VII. Monumental
Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.
—Ida B. Wells
Ida’s legacy has been preserved and promoted by our family for decades. The multigenerational family efforts to give Ida her due started with my grandmother Alfreda Barnett Duster, who was the youngest of Ida’s four children. She edited her mother’s autobiography and got it published in 1970. She also donated her papers to her alma mater, the University of Chicago, and her mother’s desk to the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago.
My father and his siblings started the Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation in 1988 in order to protect, preserve, and promote their grandmother’s legacy. Through the years, they’ve consulted with authors, filmmakers, museum curators, playwrights, and others who created work about our ancestor.
I became involved in the Foundation in the mid-2000s. We implemented college scholarships at Ida’s alma mater, Rust College, to help the next generation of leaders get their educations.
Ida died at the height of the Depression. For the first several decades after she died, the only tribute to her in Chicago was the Ida B. Wells Homes—the public housing community that opened in 1941. The expansive buildings were located close to the home she lived in for more than ten years.
Rust College.
Alfreda Duster.
The Ida B. Wells Homes, 1942, Chicago, Illinois, and dedication poster.
A renewed interest in Ida led to the 1974 national landmark status of her house on 3624 S Dr. Martin Luther King Drive. Two decades later, in 1995, the house was given Chicago landmark status.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett House on S Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, Chicago, Illinois.
Over twenty-five years will have passed by the time a monument to Ida B. Wells is installed—the first to a Black woman in Chicago. That was after a major downtown street was renamed in 2019 to Ida B. Wells Drive, an honorary street near her house was named Ida B. Wells Way, and a historical marker was placed on that same corner.
These memorials and monuments aren’t confined to Chicago. In 1987, a marker was installed on Beale Street in Memphis near the location where her printing press once existed. The more people learn about my great-grandmother, the more in awe they are. And people want to honor her in ways my family never imagined.
Ida B. Wells Drive, Chicago, Illinois.
Fitness groups like GirlTrek have created historical walks in Ida’s honor. There are social clubs and schools named after her. There was a twenty-five-cent U.S. Heritage stamp created with her image in 1990. A post office in her hometown of Holly Springs was named after her. More recently, a historical marker was placed in the town square.
There are numerous other awards given in Ida’s name, as well as tributes such as the 2019 induction into the Mississippi Writers Trail. A room in the Russell Senate Building and a street in Brooklyn were conamed after Ida. And a Baltimore restaurant, Ida B’s Table, opened in 2017 and pays homage to her.
Even Google created a doodle for her in 2015, in honor of her 153rd birthday.
Today, more people are carrying on Ida’s work through writing, too. The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting was cofounded in 2016 by journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times Magazine, Topher Sanders of ProPublica, Ron Nixon of the Associated Press, and Corey Johnson of the Tampa Bay Times. The organization provides training and mentorship for journalists of color to compete for positions as investigative journalists who will walk in the footsteps of Ida B. Wells.
Ida B. Wells historical marker, Chicago, Illinois, installed on July 20, 2019, on the corner where the sign for the Ida B. Wells Homes once stood.
The Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum, created in the 1990s, is located at 200 North Randolph Street in Holly Springs, and so fittingly in the house that was once owned by Spires Boling—the man who enslaved Ida’s parents, James and Elizabeth Wells.
My great-grandmother’s life was not easy. She endured death threats. She lost friends to lynching. She lost parents through disease. She lost her teaching job when she spoke up against inequality. She lost her printing press when she spoke up against injustice. But through it all, she stayed focused on truth-telling. She believed that her voice was important and her story needed to be heard.
Four generations of my family have worked for more than eight decades to help people remember and honor our foremother, the matriarch of our family—Ida B. Wells-Barnett. We have written about her. Spoken about her. Created books and plays about her. We have worked with politicians and artists. Filmmakers and writers. Community organizations and students. Schools and municipalities. All to make sure that Ida’s story is known.
And today, her bravery, tenacity, and willingness to sacrifice it all is a source of inspiration for current and future generations. She is a giant in our country’s history. Little girls today can grow up knowing that they have the right to vote. They have the ability to run for political office. They can reach as high and as far as their talents will take them.
Ida B. Wells did all she could with what she had to work with. She was a teacher, journalist, civil rights activist, suffragist, social worker, wife, and mother. She did not let anyone limit her thinking or her dreams. She believed in herself. She believed in the truth. And she left the world better than she found it.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum, Holly Springs, Mississippi.
Today, boys and girls across the globe can learn about her strength and focus and believe that they, too, can make a difference in this world. By learning about how someone could be born into slavery, yet go on to have a seismic effect on so many people, they, too, can dare to dream big.
Ida B. Wells’s desk.