“A Tribute to Ida B. Wells” published in The Chicago Defender on April 18, 1931.

Weeping for you is lost—worthless

As a veil of sorrow tinged despair

That comes from the foul air

Of a clime where man’s access

Is defeat, hushed and desertness.

Your future is no turmoil bare

Of reward, etched in the glare

Of right and wrong, bubbling for

redress

Of black men. Yours is no death,

For you are not dead, but yet

With us in this realm where blatant

woc [sic]

Is out of its ken. buried beneath

Your always vibrant shining web.

Where the glow of justice yet will go.

Wallace Webb Scott

*

On Monday, Ida B. Wells was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously. Here is a link to a short biography and below a moving documentary, laying out the details of her political engagement, social activism, relentless pursuit of justice and truth, and above all her courage.

Born into slavery, she, too, lived through a pandemic – yellow fever – loosing both of her parents and a sibling to the illness. Only 16, she decided to work as a teacher to support her siblings. At every junction where despair hit, including losing anti-discrimination lawsuits at the Supreme Court, her anguish turned to fury and motivated her to increase her efforts to fight for social reform, to educate and to seek justice. She soon thrived on the work of being a journalist, even though it led to her losing her teaching job.

Lynch Laws were used to terrorize the Black population, and three of Well’s friends were murdered by a mob in 1883 when they opened a grocery store competing with White interests across the street. It is strongly believed that the local criminal court judge himself was one of the lynchers. No-one was brought to justice. And if you think that it’s all long ago: Read up on the modern day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, three months ago. A Black jogger hunted down and shot by two White men, three DAs doing nothing, the last of whom only convened a Grand Jury after a video of the crime surfaced two days ago. A reminder that nothing but nothing lies in only in the past. Wells is probably turning in her grave.

Wells took her power to the pen, and with her understanding of the politics of economics called for Blacks to leave Memphis – as they did by the thousands, migrating to Midwest locations. The White establishment was enraged, hit by the loss of business. Within Memphis she organized a boycott of the Trolley system that hurt the public transport people enough that they came to beg her to end the strike – she refused. She had discovered the power of organizing and devoted efforts towards it for all her life.

Lynching, of course continued and increased in numbers, attended by crowds up to 10.000 people who got voyeuristic pleasure out of the murders. So did violence against those who spoke out: Wells’ offices were ransacked, the printing presses destroyed, her life no longer safe in the South – she was in exile for a full 30 years before she returned, writing and organizing in NYC, creating the first national anti-lynching campaign (eventually she settled in Chicago). Her insight that slaves’s bodies were economically too valuable to be sacrificed, and therefor only harmed, not killed, but that freed Black bodies only represented competition and therefor had to be eliminated, drew national attention. People like Frederick Douglass started to correspond with her and acknowledge her contributions, although many Black leaders decried her for rocking the boat (and also having a problem with a woman being so powerful.)

It was when she visited Europe and founded an international-lynching organization that threatened to curtail the import of American cotton, an industry at the heart of the South, that lynchings became part of public debate among Whites and trailed off in reaction to the economic pressure. Her fight on two fronts – racism and sexism – continued. She joined the suffragist movement as well. The fight within the Black community – between the Radicals represented by DuBois whom she joined, and the Accommodationists, aligned with Booker T. Washington’s mission to keep segregation as a protective sphere for Blacks, also took a lot out of her, but she did not back down.

Before she died in 1931 she wrote about the Arkansas Race Riots, where her work had brought justice to 12 imprisoned, tortured men who had tried to unionize Black cotton-farmers. It’s worth a read if you care about organizing. Or justice.

She was a phenomenal woman, and the late recognition is something that should encourage us all.

Music from the South.

Tulips from years gone by – the farms are closed because of the virus….