GBN’s Daily Drop: Quote from Journalist and Anti-Lynching Activist Ida B. Wells on Virtue and Respect (LISTEN)

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is based on the Tuesday, March 8 entry in the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 that features a quote from formidable journalist, anti-lynching and women’s rights activist Ida B. Wells Barnett:

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SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Tuesday, March 8th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

Today we offer a quote from formidable journalist, anti-lynching and women’s rights activist Ida B. Wells Barnett, from her landmark 1895 book The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Here’s the quote:

“Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect.”

In 2020, Wells received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for journalism, and her face honored the centennial of the U.S. Suffragist Movement in a mosaic art installation in Washington D.C.’s Union Station. And in 2022, Mattel added a tribute doll of Wells to their Barbie Inspiring Women Series.

In her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi, the Ida B.Wells-Barnett Museum acts as a cultural center of African American history. Awards have been established in Wells’s name by the National Association of Black Journalists, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and the New York County Lawyers Assn., among others.

Wells is a helluva historical figure who, even with recent documentaries and accolades, is still not known well enough. Her whole life is fascinating, and worth learning about extensively, and I shortly will point you to several resources. But if you don’t have time for it now, here is a great quote summing up Wells’ importance in the fight for equality and justice from the New York Times review of the 1999 biography on Wells. And here’s the quote:

“Linda O. McMurry‘s important new biography, To Keep the Waters Troubled, tells the story of an extraordinary American who would have been at the very summit of our national pantheon except for two things: her sex and her race. But then again, being born into a society that promised individual freedom and personal power — just not to blacks, not to women and above all not to black women — was the source of Ida B. Wells’s remarkable story.”

To learn more about Wells, read her pamphlet published in 1892 titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, 1895’s The Red Record, which covered Black people’s struggles in the South since the Civil War and explored the alarmingly high rates of lynchings in the U.S.

You can also check out her autobiography, Crusade for Justice which Wells started in 1928 but left unfinished when she died of kidney failure in 1931. Her youngest daughter, she worked for 40 years to get it into print. There are also the biographies Ida: A Sword Among Lions from 2009 by Paula J. Giddings, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells by Linda O. McMurry from 2000 and To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells by Mia Bay from 2010, and there’s also a visual documentary by WTTW Chicago available on YouTube.

Links to these and other sources are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing. Intro and outro beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot. Additional music included and permitted under Public Domain license was “Gladiolus Rag” cmposed by Scott Joplin.

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Sources:

• https://goodblacknews.org/2021/02/23/bhm-good-black-news-celebrates-ida-b-wells-journalist-anti-lynching-activist-womens-rights-advocate/
• https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/11/04/775915510/ida-b-wells-lasting-impact-on-chicago-politics-and-power?fbclid=IwAR31f0ItNqDh6lOmgETL8Hd0WfNXQQfAr6s-c4AU-nd90xgTfQusiJs_HKc
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwPqu4xTuu0
• https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett
• https://goodblacknews.org/2020/08/23/ida-b-wells-portrait-to-go-on-display-august-24th-in-d-c-s-union-station-to-honor-suffragist-centennial/