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Ida Wells-Barnett was a lioness


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Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was a lioness. Born into enslavement in Mississippi in 1862 she rose to become one of the foremost voices in this nation against lynching and injustice, as a journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, and an early leader in the civil rights movement.  She is one of my sheroes. I have written about Wells-Barnett before, in The Ballot and Black Women, and in They marched and battled for the ballot.    

There are two biographies of her you should read. The first is Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, by black historian Paula Giddings.  

Heralded as a landmark achievement upon publication, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching-a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.

At the center of the national drama is Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). Born to slaves in Mississippi, Wells began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies’ car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation’s first campaign against lynching. For Wells, the key to the rise in violence was embedded in attitudes not only about black men, but also about women and sexuality. Her independent perspective and percussive personality gained her encomiums as a hero-as well as aspersions on her character and threats of death. Exiled from the South by 1892, Wells subsequently took her campaign across the country and throughout the British Isles before she married and settled in Chicago. There she continued her activism as a journalist, suffragist, and independent candidate in the rough-and-tumble world of the Windy City’s politics.

With meticulous research and vivid rendering of her subject, Giddings also provides compelling portraits of twentieth-century progressive luminaries, blacks and whites who worked with Wells during some of the most tumultuous periods in American history. In this groundbreaking work, Paula J. Giddings brings to life the irrepressible personality of Ida B. Wells and gives the visionary reformer her due.

She was also the subject of the documentary film, Ida B. Wells: a Passion for Justice.


The second biography is To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, by Mia Bey.

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Born to slaves in 1862, Ida B. Wells became a fearless anti-lynching crusader, women’s rights advocate, and journalist. Wells’s refusal to accept any compromise on racial inequality caused her to be labeled a “dangerous radical” in her day but made her a model for later civil rights activists as well as a powerful witness to the troubled racial politics of her era. Though she eventually helped found the NAACP in 1910, she would not remain a member for long, as she rejected not only Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism but also the moderating influence of white reformers within the early NAACP. In the richly illustrated To Tell the Truth Freely, the historian Mia Bay vividly captures Wells’s legacy and life, from her childhood in Mississippi to her early career in late-nineteenth-century Memphis and her later life in Progressive-era Chicago.

It is fitting for Women’s History Month, that we look at Wells-Barnett, through the lens of  black female historians, like Paula Giddings and Mia Bey.  

Professor Paula Giddings is the author of three books on the social and political history of African American women: When and Where I Enter: The Impact on Black Women on Race and Sex in America; In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement; and, most recently, the critically acclaimed biography of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, Ida: A Sword among Lions. She is also the editor of Burning All Illusions, an anthology of articles on race published by The Nation magazine from 1867 to 2000. She is also a former book editor and journalist who has written extensively on international and national issues and has been published by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jeune Afrique (Paris), The Nation, and the journals Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, among other publications.

Before attaining the position of professor of Afro-American studies at Smith College, Professor Giddings had taught at Spelman College, where she was a United Negro Fund Distinguished Scholar; Douglass College/Rutgers University as the Laurie Chair in Women’s Studies; and Princeton and Duke Universities.

Mia Bey is a Professor of History and Director, Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University and has authored To Tell the Truth Freely: the Life of Ida B. Wells. Hill & Wang, February 2009.and  The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Bey speaks of Wells-Barnett in these two brief bio clips.



Paula Giddings is a veteran of both civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement.  I encourage you to listen to an address she gave, at the 2014 Gender & Work Symposium, on “Relationships among Women”.  

She discusses Ida Wells Barnett, intersectionality, race and gender in progressive movements – past and present. (the clip here does not include her introductory remarks)

Cross-posted from Black Kos


8 comments

  1. DeniseVelez

    discussing intersectionality.  Have had some major tiffs recently with some people who just can’t seem to understand the concept.

  2. Diana in NoVa

    Once again, I’m overwhelmed by what I don’t know and awestruck by a new idea. What if women reclaimed history through the Internet? What if we could show the power and contributions of black women and white women? Yes, I’ve always thought of the battle for women’s rights as promulgated by the Seneca Falls crowd as being “white.” Nor did I know that Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were racists.

    Thank you for bringing us this part of history. Going to have to bone up on intersectionality, which is new to me.

    Long live Ida Wells Barnett in our collective consciousness. And long live Paula Giddings for making sure we don’t forget her.

    And thank YOU, Denise, for opening our minds to reclaimed history and reclaimed ideas.

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