SOURCE: Collins, Patricia Hill. Introduction to On Lynchings, by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, pp. 9-24. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2002.

[In the following essay, an introduction to three of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's writings on lynching, Collins provides an overview of Wells-Barnett's activism and career and situates Wells-Barnett inside a feminist tradition.]

The resurgence of scholarly interest in the long and productive career of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is long overdue. This reprint of Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans, three of Wells-Barnett's important works on lynching, makes important contributions to our understanding of Wells-Barnett's place within African American social and political thought. Within African American historiography, Wells-Barnett has long been remembered primarily as an activist, an irritant to W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, and similar African American intellectuals. Wells-Barnett was an activist, and an extremely effective one for her time. She participated in an impressive constellation of antiracist and women's rights initiatives. Yet Wells-Barnett also used her journalistic career, her speeches, her leadership in political organizations, and her position papers and pamphlets to advance innovative analyses concerning the connections between African American disempowerment and the need for social justice. Unlike contemporary distinctions made between intellectual production and activism, Wells-Barnett managed to do both. Her analysis of the emergence and persistence of lynching simultaneously shaped and was influenced by her more than twenty-year crusade against lynching. As a result of this recursive and synergistic relationship between her ideas and activism, her analyses of race, class, and gender, crystallized in her work on lynching, reflect a breadth and complexity that we have only come to appreciate in the context of a contemporary Black feminism that brought attention to her accomplishments.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was neither fully accepted nor recognized during her lifetime, and until recently, was generally neglected within historiography of African American social and political thought. Within African American circles, Wells-Barnett's predilection for positions that were often unpopular and her outspokenness fostered an image of her as being unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable. For Wells-Barnett, those who failed to take a stand against lynching, or who remained silent and looked away, were as culpable as those committing the acts.

In sustaining this recursive relationship between her intellectual and political work, Wells-Barnett embraced what were then seen as two contradictory strands within Black political thought. Unlike the much-touted debates between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois on the desirability of separation versus integration as the solution to the social problems confronting African Americans, Wells-Barnett took a more pragmatic approach. She aimed to address the entrenched poverty, political disenfranchisement, substandard housing, underfunded schools, poor health, and other social problems that confronted a people who were, like Wells-Barnett, one generation away from slavery. Recognizing that major social problems required broad-based social action, Wells-Barnett participated in a broad array of social-action strategies that in turn affected her analyses of social problems and their possible solutions.

On the one hand, in Memphis and in Chicago, Wells-Barnett participated in activities designed to develop local African American communities.¹ Almost four decades in Chicago convinced her of the need for community-development strategies that would prepare African Americans for full participation in mainstream society. For example, in 1910 Wells-Barnett catalyzed the founding of the Negro Fellowship League, an African American initiative that eventually led to a Black settlement house in Chicago providing lodging, recreation facilities, a reading room, and employment for Black migrant men. The spark for the Fellowship League lay in Wells-Barnett expressing her frustration to her Sunday school class about a particularly egregious 1908 riot in Springfield, Illinois, where thousands of Blacks fled for their lives. Several young men asked what they could do, and three of them subsequently met with Wells-Barnett and founded the league.² Wells-Barnett was also instrumental in founding the Ida B. Wells Club that established the first Black orchestra and the first kindergarten for African American children in Chicago. As a founding member of the national Black Women's Club Movement that emerged in the 1890s to focus on the “racial uplift” of African American girls and boys, Wells-Barnett clearly supported the community development thrust that was the movement's initial focus. The middle-class Black women in the club movement were committed to a community development strategy based on the philosophy of “lift as we climb.” But Wells-Barnett refused to be confined by the politics of respectability advanced by its middle-class membership. Her community development politics were complicated. She opposed Booker T. Washington, and her alliances with Marcus Garvey (she once spoke at a Universal Negro Improvement Association meeting), placed her at odds with her peers. Wells-Barnett's participation in local and national community-development endeavors such as these illustrates her recognition that Black nationalist-inspired strategies for Black community development were essential.

At the same time, Ida Wells-Barnett refused to confine her activism to community-development strategies deemed appropriate for women. She traveled widely, lecturing White audiences about the crime of lynching. Wells-Barnett was so passionate about this cause that, during the early days of her antilynching campaign, she traveled with her nursing baby.³ For Wells-Barnett, participating in interracial political organizations was not always easy, because she did not mince words and thus stepped outside the boundaries established for African American women pursuing a politics of respectability. For example, claiming that African American women needed the vote just as much if not more so than White American women, Wells-Barnett organized the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first Black women's suffrage organization in Illinois. At the National Woman Suffrage Association March on Washington in 1913, to avoid offending White suffragists from the South, Wells-Barnett and her organization were told to march at the back of the parade in the “colored” section. Wells-Barnett appeared to agree, yet when the parade was in progress, slipped into the Illinois delegation and integrated the march. She also participated in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a major civil rights organization that was sparked by White liberal opposition to the 1908 riot in Springfield, Illinois. Three White liberals put out a call for a conference in New York City to discuss possible responses to the riot and the organization itself began as a coalition of White and Black Americans to work against the unfair treatment of African Americans.⁴

As one of two African American women at the founding meeting in 1909, Wells-Barnett delivered a talk titled “Lynching, Our National Crime” that distilled her experience of nearly two decades of activism. The African American leaders of the fledgling NAACP knew they would have to deal with Wells-Barnett. Yet the need to placate its White members pressured these same leaders to attempt to keep her in the subordinate place reserved for all but a few handpicked African American women. Given her tireless activism on lynching, its severity, and her virtually single-handed marshaling of international support for anti-lynching initiatives, Wells-Barnett expected to be included among the Founding Forty members of the NAACP. She was stunned to find out that her name had been omitted. After protests, her name was added, but this deliberate exclusion contributed to Wells-Barnett's growing recognition that she was being pushed to the margins of the historical record. “Wells-Barnett quickly realized that if she was going to establish her place in history, she had better chronicle her own life.”⁵

In response to this and other snubs by the political leadership of antiracist and/or women's movements, Wells-Barnett became the first Black woman political activist to write a full-length autobiography. Edited by her daughter and published posthumously,⁶ its title, Crusade for Justice, encapsulates why Wells-Barnett was able to maintain this synergistic relationship between sound intellectual analyses and sustained, principled activism. Working for social justice required both, and she did both. Moreover, her distinctive biography sheds light on how her unshakable commitment to achieving social justice for African Americans allowed her to confront a diverse array of colleagues from the Woman Suffrage Movement, to the NAACP, and beyond. Whereas many life experiences shaped her ideas and actions, three stand out, namely, the fact that both of her parents had been slaves, her experiences as a teacher and journalist in the South after emancipation, and firsthand knowledge of a lynching that she could not ignore.

Born into slavery on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida Wells-Barnett was the eldest of eight children of Jim Wells and Lizzie Warrenton. Her father, the son of a slave woman and her master, was trained as a carpenter. One of ten children, her mother had been separated from her family, auctioned off, and finally ended up working as a cook on the plantation where Jim Wells worked. Both knew firsthand the hardships and injustice of slavery. Her parents married under slavery and, after emancipation, married again and made a home in Holly Springs. Like many newly emancipated African Americans, they believed that education would improve their children's lives and was essential for the betterment of the “race.” They sent their children to Shaw University for freed Black students, Wells-Barnett's mother attending school with her children so that she too could learn to read and write. This early history gave Wells-Barnett two types of knowledge—the formal education that granted her literacy and the wisdom of knowing firsthand what it took for African Americans to become literate.

Ida Wells-Barnett's teenaged years and early adulthood in the South demonstrate that survival was a form of resistance for the African American women and men grappling with the aftermath of emancipation.⁷ When a yellow fever epidemic killed both of her parents and one of her siblings in 1878, sixteen-year-old Wells-Barnett took on the responsibility of caring for five siblings. She supported them by passing the county teacher's exam and taking a teaching job. A year later, with her two younger sisters in tow, Wells-Barnett moved to Memphis for a better-paid teaching position. There she became a member of a lyceum of public school teachers who, each week, read from the Evening Star. This weekly newspaper reached hundreds of African Americans and provided one of the few sources of communication countering the growing discourse of racism that rendered African Americans as bestial, criminal, and sexually wanton. Because Wells-Barnett found teaching restrictive and her fellow teachers too submissive to the Memphis school board, Wells-Barnett took over the editorship of the Evening Star.

Wells-Barnett's activities as a teacher and journalist in Memphis crystallized her ideas about social injustice. Teaching gave her yet another firsthand experience with the mistreatment of African Americans as well as a journalistic outlet for speaking out. Over the next few years, she established herself as a writer by contributing to local and national publications. In 1889 twenty-seven-year-old Ida Wells-Barnett bought a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and later became its editor. After writing a series of articles revealing how inadequate buildings and improperly trained teachers resulted in poor conditions in local schools for African American children, Wells found herself unemployed. Without income, Wells-Barnett promoted subscriptions for the Free Speech and solicited subscriptions from the Delta region in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Her actions are part of a tradition of Black self-help that funded much-needed institutions. Economic self-reliance was especially needed in Memphis, where African Americans were dominated by Whites who resented and suppressed Black entrepreneurial activity.

In 1892, Wells-Barnett learned firsthand the lengths that some White citizens of Memphis were willing to go to maintain African American political and economic subordination. In March, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Steward, successful managers of a grocery business in a Black section just outside Memphis, were lynched. Wells-Barnett knew all three men, and knew that they were resented because they successfully competed with a White store in the same neighborhood. This painful personal experience was a turning point in Wells-Barnett's commitment to social justice activism. Outraged that “the city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival,” Wells urged the African Americans of Memphis to “save our money and leave a town that will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, when accused by white persons.”⁸ In addition, she wrote an editorial that, for 1892, advanced a shocking hypothesis about the prevailing wisdom about lynching. Wells-Barnett claimed that not only were African American men often falsely accused of rape, but that because some White women were attracted to Black men, some sexual relations African American men and White women were consensual.

Fortunately, when the editorial appeared, Wells-Barnett was out of town or she too might have been lynched. Memphis citizens burned down the Free Speech and threatened Wells-Barnett's life if she ever returned to Memphis. This marked the beginning of Ida Wells-Barnett's crusade against lynching that included speaking tours, publishing editorials, preparing pamphlets, organizing community services, participating in women's and civil rights groups, and publishing the three pamphlets reprinted in this volume. Despite Wells-Barnett's impressive accomplishments, with the exception of Crusade for Justice, her ideas remained largely unexamined. Until the emergence of the modern Black feminist movement in the 1970s, Wells-Barnett remained neglected in African American historiography, largely because African American women's history was neglected. The resurgence of work in African American women's history created a new context for reclaiming neglected figures such as Wells-Barnett. Angela Davis's 1981 edited volume, Women, Race, and Class, positioned Wells-Barnett within the burgeoning interest in race, class, and gender studies largely catalyzed by Black feminism. Davis contextualized Wells-Barnett's analysis of lynching within this emerging interpretive framework.⁹ The essays on African American women in Bettina Aptheker's Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History also explored the significance of Wells-Barnett's antilynching campaign to Black women's political activism for women's suffrage.¹⁰ In 1990 Mildred I. Thompson published her monograph, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of An American Black Woman, 1893-1930.¹¹ The first book-length treatment of Wells-Barnett's life, Thompson's volume appeared as part of the Black Women in United States History series edited by Darlene Clark Hine and others. In the contemporary context when African American women's history seems so widely published and, for the moment, so well known, it is easy to forget what a monumental effort it took to reclaim African American women's history and Ida B. Wells-Barnett's significance within it.

The historical neglect of Wells-Barnett's work is unfortunate, for in many ways, Wells-Barnett's corpus of intellectual and activist work on lynching reflects core themes in African American intellectual production generally, most recently codified within African American Studies. According to Manning Marable, Black intellectual production has three distinguishing yet interconnected characteristics, all of which find expression within the three pamphlets reprinted here.¹² First, describing the truth of Black lives in ways that give agency to African Americans is a hallmark of African American scholarship. Black intellectual production routinely reclaims the humanity of Black people by resisting the objectifying and pathologizing of people of African descent that characterized mainstream scholarship. In the preface to Crusade for Justice, Wells-Barnett explains this responsibility of Black intellectuals. She decided to write her autobiography after conversing with a twenty-five-year-old woman who approached Wells-Barnett and, with embarrassment, asked about the details of her life. The young woman knew that Wells-Barnett was important but didn't know what she had done. As Wells-Barnett recalls, “One reason she did not know was because the happenings about which she inquired took place before she was born. Another was that there was no record from which she could inform herself. I then promised to set it down in writing so that those of her generation could know how the agitation against the lynching evil began.”¹³ Wells-Barnett's decision to create a record on lynching stems from similar sensibilities. She chooses to detail a group story of the violence needed to maintain social injustice.

In the work on lynching reprinted here, Wells-Barnett describes the horror of lynching. Extracting African American pain from behind the mask of virulent stereotyping justified by scientific racism, Wells-Barnett provides names, dates, and graphic details of the violence inflicted upon African Americans. We feel the pain of those who are lynched and the loved ones left behind—she makes them real. Mob Rule in New Orleans provides an especially chilling example of Wells-Barnett's journalistic skills, describing three days of violence and its effects on African American victims. Police officers approached two Black men sitting talking on a doorstep and for no apparent reason decided to arrest them. The men resisted, an altercation ensued, and one of the police officers was hurt. Wells-Barnett envisions how this event looked to Charles, one of the Black men profiled by the New Orleans police:

In any law-abiding community Charles would have been justified in delivering himself up immediately to the properly constituted authorities and asking a trial by a jury of his peers. He could have been certain that in resisting an unwarranted arrest he had a right to defend his life, even to the point of taking one in that defense, but Charles knew that his arrest in New Orleans, even for defending his life, meant nothing short of a long term in the penitentiary, and still more probable death by lynching at the hands of a cowardly mob.

(p. 158)

In this context, Charles not only ran from the police, he did the unthinkable of fighting back. Charles's resistance to what he perceived as police harassment so incensed a mob of White citizens of New Orleans that “unable to vent its vindictiveness and bloodthirsty vengeance upon Charles, the mob turned its attention to other colored men who happened to get in the path of its fury” (pp. 166-67). Wells-Barnett tells story after story of unsuspecting African Americans who were pulled from trolley cars, chased down streets, and murdered while they slept. Their only crime was being African American and getting in the path of mob fury. Mob Rule in New Orleans is especially interesting because, by recording the range of Black reactions to mob violence, it eschews depicting African Americans as passive victims awaiting White salvation. Most Blacks ran, hid, and tried to get away. Others, like Charles, fought back. Charles was eventually killed in a hail of bullets, but Wells-Barnett refuses to portray Charles solely as a victim.

Wells-Barnett's work on lynching also addresses a second distinctive feature of Black intellectual production, namely, that such work should aim to challenge distorted historical records that pathologized African Americans as lazy, unintelligent, sexually wanton, and violent. Pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake was a frivolous exercise in a climate where African Americans were routinely murdered without recourse. Before Wells-Barnett's intervention, the historical record on lynching proposed that Black men deserved to be lynched, in part, because their allegedly animal-like natures compelled them to lust after White women. Wells-Barnett is quite clear about the need for Black intellectual production to correct this analysis, as well as revealing why Whites advanced such ideas. In the preface to Southern Horrors, she notes: “The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.” Wells-Barnett took a huge risk in challenging conventional wisdom—she was, after all, threatened with death if she ever returned to Memphis. Thus, her caveat that “other considerations are of minor importance” should be read against the context of her times where speaking out could be extremely dangerous.

Wells-Barnett's brilliance lay in her decision to use the data collected by White journalists to challenge the prevailing wisdom on lynching. Wells-Barnett reported the record by assembling an array of newspaper articles on lynching and demonstrating that what appeared to be isolated events were part of a larger pattern of lawlessness. Such data would be difficult to refute because she assembled and presented in a different medium the very information that White journalists reported. In using quantitative analyses to describe social structures, Wells-Barnett was ahead of her times.

Ida Wells-Barnett did not content herself with generating accurate descriptions of lynching or challenging prevailing justifications for its persistence. Instead, her work speaks directly to a third distinctive dimension of Black intellectual production, namely, that such work aims to prescribe solutions to the social problems uncovered through describing the truths of Black lives and challenging historical records that distorted those truths. In the corpus of Wells-Barnett's intellectual and activist endeavors, exemplified via this work on lynching, we see the synergistic relationship between her ideas and activism shaping the strategies she herself followed and those she advocated for others. Her activism was informed by ideas, and her new interpretations of old realities enabled her to chart a unique activist course.

Wells-Barnett clearly sees the task of prodding a large and seemingly uninformed White American and European public to take action against lynching as essential to its eradication. In the Introduction to Mob Rule in New Orleans, she states:

We do not believe that the American people who have encouraged such scenes by their indifference will read unmoved these accounts of brutality, injustice and oppression. We do not believe that the moral conscience of the nation—that which is highest and the best among us—will always remain silent in the face of such outrages … When this conscience wakes and speaks out in thunder tones, as it must, it will need facts to use as a weapon against injustice, barbarism and wrong. It is for this reason that I carefully compile, print and send forth these facts. If the reader can do no more, he can pass this pamphlet on to another.

(p. 156)

Included within these essays are specific ideas about how to address the crime of lynching through informed, principled activism. The last chapter of A Red Record, “The Remedy,” asks “what can you do, reader, to prevent lynching, to thwart anarchy and promote law and order throughout our land?” (p. 150). Wells-Barnett's responses guide readers who are differentially positioned to bring about change. She first suggests that readers “disseminate the facts contained in this book by bringing them to the knowledge of every one with whom you come in contact.” She believes that public sentiment will change if people are better informed. She suggests that readers encourage their religious organizations to exert moral leadership by sending letters of condemnation to every place where lynchings occur. Wells-Barnett is far from naïve concerning what it would take to spur some individuals to action. For those who care little about African Americans, Wells-Barnett advances arguments that tap vested interests. She suggests that White Southerners need to see how lynchings are “bad for business” in that capital investment cannot occur in a climate of lawlessness. Via these strategies, Wells-Barnett's work incorporates its own policy implications and eschews the contemporary separation of knowledge from politics. She is quite clear that facts can be harnessed to passion for justice, and the lonely path she followed as an anti-lynching proponent speaks to this passionate rationality put to the service of all dimensions of the Black intellectual tradition.

Situating Wells-Barnett within the framework of African American intellectual traditions is but one way of contextualizing her life and work. In the past two decades Wells-Barnett has generated a great deal of interest because her analyses and actions are so rich and take us in so many different directions. Some say this is what writing history is all about, continually rewriting the past through the lens of the present in order to provide guidance for the future. Within the project of reclaiming the ideas and actions of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, authors typically contextualize her ideas and career within analytical frameworks that reflect their particular concerns. For example, sociologists Mary Jo Deegan¹⁴ and Charles Lemert¹⁵ discuss Wells-Barnett's activities as a sociologist during its formative decades of 1890-1910, Deegan to reclaim a multiracial tradition of female sociologists and Lemert to advance a contemporary multiracial sociology. Both highlight her contributions yet minimize the culpability of sociology in excluding African American intellectuals, especially African American women. Others analyze Wells-Barnett's place within contemporary efforts to theorize White femininity. Vron Ware opens her chapter “To Make the Facts Known: Racial Terror and the Construction of White Femininity” with a quote by Wells-Barnett. Ware explains how the British responses to Ida Wells-Barnett dispels the myth that Wells-Barnett found a natural ally in White women for her antilynching crusade.¹⁶ Angela Davis¹⁷ and Bettina Aptheker¹⁸ both examine Wells-Barnett's contentious relationship within the women's suffrage movement in light of the contentious issues that continue to plague relationships between African American and White American women today. African American scholar Joy James's intellectual project highlights a tradition of Black women's radical activism that might help guide what James sees as an increasingly bankrupt contemporary Black feminism. James situates Wells-Barnett within James's own interpretation of what constitutes African American women's activism, pointing out that Wells-Barnett's analyses of lynching challenged well-known ideas advanced by W. E. B. Du Bois and other African American intellectuals of her period.¹⁹

Ida Wells-Barnett cannot be reduced to these or any other one set of claims. In the sections that follow, I situate her work on lynching published here within the traditions of Black feminism. Picking up the strands left by Ida Wells-Barnett and similar activists, the reemergence of modern Black feminism from 1970 reminds us that Black feminism as a social justice project and Black feminist thought as its intellectual center are inextricably linked.²⁰ How might Black feminist thought shed light on our readings of Wells-Barnett's essays on lynching? Conversely, in what ways does Wells-Barnett's work on lynching illuminate the connections between Black feminism as a social justice project and Black feminist thought?

First, this work on lynching analyzes the sexual politics of Black womanhood, especially the workings of sexual violence, long a core theme in Black feminist thought. As many authors point out, the struggle to control African American women's bodies and sexuality has been a major part of relations of race, class, and gender in the United States and throughout the African Diaspora.²¹ What distinguishes Wells-Barnett's position is that her work advances our understanding of Black sexual politics, not through a focus on African American women, but on African American men.

Within contemporary Western feminist emphasis on personal advocacy on one's own behalf as a hallmark of feminism, Wells is often considered to be a “feminist” due to her support for women's suffrage, while her work on antilynching seems more appropriate for African American politics. Wells-Barnett recognized that, under the conditions of harsh racial segregation that she faced, the fate of African American women remained just as closely tied if not more so to the interests of African American men than those of White women. Because her work on lynching examines a form of sexual violence that fell more heavily on African American men, she can be seen as supporting a male-defined ethos of political struggle where the concerns of African American men take precedence over those of African American women. Yet this would be a misreading of her activism because the impetus for African American women's political activism often stems from an other-oriented catalyst—concern for one's children, a loved one, etc.—that in turn fosters distinctive forms of political activism. We find in Wells-Barnett's work an analysis of sexual violence that has great implications for the lives of African American women.

Second, these essays illustrate another distinguishing feature of Black feminist thought, namely, the use of intersectional paradigms to explain social phenomena. Wells-Barnett suggests that the crime of lynching grew less from the individual psyches of individuals in lynch mobs, and more from structural power relations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Wells-Barnett's analysis of lynching foreshadows contemporary attention to paradigms of intersectionality where race, class, and gender are seen as mutually constructing systems of oppression.²² The term intersectionality describes analyses claiming that systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization, which shape African American experiences with oppression and, in turn, are shaped by African American ideas and actions in response. What is unique about Wells-Barnett is that she not only introduced a much-needed gender analysis into Black political discourse, she did so via the very controversial theme of interracial sexuality.

Wells-Barnett raised a huge controversy when she dared to claim that many sexual liaisons between White women and Black men were in fact consensual, and most were not rape. She indicted White men as the actual perpetrators of crimes of sexual violence against African American men via lynching and African American women via rape. Consider how her comments in Southern Horrors concerning the contradictions of laws forbidding interracial marriage place blame on White male behavior and power:

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races: they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. While men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

(p. 31)

In this analysis, she reveals how ideas about gender difference—the seeming passivity of women and the aggressiveness of men—are in fact deeply racialized constructs. Gender had a racial face, whereby African American women, African American men, White women, and White men occupied distinct race/gender categories within an overarching social structure that prescribed their place. Interracial sexual liaisons violated that space. Wells-Barnett foreshadowed contemporary work on the connections between the creation of Du Bois's famous “color line” and ideas about sexuality and its role in the construction of gender during this same period.²³

Finally, Wells-Barnett's work on lynching illustrates key elements of Black feminist epistemology.²⁴ One such element is the valorization of lived experience as a criterion of meaning. Such theorizing argues that, for oppressed people, trusting one's own experiences is of value in resisting oppression. Valorizing lived experiences requires centering on the needs of a particular group harmed by social injustice and finding a prominent place for analyses advanced by victims within the research process. During Wells-Barnett's era, the harm done to the individual African American men, women, and children who were lynched and the harm done to African Americans as a collectivity living with the threat of violence served as daily reminders that victims of lynching needed to be believed and that African Americans' interpretations of their own experiences were of special value.

Wells-Barnett arrived at intersectional analyses about lynching because her activism remained grounded in the concrete experiences of African Americans, and not in abstract theories about lynching advanced by more powerful groups that proclaimed lynching as an appropriate punishment for Black male rapists. Wells-Barnett's experiences of growing up in the South not far removed from slavery showed her the trials of African American poverty and working-class life in ways that differed dramatically from her more affluent counterparts. She may have spent much of her adult life in the Black middle class, but she was not of the Black middle class, and thus challenged social injustice from this special location. Instead, Wells-Barnett's “outsider within” social location within established African American and/or women's organizations and her newfound middle-class lifestyle often generated friction, compromise, and insight.

Ida Wells-Barnett's voice in these essays grows from lived experience with Black people, and not simply from theorizing about them. The lynching of her friends revealed in unsettling detail how the absence of social justice for African Americans was a collective problem mandating a collective solution. Neither her own quality of life as an individual African American woman; nor that of her siblings, husband, and four children; nor that of African Americans as a group was ensured as long as any African American individual was denied equal protection under the law. Ida Wells-Barnett has finally gained the recognition she deserves. Yet her ideas and activism reflect similar paths taken by less famous African American women. The purpose of Wells-Barnett's life's work was not knowledge for knowledge's sake. Her work models the adage “speak the truth to power.”²⁵

Notes

1. All biographical information is taken from Wanda Hendricks, “Ida Bell Wells-Barnett,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing), 2:1242-46.

2. Paula Giddings, “Missing in Action: Ida B. Wells, the NAACP, and the Historical Record,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 1, no. 2 (2001): 1-17.

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

4. Giddings, “Missing in Action.”

5. Ibid., p. 2.

6. Duster, Crusade for Justice.

7. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 201-203.

8. Duster, Crusade for Justice.

9. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1981).

10. Bettina Aptheker, Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1982).

11. Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1990).

12. Manning Marable, “Introduction: Black Studies and the Racial Mountain,” in Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the American Experience, ed. Manning Marable (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 1-28.

13. Duster, Crusade for Justice, pp. 3-4.

14. Mary Jo Deegan, Women in Sociology: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook (New York: Greenwood, 1991).

15. Charles Lemert, Sociology After the Crisis (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995).

16. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (New York: Verso, 1992).

17. Davis, Women, Race, and Class.

18. Aptheker, Woman's Legacy.

19. Joy James, “The Profeminist Politics of W. E. B. Du Bois with Respects to Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells Barnett,” in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 141-60.

20. Collins, Black Feminist Thought.

21. Ibid., pp. 123-48.

22. Ibid., pp. 227-29.

23. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).

24. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, pp. 251-71.

25. Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota), 1998, pp. xi-xv.

Works Cited

Pagination given for Wells-Barnett's works is taken from the following edition:

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. On Lynchings, edited and with an introduction by Patricia Hill Collins. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2002.