The answer always is: "Tell the world the facts."

July 16, 2018 10:16 AM

One of the founding members of the NAACP, Ida B. Wells was at one point the most famous black woman in America. A fiery, exacting journalist, she's best known for her work on documenting lynching (and the false premises used to justify it) in her books Southern Horrors and The Red Record, the latter of which is now seen as a pioneering work of early data journalism. Now, a community group is working to create a monument to Wells in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, where she lived and worked.

More about Ida B. Wells:

• "She didn't suffer fools, and she saw fools everywhere" - from the New York Times' "Overlooked" obituary series
• Hark! A Vagrant dramatizes some moments in her life
• Her legacy also continues with the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting
• More of her work, previously on Metafilter

posted by Four String Riot (10 comments total)

from the New York Times' "Overlooked" obituary series

How in the world was the most famous black woman in America not deserving of a lengthy obituary when she first died?
posted by overhauser at 10:29 AM on July 16, 2018 [3 favorites]

We hold the Ida B. Wells Papers where I work. Some of the material has been digitized.
posted by lagomorphius at 10:53 AM on July 16, 2018 [3 favorites]

As I said elsewhere: In a just world, there would a statue of Ida B. Wells in every city in America.
posted by y2karl at 10:58 AM on July 16, 2018 [7 favorites]

In lagomorphius's link: "The amount of material in the collection is rather small due to two house fires (1915 and 1923) that destroyed virtually all of her personal and professional papers." Sigh.
posted by homerica at 11:28 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

My wife is a history teacher with a heavy AfAm History background and we accordingly have a few books with Ida B. Wells on the cover floating around the apartment at any given time; I have grown accustomed to encountering the face of Ida B. Wells whenever I am clearing the table or moving blankets off the couch.

Every once in a while I will be out in public and look up and see a billboard or a poster and have a momentary reaction of pleasant surprise where I think I am seeing a picture of Ida B. Wells that I have never seen before, and it always (always) turns out to be Bruno Mars.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:37 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thank you for this post! Ida B Wells is one of those stupendous badasses that every child should grow up wanting to emulate, and I get angry every time I remember I didn't learn about her until adulthood.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:05 PM on July 16, 2018 [6 favorites]

I say again and again that Wells is an American hero that every school child should be taught about.
posted by cccorlew at 5:06 PM on July 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

Post Civil War, Frederick Douglass had some career stretches that weren't, say, up to his normally high standards. He was one of the most capable men in American history but seemed a bit nonplussed that the freedmen weren't making strides as quickly as he had. He'd written against lynching but mostly focused on it's unfair extrajudicial meeting; on some level he had begun to believe that not all the charges could be false, that "there was an increasing lasciviousness on the part of Negroes."

Ida B. Wells stopped that shit. Her research on lynching was convincing that lynchings were not a disproportionate response but oppression through violence, terror and lies. This letter Douglass sent her is easy to find online but knowing the context it almost downplays how much she helped get him back in the fight him. Also amazing: When this happened Douglass was a 75 year old icon, easily the most accomplished black man in America. Wells was 30.
posted by mark k at 7:37 PM on July 16, 2018 [7 favorites]

Hey, that monument is fully funded as of yesterday!
posted by clavicle at 6:41 AM on July 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

History Chicks - Episode 25!
posted by Preserver at 10:20 AM on July 18, 2018