A WOMAN FOR OUR TIME

A WOMAN FOR OUR TIME

            Those of you who know me will not be surprised that in Black History Month, I am starting my roll call of witnesses with Ida B. Wells.  She was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, and I first met her in Dorothy Sterling’s book “Black Foremothers.”  I was reading it to begin a series on witnesses in Black History Month at Oakhurst Church in 1986, a series that continues to this day.  Her work was so broad and so powerful, and I was stunned that I had never heard of her.   It was another lesson in my continuing captivity to racism.  She was born about the same time as my great-great grandmother, who was also born in Marshall County, where Holly Springs is the county seat.   I have no evidence that they ever met one another, but I do have evidence that my great-great grandmother’s family held people as slaves.  I remember hearing stories from my great aunt Gran about the people treated as slaves, who hid the family horses from the Yankees when they came through Holly Springs in the Civil War.

            Wells grew up in Reconstruction, that brief period in American history when there was at least an idea of black people sharing power with white people.  It did not last long, however, as the white Southerners and other allies used violence, terrorism and legislation to seek to put people classified as “black” back in their inferior status.  Ida Wells spent most of her life fighting against this retrogression, and she did not win many of the battles – the tide of racism once again overwhelmed the country.  Why is she a witness for our time?   She lived in very difficult times, in which racism and white supremacy reasserted themselves in a powerful way.  Although we are not back there yet, we seem to be taking several steps backward, and Wells’ witness reminds us that we must always be in the fight for justice and equity – to paraphrase Langston Hughes – there ain’t no crystal stairs. 

            Wells also fought to keep our imaginations from being captured by the power of racism.  In the 1890’s there was a huge wave of lynchings of black people, not only in the South.  Though many thought that it was barbaric, the rationale given was that black men were lusting after white women.  Wells did not believe this, and she made it her business to study all known accounts of the lynchings.  Her final report, which she named “Southern Horrors,” gave a blistering account of the motivation for the lynchngs:  not black lust but rather the white need to maintain white supremacy.  The white South did not respond well – she had gone on a trip to New York to see her friend T. Thomas Fortune, and when she arrived there, he told her that he was glad that she would be staying with them for a long time.  When she replied that she did not intend to stay that long, he showed her a headline from the Memphis Commercial Appeal indicating that her offices had been burned and that a price had been put on her head.  She never returned South again until 1920, when she returned South incognito to visit black prisoners who were facing the death penalty because they chose to defend themselves in a white race riot near my hometown of Helena, Arkansas. 

            Wells was a consistently powerful voice against racism and sexism and materialism, and we will need her spirit to shore us up in these days.  Maybe since President Trump has resurrected Fredrick Douglass, perhaps he can bring Ida Wells back too!

            To read more about her, see her autobiography “Crusade for Justice,” or Dorothy Sterling’s “Black Foremothers.”  The definitive biography is Paula Giddings “Ida: A Sword Among Lions.”  For more on this whole subject of race and US history, see my good friend David Billings’ book “Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in US History and Life.”  You can also look at my series of monthly articles in Hospitality Magazine in 2016.