1970
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda Barnett Duster, was published by the University of Chicago Press
1974
Ida B. Wells-Barnett House at 3624 S. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive given National Historic Landmark status
1985
Ida inducted into Tennessee Press Hall of Fame
1987
Tennessee Historic Commission placed Ida B. Wells commemorative marker on Beale Street in Memphis
1988
• The Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation established by five of her grandchildren (her daughter Alfreda’s children)
• Ida inducted into National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York
1989
William Greaves aired his documentary film for PBS’s American Experience series, Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice
1990
February 1 – United States Postal Service issued twenty-five-cent Black heritage postage stamp in honor of Ida B. Wells
1991
• Post office in Holly Springs, Mississippi, named after Ida B. Wells
• Historical marker installed for People’s Grocery in Memphis
1995
The Ida B. Wells-Barnett House designated Chicago landmark
1996
Ida B. Wells Family Art Gallery charted in Holly Springs, Mississippi. It was renamed the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum in 2002.
2002
Ida B. Wells Homes in Chicago started being demolished
2005
June – The United States Senate issued a resolution (S Res 39) apologizing for not ever passing a bill to make lynching a federal crime. Ida’s great-grandson Dan Duster spoke before the body.
2008
• Paula Giddings’s biography of Ida, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, published
• Ida In Her Own Words, edited by Michelle Duster, published
• Ida B. Wells Commemorative Art Committee formed. Commissioned sculptor Richard Hunt in 2011 to create and install work at 37th Street and Langley Avenue as the first monument to a Black woman in Chicago
• Barack Obama elected as the first African American president of the United States
2010
• Ida From Abroad, edited by Michelle Duster, published
• Room conamed after Ida B. Wells in United States Senate’s Russell Building
2011
Ida inducted into Chicago Literary Hall of Fame
2016
• February – Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting founded
• September 24 – Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opened, which includes significant exhibit on Ida B. Wells
2018
• March 8 – Delayed New York Times obituary published as part of the Overlooked series
• March 16 – New York Times The Daily podcast about Ida B. aired
• April 26 – Equal Justice Initiative opened two institutions in Montgomery, Alabama. The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which includes quotes and images of Ida B. Wells
• July 26 – Congress Parkway in Chicago renamed Ida B. Wells Drive
2019
• February 11 – Ida B. Wells Drive street sign unveiling ceremony
• February – the United States Senate antilynching bill S. 488 (Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2019), introduced by Senators Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Tim Scott, passed the Senate on the 14th. The House antilynching bill H.R. 35, (Emmett Till Antilynching Act) introduced by Representative Bobby Rush, passed the House on the 26th. Either bill would make lynching a federal crime. Due to the House’s addition of the name “Emmett Till Antilynching Act,” the bill was sent back to the Senate for a vote and blocked by Senator Rand Paul since June 2020.
• March – Historical marker placed in Zion Cemetery in Memphis honoring William Stewart, Calvin McDowell, and Thomas Moss
• July 13 – Historical marker honoring Ida B. Wells placed in town square of her hometown, Holly Springs, Mississippi
• July 20 – Honorary Ida B. Wells Way and historical marker placed on 37th Street and King Drive in Chicago
• August – Ida inducted into Mississippi Writers Trail
2020
• May 4 – Ida awarded posthumous 2020 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation
• May 13 – Second edition of autobiography Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells released by the University of Chicago Press
• May 30 – Statue of Edward Carmack (newspaper editor and senator who harassed Ida B. Wells) toppled by demonstrators
• June – Legislative Plaza in Nashville unofficially renamed by demonstrators as Ida B. Wells Plaza
• August 20 – Senator Kamala Harris accepts nomination for vice president and running mate to presidential candidate Joe Biden (former vice president)
• Memphis Suffrage Monument “Equality Trailblazers,” which includes Ida B. Wells, created in Memphis
VI. A Powerful Legacy
They had destroyed my paper, in which every dollar I had in the world was invested. They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth. I felt that I owed it to myself and my race to tell the whole truth.
—Ida B. Wells
Defending and Embracing Our Authentic Selves
At just sixteen, Ida had to join the world of adults—and navigate the scrutiny and danger that greeted late-nineteenth-century women—all on her own. That meant adhering to the so-called cult of true womanhood, in which “the ideal woman was seen not only as submissive, but also gentle, innocent, pure, modest, and pious,” as the historian Linda O. McMurry writes in her biography of Ida, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. With such strict social codes guiding her life, the teenage Ida would have taken great care to avoid slanderous rumors and protect her reputation.
Once her siblings had been nursed back to health, Ida thought about the daunting task of taking care of everyone financially. Luckily, her sister informed her that their father had trusted his doctor to keep a sum of money safe for use in the event his wife or children needed help. According to her autobiography, Ida met him one evening shortly after her parents died in 1878 to get the money. Apparently, her visit was observed by a few chatty neighbors. Rumors began to circulate that the teenaged Black girl and adult white male had met for insidious reasons. The exchange of money did not help.
The salacious lies combined with the loss of her parents caused her a great deal of pain. She felt utterly alone yet had to forge through. Decades later she wrote in her autobiography:
Of course as a young, inexperienced girl who had never had a beau, too young to have been out in company except at children’s parties, I knew nothing whatever of the world’s ways of looking at things and never dreamed that the community would not understand why I didn’t want our children separated. But someone said that I had been downtown inquiring for Dr. Gray shortly after I had come from the country. They heard him tell me to tell my sister he would get the money, meaning my father’s money, and bring it to us that night. It was easy for that type of mind to deduce and spread the rumor that already, as young as I was, I had been heard asking white men for money and that was the reason I wanted to live there by myself with the children.
I am quite sure that never in all my life have I suffered such a shock as I did when I heard that misconstruction that had been placed upon my determination to keep my brothers and sisters together. As I look back at it now I can perhaps understand the type of mind which drew such conclusions. And no one suggested that I was laying myself open to gossiping tongues.
RECY TAYLOR
Recy Taylor was a young mother and a sharecropper who lived in Alabama in the early 1900s. One day in 1944, when she was walking home from church in Abbeville, the segregated town she and her family called ho
me, the twenty-four-year-old was abducted and later gang-raped by six white men. They left her on the side of the road after the brutal assault, presumably to die. Though Taylor reported the attack to the police, the men were never brought to justice—even when her case made it to trial, a jury composed entirely of white men dismissed the charges within five minutes. Taylor’s case galvanized the local community and the national Black press. The NAACP, including the activist Rosa Parks, advocated for her as part of a group of concerned people who formed the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. Even following their efforts, though, the men responsible for raping her were never prosecuted (despite several confessing to the heinous act). More than sixty years later, a 2007 documentary about this unimaginable ordeal, called The Rape of Recy Taylor, detailed the case itself while following the many people who fought on her behalf and how Taylor’s case exemplified the constant threat of sexual violence that Black women have contended with for centuries.
Ida B. Wells was not the first or last Black woman who needed to fend off unwarranted criticism or defend her reputation. Black women have endured being stereotyped and caricatured as hypersexual, immoral, unsophisticated, angry, and violent people. This made Ida extra vigilant in how she dressed and conducted herself. Not only to command respect as someone who would present herself in a certain way, but also to stay safe. Black women historically have had much less protection under the law than other women, starting with the omnipresent practice of rape and separation from their children that typified slavery. Victims of sexual crimes were often blamed for their trauma and almost never saw their perpetrators punished. This dynamic led to a deep silence about the violations.
From Recy Taylor, who was raped by several white men in 1944 while on her way home from church, to the string of Black women who were sexually assaulted by police in Oklahoma in 2014–15, Black women have always been especially vulnerable.
In addition to navigating physical danger, African American women had to endure having their physical characteristics vilified and viewed as a liability. Full lips, round butts, browner skin, “kinky” hair, broad noses, and other physical characteristics have been denigrated for their difference from European features. From Sarah Baartman being paraded around like a circus freak show in the 1800s to the tennis champion Serena Williams being referred to in masculine terms, Black women have been attacked for their appearances.
DANIEL HOLTZCLAW
Much more recently, in December 2015, a former Oklahoma City police officer named Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted of raping several Black women in the area. According to prosecutors, Holtzclaw began assaulting Black women in 2014, often targeting them during routine traffic stops that he made while on duty. His victims said Holtzclaw chose them because he knew they were unlikely to be believed by officers if they tried to report his crimes—all of them were Black, and many lived in one of Oklahoma City’s poorest neighborhoods. They detailed horrific assaults, and at the end of Holtzclaw’s trial, a jury found him guilty of many of the thirty-six charges brought against him, including four of six first-degree rape charges, one charge of second-degree rape with instrumentation, four counts of forcible sodomy, six counts of sexual battery, and three procuring lewd exhibition charges. Holtzclaw, who was sentenced to 263 years in prison in 2016, was denied an appeal in 2019.
Ida was aware of the difference in protection she could expect compared to white women, and she did everything possible to avoid dangerous situations or others that could tarnish her reputation. She was so vigilant about it that she demanded that a pastor write a letter to speak to her character in 1891 after hearing that he had been disparaging her name in his community. Ida had stayed over as a guest of the minister and his wife while in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on a sales trip for the Free Speech. Both Ida and the sister-in-law of the minister stayed at the house. The two women happened to converse with some men who visited the house during their stay.
Later, Ida learned that the pastor had spoken to people about how virtuous northern women were in comparison to southern women, implying that the southern-born Ida was herself not virtuous. The minister’s wife had fished Ida’s torn-up mail out of the trash and read a letter in which Ida referenced losing her teaching position in Memphis. After his wife relayed the contents of Ida’s private correspondence, the minister twisted whatever Ida had said in her letter to imply that her lack of virtue, versus her outspokenness, explained why the Memphis school system had not renewed Ida’s contract to teach. Not only did he and his wife sully Ida’s name, they also completely erased the fact that she’d taken the school system to task by exposing the vast inequality between Black and white schools. This assumption—and his willingness to share it with others—was insulting on multiple levels.
SARAH BAARTMAN
Sarah Baartman, sometimes known as Saartje Baartman, was born in 1789 in what is now South Africa. After a free Black man convinced her to move to British-controlled Cape Town, Baartman was eventually brought to London. Beginning in 1810, she was exhibited in England as the “Hottentot Venus,” a freak-show attraction meant to draw in Londoners who were unfamiliar with Africans. They jeered at her large buttocks, which were exaggerated in flyers promoting the exhibition, seeing her more as a creature than as a human. In 1815, she was taken to France, where she was exhibited under similarly exploitative conditions. Baartman died that year, at the age of twenty-six. Even now, the world does not know her birth name; she lives on as Venus but not as who she really was. Yet another act of violence.
Ida wrote the minister, insisting that she meet with him in person the next time she visited Vicksburg. She arrived flanked by all five of the close friends who relayed the minister’s slanderous remarks about her. It was very important that he set the record straight about her reputation. She was a single Black woman. She was a businesswoman. And she needed to make sure that her reputation was intact for both her safety and for her business. She insisted that he apologize not only to her in person but also publicly from his pulpit. She wrote the statement for him to say:
To Whom It May Concern:
I desire to say that any remarks I have made reflecting on the character of Miss Ida B. Wells are false. This I do out of deference to her as a lady and myself as a Christian gentleman.
She told him that her “good name was all that I had in the world, that I was bound to protect it from attack by those who felt that they could do so with impunity because I had no brother or father to protect it for me.” She wanted him to know, “Virtue was not at all a matter of the section in which one lived; that many a slave woman had fought and died rather than yield to the pressure and temptations to which she was subjected. I had heard many tales of such.” Ida emphasized, “I was one southern girl, born and bred, who had tried to keep herself spotless and morally clean as my slave mother had taught me.”
Luckily for the pastor, she showed him some extra grace in writing. In her autobiography, she noted that she “will not mention his name, because he is still living and occupies an honorable position.” So despite his rush to declare her unfit for polite society, the minister appears only as “Rev.—” in her recounting of the incidents.
Speaking Truth to Power
Ida’s boldness often extended to explicitly political spaces, even and especially ones where Black women were often not welcome. For example, eight months after the 1913 suffrage march she defiantly integrated, Ida did another courageous thing: she went to speak to President Woodrow Wilson in person. It wasn’t her first time visiting a sitting president. She had also met with President William McKinley in 1898 to talk with him about the murder of the postmaster Frazier B. Baker, a Black federal employee in Lake City, South Carolina, and the need to make lynching a federal crime. Despite hearing lip service, nothing happened.
Illinois state senator Shelby Moore Cullom urged President William McKinley (pictured) to meet with Ida.
Woodrow Wilson agreed to meet with Ida, but their discussion produced little in the way
of progress from the then president. Wilson’s anti-Black ideas became more well-known to the public in the years after his 1924 death.
William Monroe Trotter, who formed the National Equal Rights League (NERL) to fight against these types of injustices, was a friend of Ida’s. He was also the passionate and opinionated editor of the Boston Guardian. Both of them were considered “militant” because they weren’t willing to silently settle for second-class citizenship. Ida joined the NERL, and Trotter asked her to go with his delegation to the White House to discuss the problem with President Wilson. Ida believed Wilson’s treatment of federal employees had been unequivocally wrong, too. She was disappointed in his lack of concern about whether African Americans had their rights as full citizens realized. Ida’s frustration didn’t come from nowhere: during his campaign, Wilson vocally supported the advancement of African Americans.
However, after he won the election, Wilson’s administration reversed course: The Post Office and the Department of the Treasury were ordered to segregate. Partitions separated Black and white workers’ desks. Several members of Wilson’s cabinet forbade their Black secretaries and clerks from using the same restaurants and bathrooms as their white counterparts. Many Black people lost faith in their efforts to advocate for equality in their local communities while segregation was encouraged and implemented in Washington, DC.
A year passed after Ida’s visit—still, the president did nothing. Ida was disappointed but not surprised. Frustrating years spent fighting for change with slow progress had inoculated her to the failings of government. Trotter was still hopeful that he could make an impact on Wilson, so he made an appointment in 1914 to visit the White House again on his own. The solo meeting was a disaster. Trotter was infuriated when President Wilson claimed that integration caused friction between colored and white clerks. The president tried to frame segregation as a benefit to Black people, because they could avoid being in humiliating situations.
Ida B. the Queen Page 7
