"WHAT WOULD IDA B. WELLS DO?"

 “WHAT WOULD IDA B. WELLS DO?”

Ida B. Wells serves as a powerful bridge person between Black History Month and Women’s History Month.  She was dedicated to working on equity and justice for Black people, but she was equally dedicated to working for those same rights for women, especially Black women.  I described her in “Passionate for Justice” as “fearless, ferocious, formidable, and a feminist.”  Nowadays, she would correct me to say that she was a “womanist,” but the image still holds – she went where very few dared to tread, whether they were male or female.

Last week we left off with Wells’ getting ready to head back South after almost thirty years of exile.  She was forced out of Memphis in 1893, then married and raised a family in Chicago, traveled to England a couple of times to preach against neo-slavery and for rights for Black people, helped to found the NAACP,  worked for the right to vote for women, including the famous march in Washington in 1913, confronted President Woodrow Wilson on his support for neo-slavery, opened a settlement house in Chicago for Black people migrating up from the South.  And now, in 1920, she was making a huge decision to return South to Arkansas to investigate the white slaughter of over 230 Black people in my home of Phillips County.

After the Elaine Massacre in the fall of 1919, twelve Black men had been tried in my hometown of Helena, Arkansas, on charges of murder, stemming from the slaughter of 237+ Black people in that Massacre.  Yes, this development is  unimaginable, but not surprising in this bloody red decade and in the rising tide of neo-slavery and white supremacy.  They were convicted and sentenced to death.  Because the white mobs were still thirsty for Black blood, the Governor of Arkansas had them transferred to a jail in Little Rock, so as to protect them from lynching until they could be executed by the state – part of this protection came from a back channel order from President Woodrow Wilson, who was worried about the optics.  

Wells decided that she needed to investigate this massacre further, and when one of the men sentenced to death wrote to her, asking her to seek to intervene, she felt that God was calling her back South.  She took a train to Little Rock from Chicago, and then she visited the men in jail.  Because she still had a price on her head in the South, she went to visit them in disguise.  She found them overwhelmed, depressed, and certain that they would be executed.  Having seen and lived a lot in the heart of these issues, Ida B. decided that they needed a sermon, and she took to preaching.  She identified herself and then began to preach.  Here is an excerpt from that “sermon,” taken from her autobiography “Crusade for Justice:”

“I have been listening to you for nearly two hours.  You have talked and sung 

and prayed about dying, and forgiving your enemies, and of feeling that you 

are going to be received in the New Jerusalem because your God knows that 

you are innocent of the offense for which you expect to be executed.  But why 

don’t you pray to live and ask to be freed?  The God you serve is the God of 

Paul and Silas, who opened their prison gates, and if you have all the faith 

you say you have, you ought to believe that God will open your prison doors 

too……..Quit talking about about dying…..dying is the last thing you ought to 

even think about, much less talk about.  Pray to live and believe you are going 

to get out.”  (Crusade, p. 403)

Wells backed up her tough talk by publishing a definitive account of the Elaine Massacre entitled “The Arkansas Race Riot.”  She joined with Arkansas lawyer Scipio Africanus Jones and the NAACP to beat the drums on the case, and thanks to the efforts of Lawyer Jones, the case made it to the US Supreme Court in 1923, where SCOTUS overwhelmingly voted to overturn the case because it hinged on the jury being afraid of the mobs assembled inside and outside the courtroom in Helena.  The Elaine Twelve were eventually freed, and a small bit of justice was done.  Wells had no small part in this development, and later that year, one of the twelve men who had been sentenced to death came to Chicago to thank her for her coverage of the situation and for her inspiring them in that Arkansas prison, saying:“we never talked about dying any more, but did as she told us, and now every last one of us is out and enjoying his freedom.”

In these crazy and scary days, let us find some of that determination and courage and truth-telling that propelled Ida B. Wells.  We will need it to get us through these terrible times.  When we are wondering and wandering in the wilderness of this time in American culture, let this be our guiding light: “What would Ida B. Wells do?”