Biographical and Critical Essay
"Woman's Mission"
Crusade for Justice
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
About This Essay

American Newspaper Journalists, 1873-1900

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

• Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases (New York: New York Age, 1892).

• The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition--the Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature, by Wells-Barnett, Frederick Douglass, I. Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett (Chicago: Ida B. Wells, 1893).

• A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 (Chicago: Ida B. Wells, 1895).

• Mob Rule in New Orleans (Chicago: Ida B. Wells, 1900).

• Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

• Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, edited by Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

• The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells: An Intimate Portrait of the Activist as a Young Woman, edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon, 1995).

Editions

• Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997).

• The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition--the Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature, by Wells-Barnett, Frederick Douglass, I. Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett, edited by Robert W. Rydell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

Throughout her public career, Ida B. Wells-Barnett consistently broke new political and professional ground. One of but a few black women in journalism, Wells became editor of her local black weekly, the Memphis Free Speech, in 1889. When that paper was destroyed in the aftermath of a lynching and her own life was threatened, Wells became contributing editor and part-owner of the New York Age and, later, editor of Chicago's Conservator. Her investigative reporting led her to the scenes of recent lynchings. Through diligent fact-gathering, Wells established an unprecedented analysis of the economic and institutional nature of racial violence and its dependence on racist and sexist ideologies and gender subordination. Traveling alone, she launched a vigorous international crusade against lynching terror in the United States, speaking during the period from 1892 to 1895 to groups of men and women, white and black, in the United States, England, and Scotland.

Wells's activity had a measurable impact on the national action against racial violence and for civil rights. Always an outspoken advocate for black political independence, physical self-defense, and economic retaliation, she combined a doctrine of economic self-sufficiency with an understanding of the economic leverage African Americans must bring to bear in demanding their due. She believed national organizations must demand influence and accountability from state and federal governments. Consequently Wells was active in the National Colored Press Association and the Afro-American League. The antilynching cause, and the attacks against her character that her lectures aroused, helped galvanize the black women's club movement at a national level. She participated in the founding of organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Eventually settling in Chicago, she worked there with the service club named in her honor and went on to establish the Negro Fellowship League and the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first black woman suffrage organization. She also established a kindergarten, a settlement house, and other organizations to provide essential services to Chicago's urban working-class black community as that population grew by tens of thousands between the years 1895 and 1915.

At the turn of the century, Wells-Barnett was an outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington's accomodationist politics and growing influence. By her own account, this fact cost her the good favor and support of black organizers and white philanthropists who, in this political climate, grew increasingly conservative or sought more compromising positions in order to extend their political functionality. Though she was active on the committee that inaugurated the NAACP, she could not back the course it chose to secure the support of influential white members and philanthropists. She faulted the elitism of "exclusives" among her own race, like W. E. B. Du Bois, who she felt wanted to keep the national organization and its Chicago branch "in the hands of the exclusive academic few." In a letter she declared that this academic few "credit for representing the race that they ignore and withdraw themselves from on every occasion of real need." Not least among her extraordinary accomplishments, Wells supported her four siblings when in her teens and twenties and raised her own four children in her thirties and forties.

Ida Baker Wells was born into slavery on 16 July 1862, the first of eight children born to Jim and Elizabeth Warrenton Wells. The family lived in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where Shaw University, later known as Rust, was founded by the Freedman's Aid Society in 1866. Jim Wells was a trustee of the college, and daughter Ida attended classes there until she was fifteen years old. Her education was interrupted by a yellow-fever epidemic that struck the town in 1877-1878. While Wells was staying with her grandmother outside of Holly Springs, the epidemic claimed the lives of both parents and her infant brother. Two other siblings died shortly after. Returning to nurse the family and electing to keep the children together in spite of the advice of family friends, sixteen-year-old Ida took up full-time teaching at the school six miles from home. Eventually she sought the higher pay offered in the public schools of Memphis, forty miles to the north. She arranged work in Holly Springs for the two oldest boys, and keeping the two youngest sisters in her charge, she moved to the city and was selected as one of twenty black instructors in the public school system. Paid irregularly, Wells received a salary of approximately sixty dollars per month and took charge of seventy pupils in an overcrowded building. She became a determined and outspoken critic of the limited resources and second- and third-rate conditions that increasingly characterized education for black children.

During this period, Wells, already a mature independent woman and hardworking guardian, began to illustrate forcibly the qualities and concerns that she shared with other women of the emerging and tenuous black middle class. Raised in the communal and institutional-service framework of the black church by a deeply religious mother and reading the newspaper to a politically active father, Wells could not escape the grounding in Christian duty, Victorian respectability, and race responsibility that molded the ideological and practical commitments of many black women of her generation. Gender roles within the post-emancipation African American community were distinct from those historically held by white communities. Black women were expected to share as leaders and participants in the public work and in all aspects of theological and practical education within the black community. Yet, this active public role was fused with domestic expectations adapted from the Victorian ideal of True Womanhood. Proscriptions on courtship and sexual proprieties registered with particular force among the middle class, as black women sought to prove the error of centuries of racist sexual propaganda about their character.

Strictly circumspect about her personal reputation, yet dissatisfied with teaching, disinterested in marriage, and averse to housework, Wells felt limited by the professional options confronting black women and the domestic expectations attending black womanhood. In this early period, years before she began to edit her own paper or became internationally known as a skillful orator and relentless crusader against lynching, Wells kept a diary to take account of her writing, thought, and action in intimate terms. Declaring herself "an anomaly to my self as well as to others," she used her diary to ponder, "what kind of creature will I become?" When her aunt sought better opportunities for herself and Wells's siblings in California, she insisted Wells join them and teach in the Visalia school system. Wells felt keenly the contradiction between the woman she wished to become and what she had learned was her Christian and womanly duty. She was pained at the call to forsake the cultural stimulus and support of the African American community in dynamic Memphis in order to see to the domestic needs of her family. After tortured deliberations and reversals, Wells eventually borrowed money to return to Memphis with her youngest sister and pursue her teaching and budding writing career in that setting.

In Memphis, Wells began to demonstrate and consciously develop the personality, ambitions, and skills that distinguished her as editor and activist. Feeling sharply the lack in her own educational background, she continued her intellectual development, taking private lessons in dramatic recitation and joining the teachers' Friday evening "lyceum," a salon for recitation, literary exchange, and cultured conversation. The weekly salon ended with the reading of a new "edition" of the Evening Star, which Wells terms a "spicy journal" of reviews, community news, and commentary prepared and recited exclusively for this company. Wells was eventually elected editor of the salon journal and learned she liked the task well. Mailing occasional public letters to the various white and black newspapers and writing streams of private letters to friends and a shifting cast of male mentors and romantic interests--sometimes seven letters a day--Wells increasingly defined herself as a writer and political commentator in an era when her professional options as a black woman, as she perceived them, were limited to that of menial or teacher.

In 1884, when approached by a Baptist publication and asked to become a regular contributor, Wells began submitting commentaries on current matters under the pen name "Iola." These were soon reprinted in other black press publications, and "Iola" gained a larger following. It is clear even in this early journalism that any historical consideration of Wells's writing must attend to the social concerns that drove her. Wells's first published piece in the Living Way discusses a lawsuit she herself had brought against the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad, one of the first of its kind. Wells was frustrated that more African Americans did not seem to see the relevance of the complaint "as a race matter." She sought and won damages of $500 for the railroad's insistence that she move from the first-class coach to a separate smoking car. The year before she brought this case, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, and the South had grown bolder in its disenfranchisement of black citizens. While the lower court outcome was therefore a great victory against the encroachment of Jim Crow legislation in her region, Wells's faith in the legal system and her "hopes for her people" were soon crushed when the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the ruling in 1887.

It is useful to read Wells's diary of the same period in juxtaposition with her early news writing. The diary not only provides clues to the development of Wells's style and identity as a writer, but it also shows her grappling in a personal way with the civil concerns she often took up in her columns. The diary demonstrates that her life as a writer is deeply invested in two of these thematically interrelated concerns, which form the basis of the writing and activism of her later years: first, her interest in black leadership that could forge unified action in the face of specific political challenges, and second, her concern with the role of black womanhood in advancing the race.

Wells started her diary at the close of 1885. At the age of twenty-three she began to think intensely in writing about the options before her as a determinedly single black woman, a writer and a resistant witness to the repeal of Reconstruction gains. Her diary entries are not usually personally or emotionally intense. Many open and close with prayer as a formulaic structuring device; just as frequently, others open or close with a budget record, items needed or purchased and their cost, loan payments, or bills due. In the diary 's pages Wells keeps accounts of her daily expenditures, letters received and sent, reactions to news, and notes for essays.

In the diary Wells logs incidents to include in her novel. While she never wrote this novel, and her notes are too vague to reveal her concept of the novel's themes or plot, her notations are provocative. She records three interracial incidents pursued in court--the case against a black girl's fight in self-defense against a white girl and attempts to legalize two interracial sexual unions.

The diary therefore reveals literary aspirations that Wells fails to confess in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, which was unpublished until 1970. In the autobiography Wells describes herself in girlhood as "a voracious reader": "I had formed my ideals on the best of Dickens's stories, Louisa May Alcott's, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney 's and Charlotte Bronte's books, and Oliver Optic's stories for boys. I had read the Bible and Shakespeare through, but I had never read a Negro book or anything about Negroes." Yet, the mature and accomplished autobiographer presents herself as a young woman without real training, merely an instinctive insight into her audience: "So in weekly letters to the Living Way, I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things which concerned our people. Knowing that their education was limited, I never used a word of two syllables where one would serve the purpose. I signed these articles 'Iola.'" This is one account of Wells's stylistic development; her early diary suggests another. In her diary she reviews novels she has finished and evaluates the characters. While on the one hand these entries suggest Wells is using the diary to study rhetorical technique and narrative prose, on the other she seems to be appraising possible models of manly and womanly behavior as well. For instance, she discusses her disappointment in the "sunshine and flowers" heroine of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (1862) in much the same way she records her judgments concerning the character of her acquaintances, ministers, and neighbors. In the diary Wells practices with a sentimental style and with other more plain and direct forms of argument. It is interesting therefore to see her journalism apply each according to her estimate of what is appropriate to a given subject or audience.

Significantly, her first diary entry, for 29 December 1885, coincides with the publication of her essay "Woman's Mission," a piece that offers Yuletide reflections on woman's place in "all histories, biblical and political, ancient and modern." Women, the essay notes, have "ascended the scale of human progress" in proportion to men's increasing enlightenment. Stating that women's influence is "boundless," Wells chooses archetypal examples of their spiritual and moral impact; for instance, Eve's influential error was eventually made right by the Virgin's holy deeds. She speaks as well to women's educational mission, including their contributions through writing, and here her example is closer to her historical moment. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1985), Wells points out, "was indirectly one of the causes of the abolition of slavery. " She calls upon the "masses of the women of our race" to embody purity, piety, and nobility and, as she was to repeat on many occasions, encourages thought and action in the form of charitable works.

In stark stylistic contrast, a newspaper column printed one month earlier, "Freedom of Political Action," dispenses with the heightened prose, mythic scope, and sweeping ideals in which "Woman's Mission" is steeped. Though female and thus barred from the vote, Wells designates herself a political independent and forthrightly claims the prerogative of politicking and party affiliation. She faults black voters (implicitly men)--and T. Thomas Fortune, the editor of the Plaindealer, in particular--for their narrow-minded, "slavish," ahistorical political analysis:

I am not a Democrat, because the Democrats considered me a chattel and possibly might have always so considered me, because their record from the beginning has been inimical to my interests; because they had become notorious in their hatred of the Negro as a man, have refused him the ballot, have murdered, beaten and outraged him and refused him his rights. I am not a Republican, because, after they--as a party measure and an inevitable result of the war--had "given the Negro his freedom" and the ballot box following, all through their reign--while advocating the doctrine of the Federal Government's right of protecting her citizens--they suffered the crimes against the Negro, that have made the South notorious.

While all her essays on women show the impact of sentimental fiction on Wells's style, she clearly has two stylistic standards at work: the heightened style with which she exhorts the category Woman and the type of sharp-edged historical litany with which she, as a woman of political action, calls both political parties and their supporters to accountability. In the latter, Wells's prose is practical, demonstrating force and wit.

In the published essays that follow "Woman's Mission," Wells evolves a concept of women's leadership as well as their influence. Both are exercised primarily in the act of safeguarding their own virtue and in instructing men in the responsibilities of noble manhood and race advancement. Wells wrote "Our Women" (1887) and "The Model Woman: A Pen Picture of the Typical Southern Girl" (1888) in order to refute the "wholesale contemptuous defamation of women." She portrays "the typical girl" of African descent as the embodiment of the Victorian ideal. In "A Story of 1900" (1886) Wells tells a "future" history of a teacher who learns that examples from life instill "manly independence." Wells's only short fiction, "Two Christmas Days: A Holiday Story" (1894), shows a competitive woman of high standards who turns her efforts to cultivating proper, sober, male achievement on behalf of the race.

In her diary from 1885 to 1887--rather than in her journalism--Wells tests the boundaries of the Victorian ideal of woman's mission with reference to herself and her political role. Indeed, as her model requires, she robustly instructed her acquaintances, even employers, in a vital and active manhood, often pushing men to the point of vexation. In keeping with this aspect of the mission, she also established a Sunday school for the special training of young men. Events and Wells's own disposition, however, caused her to modify this model and reach for forms of influence traditionally wielded by men. Her diary also foreshadows the censure she received as a result of her efforts to originate action and to organize African American men and women for political participation and social service.

For this reason, perhaps, this early diary often seems less a confessional space or a dramatic address to an ideal self and more an experiment with the perception and projection of her own image. In the diary Wells speaks of "cabinets" or photographed portraits that she frequently made and then sent to various correspondents. This series of self-portraits, calculated in their composition of subject and stance, offers an inviting metaphor for the various writing personae and literary styles Wells constructed in the diary and circulated in other forms. In its pages she strategized about the tone and position she should strike in personal letters, wondering how her "motherly" posture or commanding tone would be received. She scrutinized her own behavior, accomplishments, and dissatisfactions in light of the model of womanhood offered by her predominantly male circle of mentors, even when she strained against that model.

The photographs were also an apt figure for the control she sought over her public image. Wells was the frequent subject of gossip, which pained her. As an outspoken and active public school teacher, Wells did not threaten prevailing expectations of women's activity. However, as a woman in her mid to late twenties, still single despite male attentions, and increasingly active in a male-dominated profession, Wells at times was seen as a novelty and at other times a threat. Her "improper" womanliness was censured by the local gossip circuit that insulted her propriety, rumoring that she had been dismissed from her post due to immorality and speculating that she was "taking money" from white men or that her young sister Lily was in fact her daughter. Though she rarely recorded these slanders in specific detail, she objected to accusations against her virtue with indignant passion.

In her professional networks outside her social circle, it was her manliness that became the issue. Continuous comparison to men was often meant to be flattering, as in T. Thomas Fortune's appraisal in 1888 that "she has become famous as one of the few of our women who handles a goose quill with diamond point as handily as any of us men in newspaper work. . . . If Iola was a man she would be a humming Independent in politics. She has plenty of nerve; she is as smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug."

By 1889, when Wells became co-owner, editor, and sales manager of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, her "novelty" seemed less charming. An editorialist for the Indianapolis Freeman wrote, "The unwritten laws of human conduct, and of journalistic ethics shield many audacious feminine writers from castigations which they richly merit. For this almost inviolable statute the Memphis 'Free Speech and Headlight' has many reasons to be thankful." This statement ran on the same page that featured a two-part editorial cartoon lampooning Wells's journalism as mere barking nuisance, and a derivative nuisance at that. One small panel depicts Wells with her hair styled in her trademark bun, but, uncharacteristically, cross-dressed in a suit with a top hat by her side. The caption reads "I would I were a Man." Beside this panel is a cartoon of two small dogs with human heads (one with trademark bun, one in the likeness of Fortune). "Fortune and his 'Echo'" are known "for their propensity to bark" and yelp "at unseemly hours." The Indianapolis Freeman, depicted as a larger, more stately newshound, "is thus forced to grin and bear it."

Just as the diary gives clues to her transformative struggle with the concept of "Black womanhood" and leadership, it also indicates that her political strategy underwent a decided shift as she observed that educational and professional "advancements" were not lessening the force of prejudice against black citizens; indeed, advancement was met with increasingly repressive tactics--both legal and illegal. Her diary records comments on lynchings: she notes the shooting of thirteen black men who were attending a trial in Carrollton County, Mississippi, exclaiming "O, God when will these massacres cease." Recording the death of a black woman "taken from the county jail and stripped naked and hung up in the courthouse yard and her body riddled with bullets and left exposed to view," Wells writes on 4 September 1886, "Can such things be and no justice for it? . . . It may be unwise to express myself so strongly but I cannot help it and I know not if capital may not be made of it against me but I trust in God." Her experience with the railroad was a case in point, and one week after she writes that she is "sorely bitterly disappointed" in the failure of this case, she attended a local Negro Mutual Protective Association organized to fight white violence and the politics of accommodation. Calling the group "the best thing out," she writes on 18 April 1887: "The Negro is beginning to think for himself and find out that strength for his people and consequently for him is to be found only in unity." From this point toward the close of this first diary, her public writing moves increasingly toward radical protest.

As editor of the Memphis Free Speech, she had sparred with the influential editors of Northern papers and crafted a high standard of social responsibility for opinion leaders such as editors of the press. An editorial she wrote on the state of black educational resources cost her the teaching appointment that supported her. Wells took the lesson that "free speech" required economic independence and proved herself a canny businesswoman. She resolved to make a living off the newspaper, something few if any managers of a black weekly had done. Wells built a regional subscriber base for the Free Speech that paid within ten dollars of her annual teaching salary.

With her own press, Wells sharpened her brand of critique on national issues as well as local. Though copies of the paper no longer exist, her editorials were occasionally reprinted by white newspapers. Her incisive delivery forced examination of the presumptions underlying customary rhetoric or practice. Noting that blacks were sent to prison for stealing 5¢ while whites were honored for absconding with thousands of dollars, the paper offered this advice to the black perpetrator: "Let him steal big." Reports of a Kentucky lynching to which blacks responded with retaliatory violence received editorial endorsement: "Not until the Negro rises in his might and takes a hand in resenting such cold-blooded murders, if he has to burn up whole towns, will a halt be called in wholesale lynching." Wells's editorials used a penchant for ironic inversion and shocking statement to jar recognition of a racial or sexual double standard.

Wells's shift in political tactics was sealed on a second instance of gross injustice supported by the legal system: the 1892 lynching of friends, the razing of black businesses, the hasty arrest of many of Memphis's black citizens, and the destruction of the Free Speech. From March to May 1892, black Memphis refused to settle. Wells's personal proximity to these events gave her insight into the deliberate, economic motives that supported lynching terror. A prosperous black grocery and its owners had been targeted for death and destruction with the full knowledge of the leading white dailies, the legal system, and the city's "ruling men." She later told audiences that in light of this "rude awakening," she, and black Memphis with her, could no longer believe "that the maintenance of character, money-getting and education would finally solve our problem and that it depended on us to say how soon this would be brought about." Nor could she any longer accept the rape charge used to justify lynching, though she admitted that she--along with many prominent black leaders--once had.

The Free Speech endorsed what amounted to an economic pullout from Memphis. Wells urged black citizens of Memphis to boycott the streetcar lines and to "save our money and leave a town which . . . takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by whites." Wells herself traveled West to send word via the Free Speech as to the opportunities available in that territory. By one account, as many as two thousand, and Wells writes six thousand, left Memphis, and at least two ministers packed up their entire congregations to move to Oklahoma. Six weeks after the lynching, the streetcar company superintendent and treasurer visited Wells's office to ask her to encourage black citizens to use the electric rails again.

Wells was traveling when her final editorial was printed. Attacking the "threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women," Wells implied what her own investigations had begun to uncover: that white women who willingly entered relations with black men often misrepresented the liaison as "rape" to save themselves from castigation. Threats against her life prevented her from returning to Memphis. By the time the Free Speech was destroyed, Wells had already begun another response to lynching, compiling the statistics and analysis that she would circulate as widely as possible at home and abroad. She purchased one quarter interest in the New York Age and on 5 June published a front-page, seven-column account of the Memphis terrors. The paper sold ten thousand copies and launched her anti-lynching crusade. Wells published her first pamphlet, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors (1892), based on this New York Age account. Of the information she here compiled, the African American orator Frederick Douglass said, "I have spoken, but my voice is feeble in comparison." Wells was invited to speak in New York before a joint gathering of black women's clubs, and her lecture career began.

Wells was to publish several pamphlet-length analyses of lynching. Each offered documentation and subsequently developed lengthy analysis, the first of its kind. She used press accounts and statistics gathered by the white Chicago Tribune and featured testimony published in other white papers to expose mob violence as a calculated attack on black economic and political power. In light of her evidence, lynching, often carried out in conjunction with mass arrests and the looting and destruction of black-owned businesses or homes, was an obvious attempt to buy or squelch the black vote, restrict black business, and ensure black consumers for white goods and services.

Yet, in spite of these facts, lynching had long been justified as an understandable outburst of rage and vengeance in response to the "outrage" of white women at the hands of brutish black rapists. In reviewing the evidence as the white press itself recorded it, Wells found that in only a third of these cases were accusations of rape made either before or after the murder. In no cases, of course, was the alleged perpetrator given a trial, and in many cases it was later shown that the charges were deliberately false. In refuting the trumped- up rape narrative that protected lynchers, Wells also addressed the violence to which black women were subject without any effective form of legal protection or redress.

Wells's writing coupled her attack on the sexual propaganda that excused lynching with an attack on the institutional mechanisms that supported it. The lynchers were supported by local authorities and by public sentiment as molded by "press and pulpit." Wells's pamphlets emphasize the collaboration of local institutions in a lynching event. In one of her most striking accounts of lynching in these terms, Wells notes that in anticipation of the hanging of Harry Smith in March 1892, the railways to Paris, Texas, offered free fares; public schools cancelled classes; whiskey shops closed; and newspapers assigned their best reporters so the event could be reported in graphic detail, reproduced, and disseminated. Smith, mounted on a float and paraded through town before he was tortured and burned, drew a crowd of ten thousand.

Faced with such realities, Wells insisted that African Americans must be prepared to act in their own defense. She herself bought a pistol after the Memphis lynchings, and in her famous declaration in Southern Horrors advised, "A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give."

Wells's pamphlets are carefully crafted rhetorical tools. Returning from her first lecture tour abroad, she offered a statement on "Lynch Law" in the pamphlet she initiated and circulated at the World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893: The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (1893). After her second tour, Wells published A Red Record (1895), which expanded on Southern Horrors and included accounts of conflicts that arose on the tour abroad. She printed Mob Rule in New Orleans in 1900, and her autobiography mentions one last pamphlet printed in 1922, The Arkansas Race Riot. Her writing routinely avoids sentiment, using facts and scenarios drawn from white press news reports. She frequently invokes patriotic rhetoric in an ironic and biting deflation of terms such as "Christian civilization," "home of the free and land of the brave." The pamphlets speak initially from personal authority, offering the story of the Memphis lynching. She demonstrates for the reader how she, and implicitly the reader, was forced to reject her long-standing belief that gradual education and elevation of her race would end violence. Her personal account is then supported by accounts of similar lynching scenarios drawn from reports in a number of states. She offers several years of lynching statistics broken down to show the type of accusation that justified the murders.

The pamphlets propose the following public course of action: collect accurate information and make the facts known; call for loud denunciations from all who present themselves as a force for Christian morality; apply economic leverage to retaliate; work for resolutions and federal and state legislation against lynching; and call legislators and law enforcement to account when the law is violated.

In her two extended lecture tours through Scotland and England, Wells set this program in motion. She asked British business opinion to do the work black economic power could not do alone. On her second lecture tour, Wells served as a correspondent to the white Chicago Inter-Ocean. Her articles differ from the pamphlets in rhetorical strategy and demonstrate a publicist's eye. These reports are partly travelogue and partly a document of the proceedings of her meetings with various groups. Understanding the dependence of U.S. exporters on British industry, she began her reports with a discussion of the manufacturing interest of Liverpool or Manchester before detailing the success of her anti-lynching lectures in that vicinity. As with her pamphlets, these "Ida B. Wells Abroad" columns developed a mode of indirect self-presentation she would use at length in her autobiography. Quoting British papers, she presented her own lectures, reception, and success as seen by an impartial observer.

Traveling abroad and giving public descriptions of lynchings, Wells not only made herself a news event, she also altered the focus of the lynching spectacle. Wells trained British eyes on the white lynchers and the festive ritual that surrounds the black victim. When assessing the results of the tours, Wells noted that now U.S. governors, papers, legislators, and bishops have all been compelled to "take cognizance" and to "speak in one way or another" concerning these crimes: "This has not been because there was any latent spirit of justice voluntarily asserting itself, especially in those who do the lynching, but because the entire American people now feel, both North and South, that they are objects in the gaze of the civilized world."

On her return to the United States, Wells devoted one additional year to lectures on lynching across the nation. She then settled in Chicago and accepted the marriage proposal of Ferdinand L. Barnett, an attorney and editor of the Chicago's black Conservator. Married in June 1895, Wells hyphenated her name in an early example of that practice. She immediately took over editorship of the paper, until her first child, Charles, was born. At that point she retired from public affairs to attend to the job of raising an infant, though this retirement proved to be brief. She recounts criticism she received from various quarters upon marrying and therefore "deserting" the lynching cause. At two points in her autobiography she notes the irony of such remarks since she had married in part due to a lack of financial and moral support for her one-woman anti-lynching crusade.

Wells-Barnett began an autobiography, Crusade for Justice, in 1928. In addition to this text she left two other diaries, a fragment of her 1893 travel diary and a 1930 diary. Both are brief and feature short two- to three-line entries with some occasional, provocative paragraph-length commentaries on her activites. The autobiography is the best soure for insight into her mature years and work, however. Presented in clear, spare journalistic style, the autobiography is of interest for the details it offers on Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction persons and politics. As author, Wells-Barnett maintained a focus on her public life and offered only small glimpses into her personal life. Moving from her early years as a teacher, editor, and antilynching lecturer to her mature years of Chicago politicking and national activism, the autobiography extended to four hundred pages before she left it uncompleted. It is organized around specific campaigns and organizational efforts rather than a strictly chronological view of her life. In it she recounts the activism of her Chicago years in detail, making careful record of the number and type of organizations that she established or aided in Chicago at the turn of the century. She continued efforts to organize groups capable of addressing "anti-Negro" legislation in Illinois and the lynchings that continued in her state and across the nation. Wells felt the need to fight segregation and to provide simultaneously services for the the black community where white organizations and civic authorities refused to serve African Americans.

The preface opens with the exchange between the sixty-year-old author and a twenty-five-year-old woman who confesses she has often heard Wells-Barnett referred to as a modern Joan of Arc, yet she has no idea why. "Won't you please tell me what it was you did, so the next time I am asked such a question I can give an intelligent answer?" It is to this woman and other youth that Wells-Barnett dedicates the book, attesting to the facts that no record existed to which the student could turn and that few documents had recorded the "authentic race history of Reconstruction times" from the view of the participants.

Throughout the autobiography one feels Wells- Barnett's own conviction that she was called to fight lynching, a Christian duty she must undertake with or without support of her peers. One reads as well her frustration at that lack of support, which she at times felt bordered on obstruction. The personal history offers recurring examples of Wells-Barnett's frustration with the lack of African American concern and resistance in the face of continued lynchings, riots, and forms of legislative aggression against black rights. She records criticism she had received from "some of our men for jumping in ahead of them and doing work without giving them a chance." Yet, she felt it her duty to act even when others would not. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," she concludes.

Throughout the autobiography, the fragile understanding and cooperation between black and white women activists recurs with almost thematic insistence. She also devotes pages to disagreements with prominent African American leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. She recounts her exchanges with other important personages of the era such as Douglass, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Mary Church Terrell, William Monroe Trotter, Marcus Garvey, Susan B. Anthony, and Jane Addams.

With regard to her later work as an organization woman, she decries the "personal element" and misguided interests that betrayed many of the efforts she led. The text witnesses to conflicts of interest and personality that hampered work of various organizations. In her detailed procedural accounts of meetings, she seems determined to correct misperceptions and to present her own role in the many involved conflicts internal to these organizations. These accounts demonstrate Wells-Barnett's considerable savvy as to political networks, alliances, and procedural know-how. Yet, they also demonstrate her ability to alienate supporters quickly with actions she proclaimed to be matters of principle or common sense and that others perceived to be matters of self-interest on the part of a determined and practiced political strategist.

Wells-Barnett's autobiography, uncompleted as it was, does not mention her run for the Illinois Senate in 1930. Though she lost that race decisively, biographer Mildred I. Thompson suggests Wells-Barnett may have undertaken the campaign not to win but rather to demonstrate the voting strength of Illinois's black women and men. At the end of her life, Wells-Barnett noted with disappointment that even her anti-lynching contribution had been omitted from the study of black history completed by Carter Woodson in 1930. She remained active to her death, which, according to her daughter and editor Alfreda Duster, overtook her suddenly. Returning home one Saturday in March 1931, Wells-Barnett went to bed not feeling well; she died four days later of uremia.

Wells-Barnett's writing offers rare insight into the life of a late-nineteenth-century black woman who witnessed the gains of Reconstruction and their betrayal from a Southern vantage point. She was part of the political and intellectual ferment that gave rise to the African American artistic, cultural, and organizational "Renaissance" of the early twentieth century. Her work represents an aggressive black feminism emerging with the black women's club movement, and, as a militant publicist and agitator committed to urban working-class needs, she unsettles the opposition between Washington and DuBois with which historians traditionally have framed study of political debate at the turn of the century.

With the posthumous publication of her autobiography, diaries, and the continuing work of scholars who cull papers and magazines in order to reprint her essays, pamphlets, and journalism, another generation of educators, activists, and writers have the opportunity to assess the woman and her tremendous legacy anew.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Biographies:

• Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990).

• Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

References:

• T. Thomas Fortune, "Mr. Fortune on the West, Glances at Indianapolis and Chicago," New York Age (11 August 1888): 1.

• "Scintillations," Indianapolis Freeman (19 April 1890): 4.

• David M. Tucker, "Miss Ida B. Wells and Memphis Lynching," Phylon, 32 (Summer 1971): 112-122.

• Roland Wolseley, "Ida B. Wells-Barnett: Princess of the Black Press," Encore, 5 (April 1976): 2.

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