This is a pretty book.  It has lots of colorful paintings, photographs and colored printing inside the book as well as on the cover.  While it is written as a book for adults, its look and feel is more oriented toward children.

 

For those who don’t know, Ida B. Wells was an important writer and activist.  She was born in 1862 in Mississippi and died in 1931 in Chicago.  She lost her parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic.  Wanting to keep her siblings together, Ida got a job as a teacher at age 16 to earn the money to support them.  She later took some of them to Memphis where she shifted from being a teacher to a writer.  She is primarily known for her tracts against lynching, which led to her being run out of town in 1892.

 

Pieces of Ida’s story are in this book, but not as a cohesive biography.  Written by Ida B. Wells’ great granddaughter, it tells a story, but not history, let alone herstory.  It’s more of a collection.  There are excerpts from Wells’ diary and her autobiography (which may be the same document), references to her own extensive articles and publications, paragraphs from her FBI file (apparently started before there actually was an FBI) and many digressions.

 

You find bits and pieces from the author’s personal history; descriptions of various race atrocities including many that happened long after Wells died (e.g. the Central Park Five); black heroes ranging from Frederick Douglass to Colin Kaepernick; important black women (e.g. Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris).  There is a long section on memorials: *streets and buildings named after Ida as well as various acknowledgments of her importance.  

 

There are some gaps. Very little is said about her frequent work for woman suffrage beyond a few swipes at white suffragists and sixties feminists.  There is nothing about her extensive work for the Republican Party, such as being the official Hoover campaign Organizer of Negro Women for Illinois in 1928.  There is a little bit on her husband (Ferdinand Barnett) who was the first black assistant state’s attorney in Illinois, but not much on the four children they raised in an elegant home they owned on Chicago’s South Side.  Ida B. hyphenated her last name after her 1895 marriage (Wells-Barnett), but in this book she is Wells.

 

The only thing that is chronological is a ten-page section in the middle of the book on “400 Years of Progress” with bullets from 1619 to 2020.  These have special emphasis on Ida B.  – i.e. 2011 “Ida inducted into Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.”  Not in this section is the year a poem was written describing Ida as the “Queen of our race” which gave birth to the subtitle.

 

There are too many factual inaccuracies scattered throughout the book to read it as history.  Other statements beg for explanation.  Some facts are twisted to conform with the author’s point of view.  This book reads more like a very long Opinion column, though multiple columns with the same theme would be more accurate.  Indeed, one comes away with a deep sense of the anger and bitterness that black women, especially the author, feel toward whites today, let alone during the time of Ida B.  As an emotional history, it doesn’t sound like much has changed, despite the 400 years of progress.

 

Fortunately, this book has an index, which are becoming scarce today.

 

©2021 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com

 

Guide to the  Ida B. Wells Paper 1884-1976, © 2009 University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, 1100 East 57th Street, Chicago, Ida B. Wells, (1862-1931) teacher, journalist and anti-lynching activist. Paper contain correspondence, manuscript of Crusade for Justice: the Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, diaries, copies of articles and speeches by Wells, articles and accounts about Wells, newspapers clippings, and photographs. Also contains Alfreda M. Duster's (Wells' daughter) working copies of the autobiography which Duster edited. Correspondents include Frederick Douglass and Albion Tourgee. Includes photocopies of correspondence of Wells' husband Ferdinand Barnett and a scrapbook of newspapers articles written by him.