Ida. B Wells: The life and power of the pioneering journalist
Kerri Miller’s recommendation this week is the story of a pioneering journalist and often-overlooked crusader more Americans should know about.
Frederick Douglass admired her bravery and determination. The FBI despised her crusades and influence.
And Ida B. Wells’ great granddaughter, Michelle Duster, the author of a new book about her, writes that she was “inspired” by her grandmother’s refusal “to make herself small, even when others expected that of African-American women.”
Duster’s new book, “Ida B. The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells,” chronicles Wells’ birth to enslaved parents, her early years as a crusading journalist and her work as a suffragist, organizing the Alpha Suffrage Club in Illinois in 1913 and joining an all-white suffrage march in front of Woodrow Wilson’s White House.
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Indeed, Ida B. Wells saw the same potential and political power of Black women that Stacey Abrams has leveraged in Georgia, pushing to register women of color so the first African-American alderman and then congressman could be elected in Chicago.
Ida B. Wells also traveled widely, crusading for anti-lynching legislation, losing patience when white “moderates” wanted to “study” racial discrimination instead of doing something about it.
And yet, Michelle Duster confides that near the end of her life, her great grandmother was not confident that she’d done enough to right the wrongs in America. In 1921, recovering from an illness, Ida B. Wells wrote: “All at once the realization came to me that I had nothing to show for all those years of toil and labor.”
We’ll talk about Ida B. Wells’ remarkable life and enduring legacy when Michelle Duster joins me on Friday at 9 a.m.