[In the following review, Foreman gives a favorable assessment of a published edition of Wells-Barnett's diary.]

To know Ida B. Wells, more than a hundred years after she launched her journalistic career, is to love her. We admire the courageous newspaper editor who in the same year her friend Thomas Moss was lynched in Memphis published an editorial that declared: “Nobody in this section believes that old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” Those of us who know of Ida B. Wells tend to think of a woman of almost mythic proportions, an unflinching anti-lynching activist who challenged new railway segregation laws in the 1880s and won (though the case was soon overturned), who in 1892, the year she began her crusade and published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, almost single-handedly turned back the flow of lynchings in the U.S. When we think of Wells we imagine a founding member of the NAACP who also insisted that every African American family should own a Winchester, a fiery woman who vowed that in the face of white violence she would “sell her life dearly.”

Miriam DeCosta-Willis's The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells: An Intimate Portrait of the Activist as a Young Woman sets out to introduce the private side of Ida B. Wells to those already acquainted with her public persona. Flanked by a foreword and afterward by prominent scholars of African American women's literature and history, Mary Helen Washington and Dorothy Sterling, DeCosta-Willis presents three separate sets of Wells's journals: the 1885-87 diary written when the to-be activist, only twenty-four, launched her career as the prominent journalist “Iola”; a short and humorous 1893 travel log drafted as the activist set out to England to rally public support and direct international pressure against lynching; and a 1930 diary, composed from the vantage point of an elder Wells, just a year before her death. DeCosta-Willis also includes selected articles penned by “Iola,” Wells's nom de plume, that coincide with the first and longest diary. Like the journals themselves, the articles reveal Wells's concerns with “race uplift,” a cause that other published Black women diarists of that era, Charlotte Forten and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, shared with race women of that era, Frances E. W. Harper and Mrs. Gertrude Mossell, for example.

The collaborative trilogy, DeCosta-Willis/Washington/Sterling, could not be more appropriate to this project. The latter two have edited landmark collections of Black women's writing, and DeCosta-Willis builds on their models of structuring an interplay between primary texts and critical commentary. She presents Wells's words and also provides a backdrop that breathes into Wells's writing new life for 20th-century readers. DeCosta-Willis paints the landscape of Wells's social and political interactions with both broad strokes and meticulous detail. In the italicized commentary that precedes most entries, DeCosta-Willis identifies the players in Wells's life and provides a context for them. DeCosta-Willis suggests that she takes “an active role in interpreting the text and even in creating its meaning.” Her annotations are illuminating rather than intrusive; even at the moments that she “makes meaning” she leaves room for her readers to take a different interpretative path.

Wells's writing, as a single and almost singularly accomplished young Black woman without family in the 1890s, often reveals the gender tensions between the oft-noted and problematized public and private spheres. Wells ruminates—in an abbreviated fashion—on her sometimes conflicting desire for professional success and domestic stability. Mary Helen Washington contends that, “if there is a single recurring theme in Wells's diary, it is that of a highly gifted and talented woman who is in constant conflict with conventional female roles, which undermine and restrict a woman's desire for work and achievement” in certain spheres. Indeed, in the diaries Wells stresses her ambitions rather than her dialy responsibilities; though she spends her days in the classroom, she sees journalism as her trade, and rarely spends time or energy reflecting on her responsibilities as a teacher. In the life presented to us in the diaries, then, Wells travels in a world of men. In 1888, for example, T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the powerful New York Age, wrote:

I met “Iola” at the conference. She has become famous as one of the few women who handles [sic] a goose quill with diamond point as handily as any of us men in newspaper work. Her name is Ida B. Wells. She is smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug.

As an ambitious budding journalist who dismissed the humbug of minding her steel-trap tongue, Wells often found herself, or perhaps placed herself, as one of the “few women” among “us men.” Almost all of her correspondence is with men; she reads the writings of men. Moreover, she often dates men in whom she has little romantic interest because she doesn't want to lose the intellectual camaraderie they bring, and knows that there is little room for such interaction outside of romantic paradigms set up by late-nineteenth-century gender conventions.

While DeCosta-Willis emphasizes that the diaries reveal in great detail “the courtship rituals that prevailed among the Black middle class” in that period, more interesting to me is Wells's description of the reading habits of a growing Black middle class. Wells describes a reading network that spanned geographical area and displayed the overlapping arenas of secular and religious Black writings. She reveals the social and discursive interconnections of the Black press on multiple levels: Newspaper editors publish in, and freely reprint articles from, each other's papers. Wells exchanges personal letters with many of these editors: T. Thomas Fortune, William Simmons, and J. A. Arneaux, among others. Many of Wells's correspondents enclose with their missives papers from the Black press in Arkansas, Boston, New York, Kansas, from the A.M.E. Church Review and the Living Way. Wells and her cohorts go to each other's homes specifically to borrow or discuss recent issues of Black periodicals. Reading and the Black press became central to the social activity of this class. As Wells describes it, popular literary clubs—their events themselves reported in the Black press—“consisted of recitations, essays, and debates interspersed with music. The exercises always closed with the reading of the Evening Star—a spicy journal prepared and read by the editor.” Wells's diary not only affirms the existence of a large Black readership but reveals a powerful and pervasive African American reading culture.

We learn much about Wells's social interactions, but the diaries themselves rarely yield the private Wells; nor does Wells's style assume the kind of correlation between Wells the writer and Wells the reflector that readers often expect from private and thus ostensibly unguarded writing. We do learn about what she perceives to be her faults: her penchant for spending money she doesn't have, her quick and sharp tongue. But she logs these rather than explores them. She seems to use her diary as a memo where she assiduously notes her expenditures and debts, the photos or “cabinets” she's exchanged with her correspondents, and how many letters she has written or received that day. Despite their more public nature, one suspects that the portrait of a more psychologically complex Wells might be found in a collection of her letters to her many friends, suitors, and professional contacts, the contents of which she sometimes alludes to in her diary.

The scope of Miriam DeCosta-Willis's primary research and the skill of her editorial hand greatly overshadow the few shortcomings of The Memphis Diaries. If any one thing could be strengthened it would be the editor's analysis of the “Victorian script” Wells ostensibly followed in her personal life as opposed to her “male-related career.” This is the only theme DeCosta-Willis follows throughout the diary without its benefitting from her commentary. Throughout the text, “Victorian social customs” remain undifferentiated and uninterrogated in relation to class, race, and decade. But this one cavil does not diminish the signal accomplishment of DeCosta-Willis's contribution. With care and consummate skill, she has made an important contribution to Wells scholarship and to the field of early Black women's writing.