To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells
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Born to slaves in 1862, Ida B. Wells became a fearless antilynching crusader, women’s rights advocate, and journalist. Wells’s refusal to accept any compromise on racial inequality caused her to be labeled a “dangerous radical” in her day but made her a model for later civil rights activists as well as a powerful witness to the troubled racial politics of her era. Though she eventually helped found the NAACP in 1910, she would not remain a member for long, as she rejected not only Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism but also the moderating influence of white reformers within the early NAACP. In the richly illustrated To Tell the Truth Freely, the historian Mia Bay vividly captures Wells’s legacy and life, from her childhood in Mississippi to her early career in late-nineteenth-century Memphis and her later life in Progressive-era Chicago.Publishers WeeklyBay (The White Image in the Black Mind) delineates journalist and antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells's life (1862-1931) and her passionate commitment "to a range of causes so extensive that they defy easy summary." When her parents died in 1878, 16-year-old Wells became the head of her family, caring for her five siblings. After a brief stint teaching, she found her two callings-political activism and, more powerfully, journalism, becoming by the late 1880s "one of the most prolific and well-known black female journalists of her day." In 1884, she sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad over segregated cars; in 1889, she became part owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech newspaper. In 1892, catalyzed by the lynching of three black businessmen, she devoted herself to "an anti-lynching campaign that would cost her the Memphis newspaper, threaten her life, and sever her ties to Memphis forever." Bay relies heavily on Wells's published writing, especially her posthumous autobiography, Crusade for Justice, supplemented by secondary sources, making this a useful book for students. The perilous edge that Wells traversed, however, is blunted; she led a life full of drama, but Bay's quotidian account is an utterly unexciting summary. (Feb.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
List of Illustrations 3Introduction "If Iola Were a Man" 31 Coming of Age in Mississippi 152 Walking in Memphis 403 The Lynching at the Curve 824 Exile 1095 Capturing the Attention of the "Civilized World" 1516 "Although a Busy Woman, She Has Found the Time to Marry" 1917 Challenging Washington, D.C. - and Booker T. 2328 Reforming Chicago 2749 Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty 314Notes 329Acknowledgments 359Index 361
