The Legacy Of Ida B. Wells

I think about the defining journalism of Ida B. Wells most often when I find myself ensnared by the clickbait that makes up so much of the coverage about Black people and Black life in America. There’s nothing wrong with the escapism of that writing. We need the respite, Lord knows. But we also need–and deserve–so much more. 

We deserve the whole of our lives documented truthfully. We deserve to know the everyday of our stories, including the real and often hard on-the-ground stories, the ones that we want so badly to end, but the ones we will only be able to end if we know the truth and the power that comes in working together in the name of that truth, in the name of our deepest need for freedoms that have never been the regular feature of Black America’s lives.

Ida B. Wells, born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16th 1862, anchored us almost single-handedly to that truth. Beginning at least by 1890, Wells made it her mission to accurately document the terrorism of lynching in America. “The people must know,” she said, “before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.”

Wells published her own pamphlets including Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases and The Red Record, co-owned and reported her own newspaper, Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, and eventually her work was carried in Black-owned papers across the nation. 

Wells not only recorded the fact that human beings were being killed, but also ensured that Americans knew that the dead were not, as characterized by white America, people guilty of crimes for which they were deserving of death. Their crime was the fact of their humanity, their lives and breaths, their dreams and labors, their loves. 

More, Wells applied sociological reasoning–science–to the occurrences of lynching, naming them as acts of terror that targeted Black people because whites feared the competition that newly and born free African Americans might pose. African Americans, after all, did the work and knew the land better than the whites who’d become so accustomed to giving orders, rather than by understanding the details of those orders.

The appreciation we have today for the vile and varied presentations of white supremacy can be traced back to many of our ancestors, Ida B. Wells chief among them. Every time we protest, through tears, the loss of another loved one to the white supremacy that drives the deadly actions of police and their civil counterparts, we are leaning upon the work Ida Wells committed her life to.

But had white America–and even some Black men–-had their way, we would never have known her name, let alone her work to end lynching, often produced alone and regularly under threat of death. White mobs destroyed her newspapers’ office in 1892.

And as the scholar Paula Giddings who wrote Wells’ award-winning biography, Ida: A Sword Among Lions noted, she “was surprised and disappointed to find that, despite her pioneering role as an anti-lynching activist and a founder of the NAACP, her name was not included in a contemporary Black history text by Carter G. Woodson, the ‘Father of Negro History.’”

But none of these acts deterred her. “Through journalism,” Wells declared, she found her truest self. And in her discovery of herself, she allowed us, generations on, to also discover ourselves. We who are journalist in particular, walk a road paved for us by Wells, for whom there were no mirrors, no roadmaps, no examples to follow. 

There were no computers, no central databases tracking police killings, no images of brutally slain young people like Emmett Till or Michael Brown to pull up and refer to. Wells—investigator, journalist, publisher, repository and archivist, was the thing itself. Telling the stories of us that are written with the sharp edges of our shattered hearts, Ida B. Wells was her own encyclopedia–and now ours.

We are her heirs.

And over more than two-and-a-half decades in journalism, I have see that inheritance displayed by us with stunning beauty in the pages of Essence, the New York Times, Ebony, the Washington Post, and here, at IOneDigital where my colleague and friend, Kirsten West Savali is vice-president. I came to know Kirsten nearly 10 years ago through her powerful bylines about how race is experienced by Black Americans in this country. Her work made me refer to her as the Ida B. Wells of our time.She was covering the intricacies and unspoken stories of our lives no one wanted told. Black lives to her mattered—before and after the hashtag and movement.

For this story, West Savali offered that,

Ida B. Wells-Barnett taught me that not only can I be both righteous and rigorous, but that, as a Black woman writer from Mississippi, I have a duty to be. She is the blueprint for those of us who write and report on white supremacy, sexual and state violence, and modern-day lynchings carried out by police officers across this nation

There is an image of her I love. In it, she’s holding onto her books—her paper and pen at the ready. Her eyes are tired, but focused. She’s willing us to keep going. Keep telling our stories. Keep digging, keep fighting, keep doing the work.

Her great granddaughter, Michelle Duster, once shared with me that her matriarch was tough because she had to be—because she loved her people that much. What an honor it is not just to learn from the inimitable and brave Ida B. Wells-Barnett, but to celebrate her entire life, and her deep, unyielding love for us.

Which is why today, July 16th, the day of her birth 162 years ago, should be a day we mark on calendars, a day when we take a moment to acknowledge that we are here, in part, because she was there.