Reading the South

Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching.
By Paula J. Giddings. New York: Amistad/ HarperCollins, 2008. 800 pages.
$35.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.

In 1990, when first-class postage cost a quarter, I knew one fact about the figure on the new Black Heritage stamp: Ida B. Wells was involved in the antilynching movement at the end of the 19th century. The stamp inspired a visit to the campus library, where I was startled to learn that Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, 25 miles north of the University of Mississippi. Ida B. Wells should be a household name, at least in every Mississippi house. Yet, few of my students can identify her, even now; and the audience was small at Square Books last year when Smith College professor Paula J. Giddings, on a national book tour, gave a gripping account of her subject.

At 800 pages, Giddings’s life of this great Mississippian provides a hefty remedy to the prevailing lack of knowledge. Recently released in paperback, Ida: A Sword among Lions won the American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award and was a 2008 National Book Critics
Circle finalist. The title echoes the Psalmist’s image of the tongue as a “sharp sword,” an apt metaphor for Wells’s skill on the speaker’s platform and in her exchanges with Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois, Susan B. Anthony, and other famous colleagues. At Square Books, the biographer also pointed out the pen-as-sword symbolism in the tiny Victorian engraving of a woman’s hand directing a feather quill beneath the word Ida on the dust jacket. Giddings explained that the teenaged Wells taught in a rural school near Holly Springs to support her orphaned siblings; but, after she moved to Memphis for a better teaching position, she “found herself in journalism” and became involved in “every progressive movement of her time.”

In fact, the biography’s scope is much more comprehensive than the subtitle "Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching" suggests. For decades, Wells wrote news columns and published pamphlets against this horrible form of racial injustice, exposing the barbaric treatment of victims from several Southern states. The 1892 lynchings of three Memphis men, including her good friend Thomas Moss, were sickeningly close to home. But Wells’s lifelong concerns also included women’s suffrage, early childhood education, unions, prisoners’ rights, political corruption, and other hotly debated issues. She was an investigative reporter before that phrase became commonplace, and Giddings traces her career in absorbing detail, citing scores of archival collections, from Holly Springs’ Rust College Library to the Library of Congress. Repeatedly, she quotes from period newspapers, including the Memphis Commercial, which described the controversial Wells as a “saddle-colored Sapphira,” a “notorious courtesan,” and “the wench.” In contrast, the Christian Recorder compared her to Joan of Arc.

Like Wells’s journalism, Ida: A Sword among Lions is thoroughly documented—dense with names, dates, and statistics. In relating the deaths of Wells’s parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, Giddings recreates the situation in Holly Springs, an elevated area known for its “healthy climate” and the reputed “healing properties” of its springs. After infected refugees arrived from other towns, the mayor was the “first local casualty,” and more than half of the 3,500 residents fled. Giddings categorizes the deaths of adults and children by race and sex. Although African Americans were as likely as whites to catch the disease, their survival rate was much higher because of their “greater immunity to tropicborn diseases.” Giddings combed Holly Springs death notices before concluding that the Wellses were apparently “the only black family to suffer multiple mortalities.”

The narrative of Wells’s life unfolds with great dramatic appeal, and Giddings ends most chapters on an anticipatory note that propels the reader onward. This technique is ideal for portraying Wells, a theater lover who “appalled” a suitor “when she told him that she was studying for a reading of Lady Macbeth—the murderous Scot who begged the gods to ‘unsex’ her sufficiently to do what she had to do.” Gender and sexuality are crucial considerations throughout Ida. Giddings describes Wells, a major supporter of women’s organizations, as a Victorian who courageously rejected any narrow “Victorian way of thinking.” Wells’s straightforward remarks on interracial sexual relationships offended blacks as well as whites; moreover, she was “one of the few women reformers who actually used the word rape, and had learned to do so without apology.” Allegations of rape were often the excuse for torturing, maiming, hanging, and burning African Americans, sometimes in public spectacles that drew women and even children. Giddings says that Wells was “careful not to claim that no black man was guilty of rape”; she nevertheless believed “that the South was using the charge against black men to hide its own deficiencies, particularly from the eyes of the suspicious and investor-laden North.”

Her newspaper office destroyed and her life threatened, Wells became a permanent exile to the North in the violent aftermath of the Memphis lynchings. In Chicago, she married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer, activist, and newspaper founder who—like Wells—“was capable of militant indignation and believed in self defense by any means necessary.” Motherhood (two sons and two daughters) barely slowed the pace of Wells-Barnett’s work, and much of Giddings’s Ida explores campaigns from the second half of her life. “I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches,” she wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. In 1930 she was the first African American woman to run for a seat in Illinois’s Third Senatorial District; Wells-Barnett lost but planned to “profit by lessons of the campaign,” her diary reports. When she died of uremic poisoning the next year, the Chicago Defender emphasized her forceful place in “Chicago public life” for almost four decades. The minister who addressed an overflow crowd at her funeral praised “her untiring but almost hopeless war against civic oppression”; and a soloist sang, “I’ve Done My Work.”

Joan Wylie Hall