"WATCHERS ON THE WALL"

 “WATCHERS ON THE WALL”

I heard from Michelle Duster this week.  She is a well-known author and human rights activist, as well as being the great-great granddaughter of Ida B. Wells. She is author of the powerful book “Ida B The Queen,” and she wrote one of the Forewords to Dr. Catherine Meeks and my book “Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time.”  Michelle was noting that a federal anti-lynching bill was now the closest it has ever gotten to being passed into law.  It has been passed by both houses of Congress, and it awaits the President’s signature.  We both gave thanks, but we also noted that no federal law against lynching has ever been signed into law in the history of the USA.  Most people are unaware of this lack of a federal law against lynching – it seems like a no-brainer, but the White South has always been a powerful force in American history.

During this Women’s Herstory Month, I want to give thanks for the witness of Ida B. Wells, especially in the context of lynching.  My friend John Cole Vodicka reminded me last week that it was the 130th anniversary of the lynching of 3 Black men in Memphis, one of whom was Ida Wells’ friend, Tom Moss.  It was that 1892 event that set her off on her journalistic career, as she was disgusted with the white explanation that the lynching was the responsibility of the Black men, that their behavior had set it off.  Wells decided to do an investigation of the recent lynchings in the USA, especially in the South.  Using white newspaper sources, she wrote an incendiary report on those lynchings, entitled “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases.”   Why was it incendiary?  It was so explosive because it revealed the truth behind the lynchings:  they were the result of white terrorism, not Black behavior.  Her report was not only figuratively explosive – it also was literally explosive.  White people in Memphis blew up her newspaper office and put a price on her head.  She left the South and did not return for almost 30 years.  When she returned, it was to investigate yet another mass lynching in my home county, Phillips County in Arkansas.

Wells was already an activist before these events, but her report made her a national figure, and for the next 40 years she would investigate, agitate, and activate.  She was a strong fighter for racial justice and for women’s justice – she was “intersectional” before it became a sociology concept.  She would not take a back seat as a person classified as “Black,” and she would not take a back seat as a person classified as “female.”  In our book on Wells and on her meaning for today, Dr. Meeks and I describe her as “fearless, ferocious, formidable, and feminist.”  This year in July marks the 160th anniversary of her birth as an enslaved girl in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  Her parents died of yellow fever when she was 16, and she wrestled with her father’s Masonic Lodge colleagues to take guardianship of her younger siblings, and she prevailed.  Her life is full of sheroism, with her share of  troubles and travails, but she did not yield to the forces of racism or sexism, even as they stormed around her.

    As Dr. Meeks points out in our book on Wells, as well as in our discussions with groups on our book, Wells was an ordinary person.  Looking back on it, there is no doubt that hers is an extraordinary life, but our caution is to refrain from making her a saint of social justice, though she certainly is.  We must remember that in many ways, she was just like us - caught up in the whirlwinds and slings and arrows of life, but all the while listening for that voice inside her and outside her, a voice that told her that she was a human being, no matter what the world thought about her.  She found her voice, and we are urged to do the same in our own time and in our own lives.  If you don’t know her story, check out our book or Michelle Duster’s book, or you can go to the source itself, Ida B. Wells’ autobiography “Crusade for Justice,” so lovingly put together by her daughter Alfreda Duster, after Wells’ untimely death in 1931.  The last chapter of that book is entitled “The Price of Liberty,” and Wells begins it with these words:

    “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it does seem to me that notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities, there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservations of our rights…..be alert as the watcher on the wall.”  As we watch SCOTUS move the dial back on women’s rights, as we watch the rise of the White South yet once again, these words of warning from Wells sound out anew – we must be watchers on the wall, to use the Biblical phrase from Isaiah 62.  Let us find our place in that witnessing, as Wells did and continues to do.