Lost Black History
By Don Valentine
The annals of school curriculums have vanquished another stout hero into the shadows of obscurity. This time it was the double edge blade of “Intersectionality” that prevented Ida B. Wells from her proper helm in our school books. She was not just a woman, but carried a second cross of being a Black Woman.
Time magazine chronicles Intersectionality as, “a term popularized by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. In her 1991 article Mapping the Margins, she explained how people who are ‘both women and people of color’ are marginalized by ‘discourses that are shaped to respond to one [identity] or the other,’ rather than both.”
Ida grew up a slave during the time of Emancipation and into Jim Crow. This led to the hardscrabble life of Blacks in that era. Her parents learned to read after slavery and made sure their children were literate. She was the eldest of 8 kids in Holly Springs, Mississippi and became the head of the household when her parents died from yellow fever. The mature 16-year old went to work as a schoolteacher while continuing her own studies, and found the energy to teach Sunday school. In 1885, at the age of 23, she started writing and editing for the Evening Star.
Tennessee State Museum [tnmuseum.org] noted, “People would come to church just to hear her read it… a Baptist minister in Memphis who ran a weekly publication called the Living Way…asked Wells-Barnett to write a weekly column for the paper. She was one of only about fifteen Black female journalists.” She purchased a one third interest in the paper and became one of the country’s first Black female owners. After a close friend was lynched by mob of angry White grocery competitors, writing against lynching became one of her life missions.
Ida, became a boisterous proponent of women’s suffrage. In 1913 Ida took part in the first suffragist parade in Washington, D.C. It was organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and she was the sole Black woman in the Illinois delegation. American Association of University Women (AAUW) wrote, “Motivated in part by racism within the women’s suffrage movement, she went on to found and co-found a variety of civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Association of Colored Women and the Alpha Suffrage Club.”
She carried her fight for women’s rights to Europe. Ida was one of the first Black women to speak in Great Britain. Her lectures drew large crowds. Upon returning to the United States, she continued writing and even published another book on lynching called A Red Record. On her next invitation to England, she wrote about her adventures for a white-owned newspaper known as the Inter-Ocean. This made her one of the first Black foreign correspondents for an American newspaper. To learn more about this Black Feminist dynamo, read her autobiography Crusade for Justice.
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