money. Apparently, her visit was observed by a few chatty neighbors. Rumors began to circulate that the teenaged Black girl and adult white male had met for insidious reasons. The exchange of money did not help.
The salacious lies combined with the loss of her parents caused her a great deal of pain. She felt utterly alone yet had to forge through. Decades later she wrote in her autobiography:
Of course as a young, inexperienced girl who had never had a beau, too young to have been out in company except at children’s parties, I knew nothing whatever of the world’s ways of looking at things and never dreamed that the community would not understand why I didn’t want our children separated. But someone said that I had been downtown inquiring for Dr. Gray shortly after I had come from the country. They heard him tell me to tell my sister he would get the money, meaning my father’s money, and bring it to us that night. It was easy for that type of mind to deduce and spread the rumor that already, as young as I was, I had been heard asking white men for money and that was the reason I wanted to live there by myself with the children.
I am quite sure that never in all my life have I suffered such a shock as I did when I heard that misconstruction that had been placed upon my determination to keep my brothers and sisters together. As I look back at it now I can perhaps understand the type of mind which drew such conclusions. And no one suggested that I was laying myself open to gossiping tongues.
Ida B. Wells was not the first or last Black woman who needed to fend off unwarranted criticism or defend her reputation. Black women have endured being stereotyped and caricatured as hypersexual, immoral, unsophisticated, angry, and violent people. This made Ida extra vigilant in how she dressed and conducted herself. Not only to command respect as someone who would present herself in a certain way, but also to stay safe. Black women historically have had much less protection under the law than other women, starting with the omnipresent practice of rape and separation from their children that typified slavery. Victims of sexual crimes were often blamed for their trauma and almost never saw their perpetrators punished. This dynamic led to a deep silence about the violations.
From Recy Taylor, who was raped by several white men in 1944 while on her way home from church, to the string of Black women who were sexually assaulted by police in Oklahoma in 2014–15, Black women have always been especially vulnerable.
In addition to navigating physical danger, African American women had to endure having their physical characteristics vilified and viewed as a liability. Full lips, round butts, browner skin, “kinky” hair, broad noses, and other physical characteristics have been denigrated for their difference from European features. From Sarah Baartman being paraded around like a circus freak show in the 1800s to the tennis champion Serena Williams being referred to in masculine terms, Black women have been attacked for their appearances.
Ida was aware of the difference in protection she could expect compared to white women, and she did everything possible to avoid dangerous situations or others that could tarnish her reputation. She was so vigilant about it that she demanded that a pastor write a letter to speak to her character in 1891 after hearing that he had been disparaging her name in his community. Ida had stayed over as a guest of the minister and his wife while in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on a sales trip for the Free Speech. Both Ida and the sister-in-law of the minister stayed at the house. The two women happened to converse with some men who visited the house during their stay.
Later, Ida learned that the pastor had spoken to people about how virtuous northern women were in comparison to southern women, implying that the southern-born Ida was herself not virtuous. The minister’s wife had fished Ida’s torn-up mail out of the trash and read a letter in which Ida referenced losing her teaching position in Memphis. After his wife relayed the contents of Ida’s private correspondence, the minister twisted whatever Ida had said in her letter to imply that her lack of virtue, versus her outspokenness, explained why the Memphis school system had not renewed Ida’s contract to teach. Not only did he and his wife sully Ida’s name, they also completely erased the fact that she’d taken the school system to task by exposing the vast inequality between Black and white schools. This assumption—and his willingness to share it with others—was insulting on multiple levels.
Ida wrote the minister, insisting that she meet with him in person the next time she visited Vicksburg. She arrived flanked by all five of the close friends who relayed the minister’s slanderous remarks about her. It was very important that he set the record straight about her reputation. She was a single Black woman. She was a businesswoman. And she needed to make sure that her reputation was intact for both her safety and for her business. She insisted that he apologize not only to her in person but also publicly from his pulpit. She wrote the statement for him to say:
To Whom It May Concern:
I desire to say that any remarks I have made reflecting on the character of Miss Ida B. Wells are false. This I do out of deference to her as a lady and myself as a Christian gentleman.
She told him that her “good name was all that I had in the world, that I was bound to protect it from attack by those who felt that they could do so with impunity because I had no brother or father to protect it for me.” She wanted him to know, “Virtue was not at all a matter of the section in which one lived; that many a slave woman had fought and died rather than yield to the pressure and temptations to which she was subjected. I had heard many tales of such.” Ida emphasized, “I was one southern girl, born and bred, who had tried to keep herself spotless and morally clean as my slave mother had taught me.”
Luckily for the pastor, she showed him some extra grace in writing. In her autobiography, she noted that she “will not mention his name, because he is still living and occupies an honorable position.” So despite his rush to declare her unfit for polite society, the minister appears only as “Rev.—” in her recounting of the incidents.
Speaking Truth to Power
Ida’s boldness often extended to explicitly political spaces, even and especially ones where Black women were often not welcome. For example, eight months after the 1913 suffrage march she defiantly integrated, Ida did another courageous thing: she went to speak to President Woodrow Wilson in person. It wasn’t her first time visiting a sitting president. She had also met with President William McKinley in 1898 to talk with him about the murder of the postmaster Frazier B. Baker, a Black federal employee in Lake City, South Carolina, and the need to make lynching a federal crime. Despite hearing lip service, nothing happened.
Illinois state senator Shelby Moore Cullom urged President William McKinley (pictured) to meet with Ida.
Woodrow Wilson agreed to meet with Ida, but their discussion produced little in the way of progress from the then president. Wilson’s anti-Black ideas became more well-known to the public in the years after his 1924 death.
William Monroe Trotter, who formed the National Equal Rights League (NERL) to fight against these types of injustices, was a friend of Ida’s. He was also the passionate and opinionated editor of the Boston Guardian. Both of them were considered “militant” because they weren’t willing to silently settle for second-class citizenship. Ida joined the NERL, and Trotter asked her to go with his delegation to the White House to discuss the problem with President Wilson. Ida believed Wilson’s treatment of federal employees had been unequivocally wrong, too. She was disappointed in his lack of concern about whether African Americans had their rights as full citizens realized. Ida’s frustration didn’t come from nowhere: during his campaign, Wilson vocally supported the advancement of African Americans.
However, after he won the election, Wilson’s administration reversed course: The Post Office and the Department of the Treasury were ordered to segregate. Partitions separated Black and white workers’ desks. Several members of Wilson’s cabinet forbade their Black secretaries and clerks from using the same restaurants and bathrooms as their white counterparts. Many Black people lost faith in their efforts to advocate for equality in their local communities while segregation was encouraged and implemented in Washington, DC.
A year passed after Ida’s visit—still, the president did nothing. Ida was disappointed but not surprised. Frustrating years spent fighting for change with slow progress had inoculated her to the failings of government. Trotter was still hopeful that he could make an impact on Wilson, so he made an appointment in 1914 to visit the White House again on his own. The solo meeting was a disaster. Trotter was infuriated when President Wilson claimed that integration caused friction between colored and white clerks. The president tried to frame segregation as a benefit to Black people, because they could avoid being in humiliating situations.
Trotter’s reaction to these statements got him thrown out of the White House. Once it was obvious that they would get no support from the federal government, Ida invited Trotter to speak in Chicago and stay as a guest in her home. With no friend to be found in the White House, they needed to come up with another strategy to win justice.
Throughout her life, Ida embraced direct, one-on-one advocacy. She frequently met with leaders—presidents, governors, and other officials—and spoke candidly about the injustices she saw all around her. Advocating on behalf of people who could not always walk into those rooms with her, she refused to homogenize her message or back down from her ideals.
Black Lives Matter
Today, Ida’s legacy of speaking truth to power lives on in the multipronged work that Black organizers, activists, and thinkers have done. While many view Donald Trump’s presidency to be a historical outlier, his tactics and rhetoric share much of those displayed by Ida’s contemporary Woodrow Wilson. Wilson and Trump both openly utilized economic distress and existing racial division to tap into working-class Americans’ willingness to stomach—if not outright support—destructive policies. Though the people who supported them span a range of economic backgrounds, both relied on heightened financial worries to boost their appeal.
2014 protest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson.
In 2014, when the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson killed the unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown, longtime organizers and newly galvanized people alike joined to protest the deadly racism of American policing. Those early days saw a swell of public demonstrations, most of them peaceful, which were met with violent repression from the police and military. It was clear that Black people could not mourn or express frustration publicly without being in danger.
President Barack Obama hesitated to meet with leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, only doing so eighteen months after Michael Brown’s death.
The protests grew into what is most often referred to as the Black Lives Matter movement. The specific phrase, coined by the activists Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, is also the name of a broad member-based organization with chapters around the country. A number of other groups and individuals mobilized, decrying the racism of the American criminal justice system and extrajudicial killings that often target Black people. While they were met with some open bigotry and threats of violence from police while protesting, some members of these groups were invited to the White House by President Barack Obama in February 2016.
The meeting came eighteen months after the death of Michael Brown. In the interim, efforts to reform the criminal justice system, and especially to institute some kind of accountability for officers who used fatal force against unarmed people, had swept the country. That all happened because of the young organizers who rallied around Brown, one another, and the community more broadly. Obama, who had given only tepid support for the protestors to that point, seemed to be listening: “They are much better organizers than I was when I was their age, and I am confident that they are going to take America to new heights.”
Civil rights leaders spanning from the late freedom rider, Martin Luther King Jr. associate, and U.S. representative John Lewis to other activists like Rev. Al Sharpton were present. But just a couple of months later, Obama again turned to what some viewed as scolding: when he spoke at a London rally filled with young activists and organizers, he warned them not to agitate too much: “Once you’ve highlighted an issue and brought it to people’s attention… then you can’t just keep on yelling at them,” he said, noting that they shouldn’t dismiss elected officials. But ultimately, Trump’s election that followed a few months later bore out the organizers’ predictions, not his. And their work continues.
Trump’s election in 2016 saw a troubling resurgence of white supremacist sentiment reminiscent of racial backlash last seen in the late 1800s post-Reconstruction era. State governments issued new protections for Confederate monuments. Conservatives rolled out a wave of suppression efforts targeted to disenfranchise Black and brown voters. And police brutality against Black citizens continued to go unpunished by the courts. The similarities in response to Black progress have surged interest in the tactics used by Ida and her contemporaries to navigate a hostile social environment.
Though the protests of recent years have been unprecedented in their breadth, Black women have been speaking out against racist police violence for decades—and in ways that often angered the white people who heard them. In early 1992, the rapper Sister Souljah, born Lisa Williamson, released the album 360 Degrees of Power. The year before, four Los Angeles police officers had severely beaten an unarmed Black man named Rodney King. Video footage of the brutality circulated, and the officers’ trials the following year were a tipping point for the city. Three of the four officers were acquitted, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on one charge for the last. Almost immediately, Los Angeles experienced mass unrest, six days in which a series of protests, demonstrations, and sometimes-violent displays saw Black Angelenos express the depth of their anger at the continuing violence that the police enacted with impunity.
Within weeks of the Los Angeles uprisings, Sister Souljah appeared on a morning talk show alongside the New Jersey senator Bill Bradley and a New York congressman, Charles Rangel. In this conversation, she referred to the state of Black Americans in the country as one of constant oppression. But in a later interview, reported by the Washington Post, Souljah explained her empathy for the Los Angeles rioters in a way that sparked immediate backlash:
I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? You understand what I’m saying? In other words, white people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, or above dying, when they would kill their own kind?
It was a shock to viewers—and to one candidate for president: William “Bill” J. Clinton. Soon after, the then presidential hopeful, who’d leaned heavily on support from Black voters, spoke to Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.’s Rainbow Coalition. In an attempt to balance his Black support with white voters’ perception that he was too close to the “radical” Rev. Jackson, Clinton took the opportunity to repudiate Sister Souljah—also in attendance as a guest of the conference.
Sister Souljah. The American artist, author, and musician received criticism for comments she made supporting the at times violent protests in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police. Her remarks were condemned by then candidate Bill Clinton, in what many saw as a political move to distance himself from the Black American community.
Clinton made a pithy, ahistorical comparison: “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think [the Ku Klux Klan grand wizard] David Duke was giving that speech.” He was also unreceptive to Rev. Jackson’s assertion that Souljah had been trying to express the extreme repression that Black people in America had faced since the country’s inception. To this day, the term “Sister Souljah moment” carries a specific meaning in political parlance: when a politician has one such moment, it refers to them distancing themselves from a member of their party or group whom others might see as an extremist.
Whether or not her confrontation with reporters was ultimately successful, Sister Souljah forced a national conversation about the resentment that injustice can breed. In that context, it’s hardly surprising that her name is invoked when describing the callous moves some politicians make.
Sister Souljah, like many others, was following in the long tradition set by Black women like Ida B. Wells to stand tall and let their voices be heard by those in power, even in the face of severe criticism and potential loss of work or money.
Working and Protesting Alone
Often, Ida took on the challenge and sacrifice of her work without anyone else’s assistance. In 1930, Ida B. Wells was almost sixty-eight years old and had been working for over fifty years. By then, she could have felt that it was time to slow down. But she was disgusted with the male political leadership and decided to jump into the Illinois state senate race as an independent candidate. Without support from a major political organization, Ida and Ferdinand funded most of her campaign themselves. They printed posters, newsletters, and letters, and distributed them all over the district.
Despite the grueling schedule of giving at least two speeches a day, Ida lost the race by a wide margin. However, her run for state senate was historymaking, as Ida was one of the first Black women in the nation to run for public office. Getting in the race was a victory in and of itself. She was a Black woman who had challenged a racist and patriarchal society to reject its assumption that Black Americans would be held subordinate indefinitely.
By the time Ida B. Wells reached her mid-sixties, she had been a firsthand witness to the realities of slavery, the freedom and hope of Reconstruction, the terror of post-Reconstruction, the implementation of Jim Crow laws, the Spanish-American War, World War I, segregation, mass migration, riots, and women fighting and winning the right to vote.
Ida’s determination and insistence on positive action over reconciliation was not always welcome within the civil rights organizations of her time. She did not possess the temperament for glad-handing and standing aside while her people “waited their turn.” But despite feeling alone and misunderstood at times during her personal fight for justice, she was firmly entrenched in the great social and cultural change seen during her lifetime and beyond. Of the organizations she played a personal role in founding, two are still functional to this day: the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Modern Mavericks
In 2015, months into the swell of activism that followed the death of Michael Brown, and weeks after the white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people at a Bible study in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, a South Carolina artist named Brittany “Bree” Newsome (now Bree Newsome Bass) did something that still stands as a powerful image even years later. The day before, President Obama had given a speech calling for the Confederate flag to be removed from the South Carolina statehouse. Newsome had decided even before Obama’s speech that she would scale the flagpole to remove the flag herself. And she did.
She raised it triumphantly, dominating over a potent symbol of centuries of white supremacy. The visual of the young Black woman scaling a thirty-foot pole to remove the flag was as controversial as it was powerful. Newsome was met with waves of harassment, as well as condemnation from the governor, Nikki Haley. (Haley would later go on to sign a bill removing the flag.) Even so, Newsome didn’t regret her decision. Two years later, she told Vox, “I grew up with my grandmother who was raised in Greenville, who told me about her experiences seeing the Ku Klux Klan beat her neighbor and things like that. The massacre in Charleston brought a refocus on the flag.” History is never too far removed.
A Charlotte, North Carolina–based filmmaker and activist, Bree Newsome reached acclaim when she climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina state capitol building to protest the state’s display of the Confederate States of America’s battleflag. Newsome scaled the flagpole near the capitol and removed the flag from its perch. She and an aide were immediately arrested.
Colin Kaepernick was a celebrated player on the San Francisco 49ers for years, leading them to the Super Bowl in 2012. Many of his supporters believe the league colluded to keep him out following his departure from the team in 2017.
COLIN KAEPERNICK
TOMMIE SMITH AND JOHN CARLOS
The name Colin Kaepernick now conjures an era that might feel like it was eons ago. The National Football League (NFL) has moved past him; the rapper Jay-Z teamed up with the league in 2019 to help bolster social justice and entertainment initiatives. It would seem that everything was neatly tied up.
But even if that were all true, it wasn’t the case at first. Before the NFL found indirect ways to talk about injustice that fit within the comfort zones of the owners and many fans, a significant chunk of the sports world turned on the San Francisco 49ers quarterback.
Kaepernick silently protested the injustice of police brutality—and racism in America more broadly—during the playing of the national anthem before each game. As his protest started to attract attention, Kaepernick became the target of nationwide ire from other players in the mostly Black league, as well as from the media and NFL fans. Some conservatives claimed he was disrespecting veterans with his protest; others said he had no right to protest because of his salary and position as a professional athlete, and should only be allowed to entertain, not cause a ruckus.
In many of these complaints, even the ones that did not seem obviously racist, there was often contempt toward Kaepernick for the simple fact of his being a young Black man pointing out an inconvenient truth. Even other Black athletes were torn. He didn’t immediately receive wide support, and his method of silently kneeling while on the sidelines of the football field was considered too radical by some.
But the years after his original 2016 season protest saw a rise in athletes’ activism across different sports and leagues. Among other 2020 initiatives to acknowledge racial inequality, the NFL printed “End Racism” in the end zones. However, Kaepernick himself, despite reaching rare heights on the field prior to his demonstrations, has not secured another contract in the NFL as of the end of 2020. But the impact of his early actions—and his continued commitment to the causes he believes in—ripples out beyond Kaepernick, the NFL, and the country.
Kaepernick was denied the opportunity to play in the NFL during the peak of his career in much the same way that Muhammad Ali was arrested, found guilty of draft evasion, and stripped of his boxing titles in 1966 at twenty-four years old. He was unable to box for four of his prime athletic years while banned from the sport for his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. Ali went on to become known as “the Greatest” based on the later years of his athletic career, a time when most in his field would be considered over-the-hill.
Two years later, the gold medalist Tommie Smith and the bronze medalist John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist during the playing of the national anthem at their medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics. The gesture, taken by many as a reference to the Black Power movement, is still seen as one of the most overtly political demonstrations in Olympic history. The 200-meter track stars Smith and Carlos were fed up. Fed up with Ali’s exile, fed up with the lack of access to good housing in their urban communities, fed up with the casual racism of the sports world. And they were punished greatly for it. A familiar pattern played out: Smith and Carlos were seen as good enough to compete for the United States, but they were not deserving of the right to point out the oppression that they, and other Black people, experienced in their country.
Muhammad Ali.
They were expelled from the Games and mostly ostracized from the sports world. They were met with racist criticism on sports networks, in newspapers, and in magazines. Their families received death threats. Over five decades later, their images have been somewhat rehabilitated by the passage of time and growing support for their positions, but the toll of those lost years cannot be undone.
Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos (right).
All these athletes transcended their sport and became more well-known as a result of their courage to speak out against injustice. They share this with Ida, who criticized the Memphis school system and then lost her job. When she spoke out against lynching, she lost her printing press and her life as she knew it. As a result of death threats, she never lived in the South again.
Speaking out about injustice can be a lonely experience and often comes with the loss of things that one holds dear. But the question must be asked: Is it better to be silent and endure hardship, or is it better to speak out and possibly effect change? Standing out and speaking out alone is something few are willing to do. And the ones who do often become historymakers, as Ida has. The attention she has gained posthumously surpasses the level of appreciation that she experienced while alive. During her life she was considered so controversial and “militant” that many times she stood alone.
Organizing Together
Many people who face a hostile social environment form or join groups and organizations in order to collectively combat injustice rather than try to do things alone. Ida was no different. Even though she fought against the railroad on her own in the early 1880s, she was part of a community that was supportive. In Memphis, she belonged to social groups called lyceums, where people gathered to share creative works and political ideas with like-minded individuals. The environment energized Ida, providing an outlet she did not find within the confines of her teaching career. It was where she began to realize the power of collective action and see her own potential as a leader.
After she left Memphis, she both founded and participated in a variety of organizations, including but not limited to the National Association of Colored Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Ida B. Wells Club, Universal Negro Improvement Association, the National Equal Rights League, the Negro Fellowship League, the Alpha Suffrage Club, and the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association. Engaging in and exchanging ideas, talents, perspectives, and tactics, Ida was part of a critical moment in the United States’ progression to a more perfect union.
Ida B. moved to New York City in 1892 and started working with T. Thomas Fortune on his New York Age newspaper. Thomas also introduced her to the nascent National Afro-American Council, of which Ida became the inaugural secretary. The group was formed in 1898 after a spate of violent lynchings and is considered the nation’s first nationwide civil rights organization. They lobbied actively for the passage of a federal antilynching law (there have been over two hundred attempts within the last century to pass such laws—the most recent introduced by the 116th Congress in 2019).
T. Thomas Fortune, depicted in The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, circa 1891. Fortune was the leading Black economist of his time and the publisher of the New York Age, America’s leading Black newspaper of its time.
Ida’s travels in this period had a profound impact on her worldview and understanding of what was possible. An 1893 trip to the United Kingdom opened her eyes to a more progressive society, strengthened by women coming together to form social clubs that elevated their voices and provided real influence over politics. When she arrived in Chicago for the World’s Fair later that year, a women’s club was formed in Chicago and Ida was selected as chairman. In September it was chartered as the Ida B. Wells Club. In 1896, Ida cofounded the National Association of Colored Women, and Mary Church Terrell was elected as the first president.
More than a decade later, in 1909, Ida became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), along with W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell. The group was formed in response to a Springfield, Illinois, race riot.
But Ida quickly grew frustrated with the organization when she realized that most of its leaders were wealthy white moderates who wanted to “study” the race problem rather than get involved in concrete action and activism. She considered their approach to be too passive and gradually disengaged from their supposed mission. She also was insulted when the organization adopted her antilynching platform without giving her the credit she deserved and then selected the younger W. E. B. Du Bois over her to edit its national Crisis magazine. The selection was made despite Ida’s status as one of the most prolific and well-known journalists of her time.
Banner with the motto of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.
Despite Ida’s differences with this early iteration of the NAACP, its work in the years that followed is not to be ignored. Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall, and thousands of other activists have been part of the NAACP in the fight for equal rights in voting, housing, education, health care, and public accommodations.
Medgar Evers.
Thurgood Marshall.
After gradually disengaging from the NAACP over a few years, Ida got involved in the National Equal Rights League (NERL) in 1913 and worked with William Monroe Trotter, the editor of the Boston Guardian. The organization pursued equal rights through the courts, arguing that these institutions were more sympathetic to Black rights than federal or state governments. During World War I, the NERL took up Ida’s signature cause to make lynching a federal crime. It was this effort that brought her and Trotter to President Woodrow Wilson’s White House with a 25,000-signature petition in hand. Wilson was unmoved, and more than a century later Congress has still failed to pass law on this measure.
The concept of unionizing in order to participate in collective bargaining has also been something that Black people have engaged in for over a century. In fact, Ida B. Wells wrote an entire pamphlet titled The Arkansas Race Riot about a group of sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, who tried to form a union in 1919. Their demand for fair compensation for their crop and attempt to organize around it was met with violence—dozens of deaths and extensive destruction of property.
The spirit of rising up against economic injustice still rings true today, from the 2019 teachers’ strikes that took place in several states to sick-outs at Amazon warehouses taking place in 2020. Collective action has a long history.
During the late 1950s to mid-1960s, several organizations were formed in order to fight against racial oppression. These include the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), just to name a few.
William Monroe Trotter.
In 1971, another organization formed that still is functioning today. Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) began with the focus of uniting people in the fight for economic equality for African Americans. Operation PUSH, which was established by Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., expanded into areas of social and political development. Based in Ida’s adopted home of Chicago, the organization merged with the Rainbow Coalition to create the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and has been working on campaigns ranging from antipoverty advocacy to voter registration and enfranchisement for more than forty years.
When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, trusted associate Jesse Jackson Sr. was at his side. Jackson went on to become a civil rights icon in his own right, founding the Rainbow/PUSH social justice organization and becoming a serious contender for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1988 presidential election.
A Chicago-based politician and civil rights leader, Oscar De Priest was the first African American elected to the United States Congress in the twentieth century.
In 1913, Illinois granted women limited suffrage. Ida saw a rare opportunity to fully utilize the force of both of her life’s great causes: combating racism and sexism. She founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and it quickly developed a block system to canvass the neighborhood and register African American women to vote. Their work saw immediate returns in 1914 as Oscar De Priest was elected as the city’s first Black alderman. In 1928, he became the first African American congressman elected to the House of Representatives from a northern state and a national symbol for racial pride.
After fighting for so many years to gain respect and equal rights as citizens of the United States, an African American movement focused on the African diaspora took hold during the second decade of the twentieth century. Marcus Garvey formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914. Its motto, “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!,” and its slogan, “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad!,” reflected its global orientation.
Ida got involved because she truly believed that Black people needed to be self-sufficient. On top of that, Marcus Garvey was not intimidated by her outspokenness. He invited Ida to his meeting in December 1918, and she was selected as a delegate to attend the group’s 1919 Paris Peace Conference in France as a follow-up to the end of World War I. Unfortunately, she and close ally Madam C. J. Walker, who had financially supported antilynching work, were both denied passports to attend.
The controversial Jamaican-born activist, publisher, journalist, and philosopher Marcus Garvey became known for his view that Black Americans could not truly be free until they had achieved full self-sufficiency. Many interpreted this as a separatist ideology. He was also an advocate of Pan-Africanism, the idea that all people of African descent should unite to build power and create distinct spaces of their own for safety and prosperity.
Black activism stretches across the globe. In 1977, Randall Robinson founded TransAfrica Forum, which focused on influencing American foreign policy toward Africa and the Caribbean. Going in the opposite direction, in 2019, Ghana implemented the Year of Return, in remembrance of the four hundred years since Africans were first enslaved in what would become the British colonies that later formed the United States. The country welcomed African Americans back “home,” and many took advantage of that offer in response to their feeling that gaining full equality in the United States was more of a distant dream than a potential reality.
Taking Control of Our Narrative
When Ida wrote about the realities of her friends being lynched, she was countering false narratives about Black people. She took control of the narrative and presented the Black perspective to counter propaganda that framed Black people as biologically or sociologically inferior, dangerous, and violent.
The prevailing narrative at the time was that Black men were sexual predators who targeted white women and therefore deserved to die in a most brutal way. Other victims of lynching had been framed as dangers to the social order, specifically threatening to white people, or robbers. Horrific acts against Black people were normalized over time: torture, collecting their teeth and bones as souvenirs, or even burning them alive for the enjoyment of spectators.
Ida investigated these atrocities with the goal of humanizing their victims. Time and time again, she found that the victims were misidentified scapegoats targeted to be punished for a crime that was committed by someone else or swept up in an act of terror intended to institute social control over unwanted Black communities and neighbors. When Ida wrote her articles in the Free Speech about the lynching of the three grocers, she highlighted how the murders’ implication of violence against any Black person, at any time, kept the surrounding community terrorized and economically disenfranchised for a generation.
Her landmark pamphlets Southern Horrors in 1892 and A Red Record in 1895 outlined in great detail individual cases and statistics to convey the vast scale of America’s lynching problem. Pioneering what is now called “data journalism,” Ida collected this information from a wide variety of sources. She scoured articles by white correspondents and in white-owned newspapers, combining those findings with the statistics she was able to pull from sources that she ultimately democratized by putting them in one place. In A Red Record, she listed the various “crimes” committed that resulted in lynching:
Rape, attempted rape, alleged rape, suspicion of rape, murder, alleged murder, alleged complicity in murder, murderous assault, attempted murder, attempted robbery, arson, incendiarism, alleged stock poisoning, poisoning wells, alleged poisoning wells, burglary, wife beating, self-defense, suspected robbery, assault and battery, insulting whites, malpractice, alleged barn burning, stealing, unknown offense, no offense, race prejudice
And in 1899’s Lynch Law in Georgia, she wrote thus to summarize the murders of over a dozen people:
The real purpose of these savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that in the South he has no rights that the law will enforce. Samuel Hose was burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must not resist.
A year later, in 1900, she wrote Mob Rule in New Orleans, which chronicled the widespread mob violence inflicted on the Black community and the horrible demise of Robert Charles, who was murdered in retaliation for defending himself against a police officer.
Ida B. Wells’s Lynch Law in Georgia, a document used to inform political and organization leaders about the scope of unchecked violence against Black Americans in the late nineteenth century.
In 1917, she wrote The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century, a chronicle of the horrific violence against an entire Black community. She also outlined oft-overlooked tensions that existed in the American North, where the first waves of the Great Migration tested the Union states’ full belief in their cause.
During World War I, with the shortage of workers in the North, there was an effort to employ recent migrants from the South. This led to labor displacement in certain areas and a fight for equal wages. In East St. Louis, Illinois, this battle between the white community and Black migrants led to the death and destruction of an entire Black community. The National Guard was called into the area, but they proceeded to do nothing to protect the Black residents. Thousands of people were killed, and those that survived were displaced and lost all of their property.
Ida went around in the aftermath of the riot and interviewed people firsthand to learn what had happened to them. She then wrote her pamphlet describing the reality of the situation and met with Illinois governor Frank Lowden in order to make sure that those who created the situation would be held accountable.
By investigating the situation herself and chronicling personal accounts of what happened, Ida was taking control of the narrative. Instead of allowing white people to spin and skew reality to justify their annihilation of Black people, she documented the brutal truth about the violence being inflicted on the Black community. Her influence helped reduce retaliatory sentencing for a few Black people but did little to have white instigators punished for the destruction.
Ida’s project of amassing the details of anti-Black crime nationwide through data journalism continued when she went down to Arkansas in 1920 to investigate the deaths of a slew of Black sharecroppers and the sentencing of twelve to death row. By talking to people herself, she learned that their supposed crime had been an effort to form a labor union and secure better pay for cotton industry workers. One of their meetings had been besieged, and a white person died in the fighting that ensued. The sharecroppers present at the meeting were accused of murder, and hundreds of innocent Black people were murdered in retaliation. Their property was destroyed, and descendants of the victims insist to this day that a great land theft took place.
Ida’s pamphlet The Arkansas Race Riot countered the prevailing narrative at the time—that the whites raiding Black people’s property were simply defending themselves. She told the story from the Black people’s point of view, leaving behind a firsthand account that still survives to this day. Elaine is still struggling to reconcile with that past. An uptick in interest has seen these riots come under renewed scrutiny in recent years, but the history was largely buried for nearly a century. And almost nothing has been done yet to bring about justice for the victims or their families who had their lives and wealth stolen.
In 1942, John H. Johnson was an office clerk at a Chicago life insurance company. He used a $500 loan to start the Johnson Publishing Company, printing the Negro Digest later that year and eventually adding the famed Ebony and Jet magazines. But Johnson Publishing also brought The Ebony Cookbook, by the columnist Freda DeKnight, and The New Ebony Cookbook, by the author Charlotte Lyons, into homes around the country. Through standard news, commentary, or preserving Black food traditions, Johnson Publishing helped chronicle Black life in America.
Many people have followed Ida’s example of taking control of disputed history—most often shaped by the wealthy and powerful—and telling those stories through the lens of Black people’s perspective. From the first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, started in 1827, to Frederick Douglass establishing the North Star newspaper in 1847, to John H. Johnson founding the Johnson Publishing Company in 1942 (the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines), Black people have had to write, create, and own dozens of other media outlets to have their own stories heard.
In more recent history, several Black women have emerged as leaders in creating corrective works. Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times Magazine spearheaded the narrative-altering “1619 Project,” which reexamined the legacy of slavery in the United States and its ongoing impact on the structures of the country. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020, the same year that Ida was awarded her posthumous Special Citation.
In 2016, Ava DuVernay produced the Netflix documentary 13th, which explored the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the legislative decisions that have resulted in the nation’s disproportionately Black prison population. Three years later, DuVernay created the series When They See Us, which told the story of the “Central Park Five” from their perspective and reframed them as the “Exonerated Five.”
Pop culture, cinema, and storytelling have a huge role to play in opening new eyes to the individual stories that make up America’s despicable history of race-based oppression, but the work cannot stop there. Cultural institutions are emerging nationwide to bring the African American experience to traditional platforms that have been slow to adapt. Under the leadership of Lonnie G. Bunch III, the Smithsonian Institution created the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. It opened in 2016 and showcases the African American story’s impact on American and world history, including an exhibit on Ida.
In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It humanizes the stories of slavery, mass incarceration, and lynching that stain American history while avoiding the stereotypes and false information that often infect the discussion. The Equal Justice Initiative and other local organizations, such as the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, place markers throughout the country to honor the victims of lynchings alongside their personal stories—applying faces, names, and details to historical instances of people’s deaths at the hands of racist mobs.
EXONERATED CENTRAL PARK FIVE
The infamous Central Park Five case divided New York City—and the whole country—in 1989. Following the assault and brutal rape of a white woman who had been jogging through the Manhattan park, five Black and Latino teenagers were rounded up by the NYPD and coerced into confessing to the crime after at least seven hours of interrogation each. The national press played into stereotypes about Black criminality in its coverage of the case, swaying public opinion against the boys. Most notably, a local real estate guru named Donald Trump took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the deaths of the so-called “wolf pack.”
Despite the evidence against them being circumstantial and often contradictory, four of the boys—Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana—all ultimately served between six and seven years in juvenile facilities. Korey Wise, known then as Kharey, served thirteen years and eight months in various state prisons. In 2001, at the Auburn Correctional Facility in New York, he met a man named Matias Reyes. Convicted of serial rape and murder, Reyes later confessed to the 1989 assault of Tricia Meili, the Central Park jogger. The original five, who had always maintained that they were innocent, would have their convictions vacated in 2002. They sued the city the following year and received a settlement over ten years later, in 2014.
National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Historical marker for Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Henry Stewart.
As for the three owners of the People’s Grocery who were killed outside Memphis, the Mount Zion Cemetery restoration project in Memphis honored their memories with a marker in 2019.
We Shall Not Be Moved
Despite years of progress in the wake of Ida’s work, America continues to tolerate efforts to silence and disrespect Black women. But in the face of that harsh reality, there are still brilliant examples of contemporary figures carrying on Ida B. Wells’s example of resilience in the face of all obstacles.
Ida B. Wells was a powerful political figure in her time, but she never personally served in an elected political office. Despite that, her influence outside government as a journalist and organizer was immense. With both efforts for racial equity and women’s suffrage taking place within her own lifetime, Ida was perhaps fated to fight for the advancement of, rather than personally benefit from, the great causes of her time. Today Black women, along with others, are empowered to make change directly from within the halls of power.
It is to everyone’s benefit that racially targeted lynching—while by no means eradicated—is far less prevalent today than it was in Ida’s time. But a newer scourge, that of disproportionately Black gun victimization, has sprung up in its place. The United States in particular has seen gun violence spiral into an epidemic over the first few decades of the twenty-first century. In 2016, gun violence was the second leading individual cause of death for children and adolescents in America. And that spate of violence hits Black and brown children at an even more alarming rate: between 2013 and 2019, Black and Hispanic teens made up fifteen percent of the K–12 school population but were twenty-five percent of gun violence victims on school grounds. In Ida’s adopted Chicago home, a study found Hispanic children and Black children faced much greater odds (seventy-four percent and 112 percent higher, respectively) of being exposed to gun violence than their white neighbors.
California congresswoman Maxine Waters is one of those heroines who carry the torch for equal rights and representation in the twenty-first century. A frequent target for President Donald Trump’s stoking of racial and gender resentments, she stood strong in defense of herself and her constituents. She constantly spoke out against his policies, pointed out his personal flaws, and refused to be silent, despite facing incredible levels of criticism and even threats. Waters faced vilification and death threats as she stepped forward as a leader in the effort to impeach Donald Trump for ethical lapses and incompetence. Her cause ultimately succeeded on January 16, 2020, when Trump became the third United States president in history to be impeached.
While a flight attendant and part-time activist based in Atlanta, Georgia, Lucy McBath lost her son to gun violence in a 2012 shooting. Her subsequent campaign for stronger gun laws, fueled by personal tragedy, built into a successful run for the United States House of Representatives in 2018.
A member of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017, Stacey Abrams fell short in a controversial election for governor of Georgia in 2018. She went on to spearhead voter registration efforts nationwide in the United States 2020 elections.
That tremendous burden has also led to remarkable bravery from women of color as they’ve stepped up to fix the problems that plague the country. Lucy McBath was born in Joliet, Illinois, just outside of Ida’s adopted city of Chicago. McBath is also the daughter of Lucien Holman—himself a former president of an Illinois chapter of the NAACP. She studied political science in college and interned for future governor Douglas Wilder in Virginia, but she ultimately worked as a flight attendant at Delta Air Lines as she raised her family in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2012, McBath’s seventeen-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was murdered at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. Michael Dunn, a forty-five-year-old white man, had been enraged by the “thug music” Davis and his friends were playing in their car. Dunn shot his handgun into the car, hitting Davis in his legs, aorta, and lungs, and continued shooting even as the car pulled away.
Six years after the death of her son, McBath ran for Congress in Georgia’s sixth congressional district. With a platform that included gun law reform, McBath won the congressional seat.
SYBRINA FULTON
Like McBath, Sybrina Fulton was prompted to turn her grief into action after losing a son to racist violence. The mother of slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, whose death at the hands of George Zimmerman catalyzed an activist movement around the country, Fulton announced a bid for county commissioner in Miami-Dade County in 2019. In 2020, with the support of other mothers including McBath, Fulton officially qualified to run, and later ended up losing the race by less than one percent.
2020 Black Lives Matter protest in New York, NY.
In 2018, a longtime attorney named Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia against Brian Kemp, then secretary of state, which meant he was in charge of elections and voter registration. Kemp refused all pressure to recuse himself from his position for the election and was allowed to run despite the conflict of interest inherent in administering his own election. He implemented numerous barriers targeted at denying the vote to groups projected to turn out strongly for Abrams (especially African American voters). Kemp “won” the election by fifty thousand votes.
Abrams refused to officially concede the race, and shortly thereafter announced the creation of Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit organization that combats voter suppression techniques. She sued the secretary of state and state election board in federal court, a lawsuit that was ongoing as of October 2020. In the interim, Abrams maintained a high profile in national politics and was even considered as a potential vice presidential candidate for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Even now, it often seems Black women frequently find ourselves fighting alone in the push for recognition. The Black Lives Matter movement, founded in 2013, grew out of mounting frustration with police violence against the Black community. Started by three Black women, Black Lives Matter ushered in a wave of national activism. The organization, with the simple affirmation at its core, was initially met with skepticism by those who believed accusations of racism across the country were overstated.
The group’s founding was yet another example of Black women’s refusal to be silenced, sidelined, or ignored when it comes to having equal rights under the law. In the years that followed, the election of Donald Trump would once again prove the nation’s deep and abiding devaluing of Black lives. As protests reignited following the May 25, 2020, police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, Black women organizing with Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100, Movement for Black Lives, and countless other organizations continue to fight for the dignity and safety of all Black people.
Beginning with the suffrage movement, white women have repeatedly fought for “women’s rights” in a way that prioritizes their needs over those of all women. Many white women did not want Black people to get the right to vote, even as Black women were willing to work alongside them. During the 1970s movement for women’s liberation, white women advocated for concerns that didn’t affect Black women nearly as much. For example, Black women had been working—whether under the involuntary conditions of slavery or as sharecroppers and later domestics—since our arrival in this country. White women’s fight to integrate themselves into the workplaces that their husbands and brothers and fathers occupied simply didn’t resonate. Black women worked in their homes.
While moments of tension arise around the divide between Black and white women’s and civil rights movements, some efforts have been made by various organizations to bridge the gap a bit. In 2020, the Rose Parade featured a suffrage float in celebration of the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. I was asked to ride on the float in honor of my great-grandmother, alongside the descendants of other suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Harriet Tubman.
The fact that those of us who are three to five generations removed from the early leaders of the suffrage movement can meet, interact, and work with each other shows the level of improvement that this country has experienced. Yet there is still a long way to go before any of us can claim there to be true equality across the board. Having a few exceptional Black people overcome the unique obstacles that we face as a community is a sign not of absolute equality but of heroic feats by select individuals.
Self-Determination, the Law, and Politics
Black people have often taken to “making a way out of no way.” We built our own postsecondary schools, now known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). We started our own civic and social organizations, businesses, and business networks. We created our own guidebooks to promote and support our own institutions and ourselves. These were all part of myriad survival techniques that have been employed to maintain Black dignity and independence.
At the start of the twentieth century, Ida and her attorney husband, Ferdinand, both sought to look outside the community to help change the laws that kept Black people unequal. In order to have this they needed to not only have the right to vote but also to get involved in politics. Some of Ida’s inspiration to advocate with the law might have come from the example her father set during Reconstruction. When the Fifteenth Amendment was passed in 1870, Black men were given the right to vote. Her father and many men around him earnestly engaged in political talk and exercised their newly found right.
HOLDING POLICE ACCOUNTABLE
In 1909 a penniless Black man named Will James, who was known as “Frog,” was arrested after the body of a white woman was found in an alley in Cairo, Illinois. Frank Davis, the sheriff of Alexander County, was involved in the hanging of James. He allowed a mob to take the prisoner to his certain death. With no due process of law, James was hanged from an electric pole and hundreds of bullets were pumped into him before his head was cut off.
If Ida B. Wells and other Black leaders had not put pressure on Governor Charles S. Deneen, the sheriff probably would have gotten away with this negligence. However, Ida traveled to Cairo and spent two days there talking to Black people in town to gather facts about what had actually occurred. Many were scared to say anything against Sheriff Davis because they had to live among those who had committed or sanctioned the murder of Frog. In Springfield, Ida testified in front of Governor Deneen and argued that the sheriff had violated his duty and knowingly released a prisoner into an assured death.
A sheriff of a town was legally obligated to protect its inmates from a mob, and Davis had not done that. If he got away with releasing someone to an assured death, then Ida felt there was no point in even pretending to have a law enforcement department. A few days after the hearing, Governor Deneen issued his verdict to not reinstate the sheriff. The impact of this decision was far-reaching. It was the first time that someone in Illinois who was complicit in a lynching was actually punished. This changed the way accused prisoners were handled in Illinois. When a sheriff saw signs of trouble with a mob, he would immediately call the governor for troops.
Governor Charles S. Deneen.
Though she didn’t yet have that right herself, Ida made her voice heard in a different way: in 1909, she testified in front of Illinois governor Charles S. Deneen to urge the permanent removal of a corrupt sheriff, Frank Davis of Cairo, Illinois, who had aided in the murder of an innocent Black man.
Many individuals and organizations have worked to hold law enforcement accountable since Ida’s years. The NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund was set up to fight against institutional racism. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Sentencing Project, and many other organizations focus on assisting and defending the most disenfranchised in our society.
In the tradition of his grandparents, my father, Donald L. Duster, ran a social service agency in Chicago for over two decades. One program that was instituted was First Defense Legal Aid, which was a network of attorneys who volunteered to provide legal counsel to young people who had been arrested. The attorneys went to police stations and worked on behalf of the mostly young Black and brown males who had been arrested and did not know how to defend themselves.
Housing and Support
Throughout her life, Ida constantly straddled two worlds. She interacted with and worked with some of the most well-known leaders of the time, but she also had no problem working one-on-one with some of the most downtrodden or disenfranchised of her community. Ida often visited young prison inmates, who told her how their inability to find work had led to their troubles. Chicago didn’t offer the men as much opportunity as they hoped. It seemed to Ida that Black men were only welcomed by saloons, pool rooms, and gambling houses, confining them to environments that by their nature attracted undue attention from law enforcement. They were essentially entrapped right from the start. Ida felt in her heart that whatever outsized criminal element existed within Chicago’s Black neighborhoods was exacerbated by the failure to provide alternative activities to attract young men’s attention.
She and Ferdinand opened the Negro Fellowship League in 1910 at 2830 South State Street, where it operated for almost three years, before it moved to the location where it would remain until its close in 1920. My great-grandfather Ferdinand was assistant state’s attorney for Cook County during the first two years the League was open. Many of his clients were exactly the kinds of otherwise promising young Black men who needed just one step up to improve their long-term prospects. They needed a temporary place to sleep, a library to help hone their work skills, and employment services to aid their search for honest work.
A prominent Black lawyer and civil rights activist in post-Reconstruction era Chicago, Ferdinand L. Barnett married Ida B. Wells in 1895 before becoming Illinois’ first Black assistant state’s attorney in 1896.
Institutions designed to help the most vulnerable people in society were nothing new, but building one that granted access to young Black people was far from the norm. Family, friends, and informal associations have held disenfranchised populations up through the ages, but the terrible history of the African American experience places many of us at a remarkable disadvantage. Generations of enslavement, disenfranchisement, destruction and theft of our property, and government policies that created barriers to the accumulation of Black wealth are challenges not equally shared across racial lines.
My great-grandparents Ida and Ferdinand were determined to work on behalf of those who defended themselves in the face of terror. Through their Negro Fellowship League, they helped individuals such as Steve Green, a young man from Arkansas who had previously worked on a plantation. He and the owner got into a fight that ended when Green accidentally killed the man in self-defense. Knowing that he would be lynched by a mob if he remained in Arkansas, he escaped to Chicago.
Unfortunately, he was captured by local police who agreed with Arkansas authorities to return him to the state. Ida heard about this situation and knew Green would get no fair trial in Arkansas. She, along with attorneys including Ferdinand, negotiated with Illinois authorities to make a deal to prosecute him in Illinois if he did not go across the state line. While on the train heading South to a certain death, Green was taken into custody by a sheriff at the southern tip of Illinois right before crossing into Missouri.
Once back in Chicago, Green was hidden and ultimately escaped to Canada with the assistance of Ida. He returned a few years later, found a night job, and slept during the day at the League until he was able to get on his feet.
Women Belong in the House and Senate and Every Hall of Power
Ida knew that not only did laws need to change, but women needed to get involved in politics. Her husband was an assistant state’s attorney. They were both politically and socially engaged in changing things from the inside out. She, and so many who fought for the rights of Black people and all women, paved the way for a succession of trailblazers. In 1917, Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman in either chamber of Congress. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to serve in Congress, and she even ran for president in 1972. That same year, Barbara Jordan was the first Black woman to be elected to Congress from the South. The legacy of Ida B. Wells—when it comes to challenging laws, providing support for the most vulnerable citizens, and fighting for political engagement—has lived on for ninety years since her death in 1931.
In 1993, the Illinois representative Carol Moseley Braun became the first Black female senator in the country’s history.
Nancy Pelosi.
As of this writing, almost a quarter of the 116th House of Representatives (101 out of 435) and Senate (26 out of 100) are women. In addition, Nancy Pelosi is the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House. Hundreds of women are mayors of cities and nine women serve as governors. This follows Hillary Clinton, who served as a U.S. senator from New York, and who broke barriers in 2016 by becoming the first woman to be the nominee for a major party in a presidential race.
In 2017, Kamala Harris was the first Black woman to be elected senator for the state of California. She was the second Black woman to run for a major party’s presidential nomination, and in August 2020, the year of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, Kamala Harris made history as the first woman of color to be nominated for vice president. The ticket of Joe Biden/Kamala Harris was made possible by the thousands of women who fought for decades for racial and gender equality.
The Brooklyn-born Shirley Chisholm was the first African American woman ever elected to the United States House of Representatives. In 1972, she became the first African American candidate for a major party’s presidential nomination, and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2015.
Carol Moseley Braun.
Hillary Clinton.
Barbara Jordan.
Passing the Torch
Ida B. Wells lived life on her own terms, fighting against an oppressive society that tried its best to keep Black people in a second-class-citizen status. She did not have the right to vote for almost her entire life. She had limited resources compared to the power structure she was fighting. She was a Black woman operating in a white male-dominated society. So, she used the only tool she had—her voice. She spoke up against lynching. She spoke up against segregation. She spoke up against a government that was willing to kill its own soldiers. She organized and marched for the right of women to vote and to have roles in the leadership of the country.
Wherever Ida saw a need to fight for equality, she was on it. In doing this, she endured criticism, financial hardship, terrorism, threats, and enormous loss. Yet she kept on speaking out in order to help the country be all it promised to be. She had a remarkable level of internal fortitude, the courage to speak the truth, and the boldness to challenge systems and social norms that were unjust and limiting. A woman who was born into slavery went on to take on an entire country—and more. She spoke across the United Kingdom in addition to the United States. She spoke with presidents, governors, mayors, other civil rights activists, women organizers, as well as those who had no home or places to eat. She was uncompromising in her belief of what was right and wrong and believed in herself enough to speak up for what was right.
United States Senator and 2020 vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Despite all her achievements, my great-grandmother did have her low moments. She wrote about how in 1921 while recovering from a health challenge she thought, “All at once the realization came to me that I had nothing to show for all those years of toil and labor.” She was human and experienced turmoil and self-doubt at times. But she summed up her overall attitude when she wrote “I could no longer hold my peace, and I feel, yes, I am sure, that if it had to be done over again (provided no one else was the loser save myself) I would do and say the very same again.”
We know today that she left an indelible legacy and belief that all people should be treated equally. And the next generation of leaders has her example to follow. The next generation of young women can look at Ida B. Wells and realize that they, too, are capable of tremendous actions. If she could believe in herself enough to not be limited by the circumstances of her birth, so can they. If she could fight for liberty and justice, so can they. Because they, too, are important parts of this world. And their voices matter.