[In the following essay, Boyd reviews two books and one film which have helped to revive interest in Wells-Barnett's life and works.]

One hundred and one years ago, the Worlds Congress of Representative Women, a black women's organization, was founded in order for black Americans to levy some representation at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As a response to another blatant act of racial discrimination, F. L. Barnett, J. Garland Penn, Frederick Douglass, and Ida B. Wells wrote and published The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition. The introduction was translated into French and German, and the pamphlet was distributed to patrons of the exposition.

“Lynch Law” by Ida B. Wells was included in the pamphlet, an essay that explains the racist psychology of American society, as it details the horrors and provides the statistics that amplify this national shame. In her condemnation of the media's complicity with the perpetrators, she asserts:

The men who make these charges encourage or lead the mobs which do the lynching. They belong to the race which holds Negro life cheap, which owns the telegraph wires, newspapers, and all other communication with the outside world. They write the reports which justify lynching by painting the Negro as black as possible, and those reports are accepted by the press associations without question or investigation. The mob spirit has increased with alarming frequency and violence. Over a thousand black men, women and children have been thus sacrificed in the past ten years.

(Selected Works of Ida B. Wells, p. 75)

Shortly thereafter, a derivative women's club in Boston began publishing the journal, Women's Era, inscribed by the speech Frances Harper delivered at the Congress in Chicago. It became the voice of black feminism in the U.S. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, known internationally for her fight against lynching, significantly influenced the ideological direction of the black women's organizations, which embraced the anti-lynching crusade as a major issue in their political agenda.

Almost a century later, a full range of literature has emerged that resurrects and contextualizes the literary voices of Afroamerican women, which for too long were either ignored, obscured or dismissed. Undoubtedly, the presence of women scholars and writers has altered the political dynamics and the intellectual axiom of the current intellectual era. Notwithstanding, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who endured political and gender discrimination from within and from outside the Afroamerican community, has, to a large extent, been vindicated in the advent of black women's studies. The reprinting of her essays, Selected Works, and her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, revives her voice; while a new biography by Mildred Thompson and a documentary illuminate a contemporary need for her ideological integrity and tenacity during these contemporary times.

For the most part, the three recent works, Ida B. Wells: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, Selected Works of Ida B. Wells, and the film, A Passion for Justice, explain how legislated discrimination and racial terrorism beset the Reconstruction Era. And, each of these works considers Wells' response to these historical circumstances, while individually each work serves a particular purpose appropriate to the medium or the purposes of the text.

The film, Passion for Justice, provides a general outline of Wells era, and integrates her voice and other contemporary authorities into the telling of her story. The biography by Mildred Thompson is more detailed and intricate and therefore provides a more complex presentation of the historical dynamics that affected Wells. Trudier Harris, on the other hand, does not critique Wells' life in her introductory essay to Selected Works, but presents a description of related historical events and biographical issues.

Thompson's text includes essays and even a short story by Wells, which adds the unedited perspective of her subject. This presentation provides autobiography, literature, biography and historical context. If it were not for the high cost of this hardcover, it would be an excellent textbook. Selected Works by Ida B. Wells contains original writings by Wells, but the selections do not extend beyond 1900 because the book is a part of The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers Series.

Harris' overview of Wells' life touches on the nuances of Wells' political conflicts with prominent “race” leaders of the times. Thompson's book, and Wells' autobiography Crusade for Justice, edited by her daughter, Alfreda Duster, reveal why Wells is so highly regarded by many black Americans, though her essays remained out of print for decades. Thompson's work interrelates Wells' autobiographical voice with historical incidents and political controversy, and thereby demonstrates the impact of Wells' radicalism.

In any discussion of Wells' life, two historical incidents are relayed as essential to Ida B. Wells' destiny as an activist leader. One incident involved a direct confrontation with a Jim Crow Law, and the other involved three of her friends, who were lynched.

In May 1884, Wells was asked to leave her seat in the ladies car and to go to the smoking car because she was black. Wells refused. The conductor, with the help of other white men, forcibly removed her. Shortly thereafter she sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Rail Road Company. Though she won the decision in the lower court, the Court of Appeals overturned the ruling. Yet her suit against Jim Crow propelled her into national attention, and identified her as a dissident. She later wrote about the case; launching her journalism career. Regarded only as a racial being, this incident demonstrated how race and sex converge as class in the experience of black women in the United States.

Wells exerted a powerful political influence during her lifetime. Her articles in The Free Speech provided ideological clarity and served as an organizing tool locally, nationally and internationally. After the brutal lynching of three of her friends on March 9, 1892 in Memphis, Tennessee, she instigated a mass exodus of blacks from that city. Her open attack on white patriarchal chivalry, and the suggestion that white women might desire black male companionship, so offended the white citizenry that the press office was destroyed, and the white newspaper of Memphis called for her lynching. Fortunately, she was attending an African Methodist Episcopal Church convention in Philadelphia and was safe as a guest in the home of Frances E. W. Harper.

Hence, the fight against lynching became her particular crusade. This subject dominated her writing and her lectures, as she documented and protested this terrorism. She exposed lynching as a tactic to repress the political, social and economic ambitions of Afroamericans and forthrightly denounced the lame confabulations of “white” law and order, a subject that warrants contemporary study during the current hysterical response to urban crime.

THE DOCUMENTARY FILM

Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice, a William Greaves Production, has received many film awards including, First Place Documentary award from the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, the Silver Apple at the National Educational Film and Video Festival, and the Silver Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival among others. The sixty minute film opens with a discussion about the Civil War and the birth of Ida B. Wells into slavery in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

Historical photographs, drawings and authentic documents outline the visual imagery as the narrator informs the audience of dates, places, and events that move the history forward. The film traces the personal difficulties, the political issues and the key historical events which challenged Ida B. Wells, and how her determination and activism, in turn, affected the politics and history of many Afroamericans.

But more impressively, when Toni Morrison reads from Wells' autobiography, Crusade for Justice, the film experience becomes more personal. Morrison conveys the vitality of Wells' voice, as we learn about Wells' struggle to raise her siblings after the death of her parents. Wells' devotion to family extends to her marriage to F. L. Barnett when she retreats from active political life to devote most of her time to raising their children. But this decision should not be viewed in simple, conservative terms. Wells' children often accompanied her to political events and activities, and when the children reached maturity she returned to her activist lifestyle. These excerpts from Wells' autobiography, articles and essays also function as transitions from setting to subject. Moreover, Morrison reading Wells suggests a literary legacy in black women's history.

A series of interviews with prominent historians including Paula Giddings, John De Mott, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and David Tucker constructs the historical context of the Wells' legacy. What is especially effective about these historical discussions is that the details of events and instances are enhanced by critical analysis and feminist insight. These interviews explain the political relationship between Jim Crow legislation and lynching and how Ida B. Wells was personally affected and politically motivated by these dynamics. Their discussions also consider the repressive sexism in the black community and its ambivalence about female leadership.

The film also includes a brief interview with Troy Duster, a professor of sociology and the grandson of Ida B. Wells. Dr. Duster's interview includes personal reflections that reiterate his grandmother's strong character and radical convictions. Through him, family oral history enhances the film's narrative.

If there is one thematic incongruity in the film, it is the narration. Since the man behind the voice, Al Freeman, Jr., is never shown in the film, the narration avails the film like an omniscient eye. Consequently, even though this is a film about a black woman, the subliminal affect of the male voice, which gives the first and the last words on the subject, suggests that the larger intelligence and the broader view of history is male. Possibly, the interviews could have been extended to include those scripted historical accounts supplied by the narrator. Additionally, the film could have opened and closed in Ida B. Wells' words.

However, the film does indicate the key points of ideological conflict and provides a firm historical outline and critical details of Wells' life. The film also does an excellent job of conveying the complexity of her life by relaying the various conflicts that affected her, including radicalism versus conservatism, race issues versus women's rights, and private versus public life.

The film takes a more personal approach to Wells' relationships with prominent activist of the times, such as Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, demonstrating how these more amiable associates were politically aligned with Wells' outspoken radicalism. Throughout, the film maintains Wells' radical perspective as its primary focus.

The film complements the writings by Wells found in the reader, edited by Harris, while more detailed research and documentation is constructed in the biography by Thompson. Thompson, however, concludes her historical study of Wells with a comment about the film:

National Educational Television has just aired an entire program devoted to her accomplishments. She would have been excited and pleased at this acknowledgment of her place in history.

(p. 130)

THE BIOGRAPHY

Mildred Thompson's book is a part of the comprehensive sixteen volume series, Black Women in United States History, edited by Darlene Clark Hine. Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930 contains a valuable biographical analysis of Wells' life and times. The creative structure of biography is the strongest dimension of the work, as the biography interacts with Wells' personality and perception through excerpts in Wells' voice. Thompson's detailed historical account should be considered a seminal text. It reconstructs the broader framework of Afroamerican history with autobiographical comments from particular personalities of the times, juxtaposing various perspectives on particular events and analyzing Wells' philosophical and political position therein. Thompson explains:

This study of Ida Wells-Barnett reveals the complexity of a woman who was not merely engaged in almost constant civil rights activity, but who initiated many of these reform efforts. It points out some of the factors that motivated her daring and steadfastness in a climate of blatant racial prejudice, national indifference, and changing black ideologies. It also shows the relationship between her declining influence and the increasing significance of organizational powers in the black community. Ida Wells-Barnett was a militant civil rights activist during most of her adult life, but in her mature years when she was out of step with her time, attuned to a drummer whom she had heard earlier, a drummer whose beat would not be heard again for another generation.

(p. 9)

Though the biography engages the traditional scholarly approach, (the text was initially written as her doctoral dissertation), the attempt to “objectify” Wells' life sometimes misconstrues Wells' radicalism. Thompson often employs the language of Wells' political critics, referring to her as an “extremist.” This subjective term is derived from the prevailing conservatism that alienated Wells and dominated black politics at the turn of the century. Hence, Thompson concludes that Wells was out of step with her times, while others might conclude that Wells was on time because she extended the progressive vision of the nineteenth century radicals despite the political regression of her peers.

An analysis of Wells' political perspective is more squarely secured in Bettina Aptheker's introduction for the monograph, “Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views” by Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells:

Wells determined to reveal the exact details of all lynching which came to her attention. She believed that the concrete circumstances surrounding each case would show that the overwhelming majority of lynch victims were killed for economic and political reasons. She believed further, that if the political causes of lynching could be demonstrated, political opposition could be generated. This, coupled with a moral appeal to Christian ethics, might succeed in building an effective movement to halt the atrocities.

(p. 15-16)

Aptheker's discussion on Wells is more focused on political thought and considers that thought relative to historical reality (approximately 10,000 lynchings by the 1900) rather than relative to political trends. Wells never apologized for her frankness or retreated from a position that invigorated free thought. She did not compromise her principles whether it be the racist power brokers of government or the “colored accommodationists” fraternizing with the “fat cats” of big business. What becomes even more apparent as one reads about the emerging black politics during the post-reconstruction era, is that true radicalism runs against the grain of orthodoxy.

Wells was never misled by organizations beleaguered by opportunists or dilettantes. Wells' role was to identify the true intentions and motivations of oppressive forces and to dispel the projections of a corrupt democracy that believed in and practiced white male supremacy. At the same time, the principles she applied to the ruling culture were not altered to excuse the foibles of black leadership.

Wells' work not only identified the horrors of lynching and the evil and hatred of the blood-thirsty crowds, but it also carried this fight to her own community. She challenged the leadership of Booker T. Washington because she believed his political strategy was complicit with covert racists. Thompson discusses this conflict, and the inclusion of Wells' essay, “Booker T. Washington and His Critics,” provides the reader with the primary text. Wells squarely addresses Washington's theoretical contradictions and denotes the reactionary ramifications of his apologist appeal to racist subterfuge:

Does some one ask a solution of the lynching evil? Mr. Washington says in substance: Give me money to educate the Negro and when he is taught how to work, he will not commit the crime for which lynching is done. Mr. Washington knows when he says this that lynching is not invoked to punish crime but color, and not even industrial education will change that.

Again he sets up the dogma that when the race becomes taxpayers, produces of something the white man wants, landowners, business, etc., the Anglo-Saxon will forget all about color and respect that race's manhood. One of the leading southern papers said editorially, in discussing the separate street car law which was to go into effect last winter in Memphis, Tennessee, that it was not the servant or working class of Negroes, who know their places, with whom the white people objected to riding, but the educated, property-owning Negro who thought himself the white man's equal.

(p. 258-59)

Wells' political integrity and strong sense of social urgency was compatible with her earliest associates, but during the more conservative era of the early twentieth century, this radicalism distanced her from the new leadership on the left. Other biographers mention this paradox that rendered Wells to a marginal position in national politics during the latter years of her political life, and Thompson provides the details of her conflict with W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP.

Because Wells was outspoken and questioned Du Bois' organizational appeal for white liberal leadership, she was exempted by Du Bois from the Committee of Forty, the founding membership of the NAACP. When she took exception to this, Du bois explained that her perspective would be represented by another member of the committee. Wells consulted Charles Edward Russell, one of the principal organizers of the National Negro Conference, and he overruled Du Bois and appointed her to the committee.

But Thompson explains: “Being named to the Committee by Russell did not assuage the hostility that Wells-Barnett continued to feel toward Du Bois. He, in turn, ignored her activity entirely in the pages of the Crisis, the official organ of the NAACP.” Thompson extends the discussion in Wells' own words, “Both Mr. Villard and Prof. Du Bois gave me the impression that they rather feared some interference [sic] from me in the Chicago arrangements. They also gave me very clearly to understand at the executive meeting there in New York that I was not expected to do anything save to be a member” (p. 83).

Wells encountered similar difficulties with some of the leadership in the black women's movement. Hallie Q. Brown, who was instrumental in organizing the World Congress of Representative Women at the 1893 Chicago Centennial, viewed Wells as an “extremist” as well. And like Du Bois, Brown felt that Wells' political strategy was too confrontational. But the issue of lynching was the issue that distinguished the Women's Club Movement, and it was Wells' valiant fight against ghastly assaults on black women, men, and children that challenged the consciousness of the American public and that gave black women a clearer vision in establishing their organizational character.

Throughout her activist years Wells was criticized for “speaking out like a man.” To some extent Wells was sensitive to this opinion. However, she refused to temper her style to the narrow perceptions of a growing conservative climate. Her class consciousness exceeded the more bourgeois motivations of the women's organizations and the Chicago black elite. Indeed, her work with the Ida B. Wells Club and the Negro Fellowship League focused on the needs of poor blacks and engaged practical problems like employment, food, housing and education.

The essays by Ida B. Wells that follow the biography carry the breath and fire of her radicalism. Unlike the more pretentious Victorian prose that resulted from the constraints of conventional intellectualism, Wells' direct and impassioned language is appropriate to her tasks and her themes. The selections about lynching demonstrate how her detailed and extensive research expose the collusion between klansmen and “upstanding citizens.”

What hindsight also gives our contemporary reading of Wells is that her writing and her political thought was linked to the nineteenth century rhetorical style of black women radicals like Frances Harper. In fact, Harper named her main character after Ida B. Wells' pen name, Iola, in Harper's 1892 feminist novel, Iola Leroy: Or Shadows Uplifted. Likewise, Harper's essays and speeches focus on political issues, especially abolition, woman's rights and lynching.

Their urgency for justice produced literature that was not content for intellectual fodder, but rather, insight for political activism. The candid language and direct appeal were drafted to instigate change and to reach a mass audience. For example, in “Duty to Dependent Races,” Harper asserts:

A government which has power to tax its citizens from wrong and outrage and does not is vicious. A government which would do it and cannot is weak; and where human life is insecure through either weakness or viciousness in the administration of law, there must be a lack of justice, and where this is wanting nothing can make up the deficiency.

(p. 91)

Likewise, in “Lynching Our National Crime,” Wells charges:

Why is the mob murder permitted by a Christian nation? What is the cause of this awful slaughter? This question is answered almost daily—always the same shameless falsehood that “Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood.” Standing before a Chautauqua assemblage, John Temple Graves, at once champion of lynching and apologist for lynchers, said: “The mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race.” This is the never varying answer of lynchers and their apologists. All know that it is untrue. The cowardly lyncher revels in murder, then seeks to shield himself from public execration by claiming devotion to woman. But truth is mighty and the lynching record discloses the hypocrisy of the lyncher as well as his crime.

(p. 262)

For additional reading, The Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett includes all of the chapters from the pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (1892) (including prefaces in French and German); A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892-1893-1894; and Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (1900). For the most part, Selected Works is a reprinting of Well's essays and the text serves this essential need, but again, an expensive price tag of $32.50 will send the mass reading audience to the library for a copy.

The Black Women in the United States Series is a comprehensive attempt to historicize black women lives, but the Schomburg Series is a literary collection. By aligning Wells with Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, Harriett Jacobs, Ann Plato and Phillis Wheatley, among others, Wells' historical and political insight can thereby be valued as cultural expression and appreciated as literature. Reading Ida B. Wells supplies an ideological context for our contemporary setting because she reveals how race hatred is linked to historical guilt and how oppressive beliefs and deeds are enacted to deny responsibility. Her analysis of lynching moves us to an understanding of the critical issue of miscegenation, and why patriarchal rule depends on the control of women.

Furthermore, her perspective and system of analysis can and should be extended to contemporary social issues that confound the public, i.e. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Thomas' collusion with the Republican administration should be linked to Booker T. Washington's complicity with the ruling aristocracy, while Anita Hill's treatment by the Senate committee during the judicial hearings should be considered historically consistent with the public disdain for black women who speak up for themselves and for the conscience of the nation.

The utterances of leading white men show that with them it is not the crime but the class. Bishop Fitzgerald has become apologist for lynchers of the rapists of white women only. Governor Tillman, of South Carolina, in the month of June, standing under the tree in Barnwell, S.C., on which eight Afro-Americans were hung last year, declared that he would [“]lead a mob to lynch a negro who raped a white woman.” So say the pulpits, officials and newspapers of the South. But when the victim is a colored woman it is different.

(Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors,” 1892)

In the study of Wells' life and words, we find insight into the complex and peculiar predicament of the black female experience.

Works Cited

Aptheker, Bettina. ed. “Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views, by Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells.” The American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977.

Duster, Alfreda M. ed. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Harper, Frances E. W. “Duty to Dependent Races,” National Council of Women in the United States, Philadelphia, 1891, (pp. 86-91).

Trudier Harris, ed. Selected Works of Ida B. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Mildred I. Thompson. Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1990.

Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice, a film, written and directed by William Greaves Productions: New York: William Greaves Productions, Inc.