Reviews

• Incredible human being

  Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a formidable human! A daughter of slaves who grew up in the post-Civil War South and was orphaned at 16, she managed to become a schoolteacher and subsequently a journalist through a lot of hard work and a fair bit of talent, and, around the age of 30, emerged as this incendiary figure in American politics, campaigning against lynching and researching and writing pamphlet after pamphlet on the subject and touring the US and the UK to raise awareness about America's "national crime", as she called it. Not only that: she fought for women's suffrage, gave the voting bug to thousands of Chicago's African-American women once Illinois became the first state to allow women to vote, co-founded the NAACP, and did so many other amazing things! Wells-Barnett's sheer amazingness, as well as Giddings' elegant and unpretentious prose, make this a super-compelling book, despite its length (659 pages, notes not included) and the fact that every single page is absolutely packed with information. And I feel like I learned loads about American history generally as well--before reading this book, I knew nothing about the post-Civil War decades, or the racial policies of Woodrow Wilson, or who exactly Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois were--and not only did this book very clearly explain all these things and more, it's also made me want to about all of them!

• Fiery Biography of a Crusader against Racism

  Before Rosa Parks, there was Ida B. Wells. And then some. A political activist beginning in the late1800s, Ida B. Wells grabbed my attention when I first heard the story about the time she received a knock at the door by two intelligence officers. They threatened to arrest her for treason if she didn’t stop her brand of political activism, referring to her making commemorative buttons for the martyred twenty-fourth United States Infantrymen, Third Battalion in Houston, Texas. In her fifties, she stated she’d rather go down in “history as one lone Negro who dared tell the government it had done a dastardly thing” (charging the soldiers with mutiny after a race riot and ordering many of their executions), “than save her own life by being quiet.” She added it would be an “honor” to be incarcerated under those circumstances. The year the intelligence officers knocked at her door was 1918 and Congress had passed the Sedition Act. It was a draconian amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917 which carried a $10,000 fine and a prison term up to twenty-six years for anyone found meddling with the conduct of the business of World War I. Paula Giddings’ book, “Ida: A Sword Among Lions,” focuses on Wells’ campaign against lynching. The author’s book thoroughly covers Ida’s life but gives little background of blacks and the status of civil rights that preceded the late 1800s and were established before the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson which upheld segregation. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment provided equal protection of laws. No state could deprive citizens of their rights under the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) established the right of citizens to vote. The First Civil Rights Act extended citizenship to anyone born in the U.S., giving African Americans full equality before the law. The Civil Rights Act of 1872 made it a federal crime to deprive an individual of his constitutional rights. The Second Civil Rights Act in 1875 entitled everyone to equal enjoyment of cultural rights. However, in 1883 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment was limited to correcting official acts by states, meaning that private citizens could practice discrimination without interference from the national government. This change in the law and the murder of her friend, Thomas Moss, with whom she had taught Sunday School in Memphis, Tennessee, directly affected Ida B. Wells. In 1883, Wells was forced to leave the first-class ladies’ car on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway though she had paid for a first-class ticket. Wells was twenty-two years old at the time. She sued the Railway and won only to lose in the Tennessee Court of Appeals because the laws themselves had changed. The case was used to bolster the ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Wells’ friend, Moss, in his dying breath implored, “Tell my people to go West; there is no justice for them here.” The murder propelled Wells, who had now evolved from a teacher to a journalist, into a life of activism. She knew Frederick Douglass who was more of a father figure to her. His death may have been a catalyst for her marriage to Ferdinand Barnett, a Chicago lawyer, graduate of a law school which became part of the University of Chicago. Ida B. Wells endangered herself throughout her life with her unwavering, militant views on racism. Her life’s work highlighted the erosion of race relations after 1883. She is regarded as one of the foremothers of sociology and even in that role she faulted the sociologists from the University of Chicago for their empirical bias against black women. Marginalized by the NAACP because of her ideology, Wells-Barnett, as she wished to use as her surname, with her journalistic movement and anti-lynching campaign gained the organization its legitimacy when they adopted her ideas and progressive agenda. In this thoughtful biography of Wells-Barnett by Giddings, the activist’s legacy continues to live.

• Ida

  A great read. This is definitely a book that needs to be on your shelf. There's a lot of history in this, and it covers a lot of Ida's life. Interestingly enough, it also shines a light on what's going on today.

• Super interesting to read in these times

  I have been wanting to learn more about Ida B Wells for a long while, and finally read this book. It's especially interesting to see the historical context and the activist writings/work by Ida and others - and how much it resonates with issues and perspectives today. Author does a good job of discussing the context of what Ida did and thought, and relating her sources (this came from Ida's writings, this came from a different source) -- this gives a fuller picture of what Ida may have been thinking (i.e., it's interesting to hear that certain big events were not discussed directly by Ida in her journal). Author does a good job of relaying relevant information and fitting it togther. Sometimes it's a bit dense, but it's history and so this is not surprising. I'm enjoying this book, even if I need to read it in fixed doses.

• History of a Brave, Heroic American

  The author takes the reader through the major events of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's life from her beginning as a child born into slavery through Reconstruction to her death in 1931. The book is meticulously researched. Wells-Barnett was a journalist and educator. She became a fearless crusader against violent lynchings of thousands of African Americans at the hands of mobs. She traveled alone to the scenes of lynchings to interview witnesses and gather facts. She was an activist and afraid of no one. She wrote pamphlets, lectured In America and England and wrote articles for newspapers to spread the word about the atrocities that were happening to her people. She was a tireless campaigner for an Antilynching Law and for political candidates who would bring equality and justice to African Americans. She and her husband became advocates for wrongly accused and imprisoned African Americans. She was a leader in the women's suffrage movement and was personally responsible for increasing the rate of voting among black women in Illinois after women got the right to vote. She started many clubs for the purpose of empowering black women and networking for social change. She confronted politicians and Presidents. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a friend of Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams. She was every bit as important as they in shaping American history.

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