Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts tagged as “Holly Springs”

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:

You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

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. GiddingsTo 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.

If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or
go old school and tell a friend.

For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

Sources:

 

BHM: Good Black News Celebrates Ida B. Wells – Journalist, Anti-Lynching Activist, Women’s Rights Advocate

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

This is Ida B. Wells. Best known for being a late 19th/early 20th-century journalist, anti-lynching crusader and women’s rights advocate. 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.

Wells is a helluva historical figure who still far too few people know about. Her whole life is fascinating, so I’ll try to keep it short and focussed on her work. If you don’t have time for it now, right below 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:

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.”

Wells was one of the first African-American female journalists to run her own newspaper, was an outspoken feminist, suffragist, an international figure and speaker, and early leader in the Civil Rights Movement who helped found the NAACP with W.E.B. DuBois and others, and helped women get and consolidate their power around voting in Illinois when they won the right.

But what fascinates me the most is her near one-woman crusade against lynching, and how she used her investigative, reporting, and oratory skills not only to document lynchings in the 1890s, but also to disprove the lie that Black men were raping white women or committing crimes that justified their mob hangings.

Wells offered real proof that lynching was being used in the South as a way to control or punish Black people who competed with whites. Even after the offices of her newspaper, Free Speech and Headlight, were burned down and she had to relocate from Memphis to Chicago to escape death threats, Wells persisted with her work.

Although there was major resistance in the U.S., Wells garnered support from the British, who after reading her work and hearing her speeches (they also witnessed her being dragged unfairly in the American press), offered monetary support and formed the British Anti-Lynching Committee, which included prominent members such as the Duke of Argyll, the Archbishop of Canterbury, members of Parliament, and the editors of The Manchester Guardian, who put international pressure on the U.S. to address these horrific crimes against Black Americans.

Wells’ crusade against lynching started in 1889, when her friend Thomas Moss opened the Peoples Grocery in the “Curve,” a Black neighborhood just outside Memphis city limits. It did well and competed with a white-owned grocery store across the street.

In 1892, while Wells was out of town, a white mob invaded her friends’ store. During the altercation, three white men were shot and injured. Moss and two other black men were arrested and jailed pending trial. A white lynch mob stormed the jail and killed the three men.

After the lynching of her friends, Wells wrote an editorial and became an ersatz civil rights leader and firebrand, urging Blacks to leave Memphis altogether. More than 6,000 black people did leave Memphis; others organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. After being threatened with violence, Wells bought a pistol. She later wrote, “They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth.”

Wells began her investigation by looking at the charges given for her friends’ murders, which officially started her anti-lynching campaign. She spoke at various Black women’s clubs, and raised more than $500 to investigate lynchings and publish her findings. Wells found that Blacks were lynched primarily for social control reasons such as failing to pay debts, not appearing to give way to whites, competing with whites economically, or being drunk in public.

She found little basis for the frequent claim that Black men were lynched because they had sexually abused or attacked white women. This alibi seemed to have partly accounted for white America’s collective acceptance or silence on lynching, as well as its acceptance by many in the educated African-American community.

Wells published her findings in a pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She followed it with an editorial that said, unlike the myth that white women were sexually at risk of attacks by Black men, most liaisons between Black men and white women were consensual.

Her editorial enraged white men in Memphis. On May 27, 1892, while she was away in Philadelphia, a white mob destroyed the offices of the Free Speech and Headlight.

To quote again from the 1999 New York Times Review:

“Wells exposed as false the most common justification for these lynchings: that they were necessitated by sexual ”outrages” committed by Black men against white women. Perhaps only a woman could have spoken out effectively against these charges, but doing so exposed Wells to attacks against her sexual character. Her willingness to talk openly about rape and interracial sex kept her from succeeding the aging Frederick Douglass as ”leader of the Afro-American race,” the most respected Negro in the United States among whites. This role went instead to a man and a nonmilitant, Booker T. Washington.”

In continued efforts to raise awareness and opposition to lynching, Wells spoke to groups in New York City, where her audiences included many leading African-American women.

On October 5, 1892, a testimonial dinner held at Lyric Hall, organized by political activists and clubwomen, Victoria Earle Matthews and Maritcha Remond Lyons, raised significant funds for Wells’ anti-lynching campaign. The Women’s Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn was formed to organize Black women as an interest group who could act politically.

Wells toured Europe in her campaign for justice, but the first tour in 1893 didn’t go so well. Wells went to Great Britain at the invitation of Catherine Impey, a British Quaker. An opponent of imperialism and proponent of racial equality, Impey wanted to ensure that the British public learned about the problem of lynching in the U.S.

Wells accompanied her speeches with a photograph of a white mob and grinning white children posing near a hanged Black man; her talks created a sensation, but some in the audiences remained doubtful of her accounts. Wells intended to raise money and expose the U.S. lynching violence, but received so little funds that she had difficulty covering her travel expenses.

Before her second visit to Britain in 1894, the enterprising Wells worked to get some backing. Wells called on William Penn Nixon, editor of Daily Inter-Ocean, a Republican newspaper in Chicago, the only major white paper that persistently denounced lynching.

After Wells told Nixon about her planned tour, he asked her to write for the newspaper while in England, making her the first African-American woman to be a paid correspondent for a mainstream white newspaper. This time, Wells was highly effective in speaking to European audiences, who were shocked to learn about the rate of violence against Black people in the U.S.

Wells called for the formation of groups to formally protest the lynchings and helped catalyze anti-lynching groups in Europe, which tried to press the U.S. government to guarantee the safety of Black people in the South.

When she spoke at home to Black crowds, Wells was a one-woman precursor to the 1950s Deacons of Defense or the 1960s Black Panthers or even Malcolm X: she recommended that Black people arm themselves to defend against lynching:

“The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honour in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”

Wells subsequently published The Red Record (1895), a 100-page pamphlet describing lynching in the U.S. since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It also covered Black people’s struggles in the South since the Civil War. The Red Record explored the alarmingly high rates of lynching in the United States (which was at a peak from 1880 to 1930).

Wells gave 14 pages of statistics related to lynching cases committed from 1892 to 1895; she also included pages of graphic accounts detailing specific lynchings. She notes that her data was taken from articles by white correspondents, white press bureaus, and white newspapers.

The Red Record had far-reaching influence in the debate about lynching. Her accounts grabbed the attention of Northerners who knew little about lynching or accepted the common explanation that black men deserved this fate.

(Ida B. Wells in Chicago in 1909 with her children: Charles, Herman, Ida and Alfreda Archivio GBB/Redux)

During this time, Wells also had to deal with dust-ups with white women suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard. Anthony was critical of Wells for getting “distracted” by her young son who she had to bring with her on occasion to speaking engagements.

Willard went out of her way to try to discredit Wells in the press after Wells called Willard out for being silent lynching and for making racist statements where she said Black people drank too much and threatened the safety of women. Wells clapped back at Willard in The Red Record with an entire chapter dedicated to discussing “Miss Willard’s Attitude.”

In 1896, Wells founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and the National Afro-American Council. In Chicago, Wells also worked to improve conditions for its rapidly growing African-American population due to the Great Migration to northern industrial cities.

Wells worked on urban reform in Chicago during the last thirty years of her life. Wells began writing her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, in 1928 but never finished it; she died of uremia (kidney failure) in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68.

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.

To learn more about Wells, consider reading her autobiography (which her youngest daughter worked for 40 years to get into print), 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.

Also consider clicking on the Southern Horrors and Red Record links to download her original works via Project Gutenberg, reading this npr.org piece https://www.npr.org/…/ida-b-wells-lasting-impact-on… or watching below:

https://youtu.be/8f7TUBvbgrI

#blackhistorymonth #gettheknowledge

(paid links)

HISTORY: Movement to Honor Anti-Lynching Crusader and Journalist Ida B. Wells in Chicago is Gaining Momentum, and is ‘Long Overdue’

Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells. (Taylor Glascock for The Washington Post)

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Peter Slevin. via thelily.com

Ida B. Wells, a crusading African American journalist who exposed the crime and shame of lynching and fought for women’s suffrage, spent half her life in Chicago. She died in 1931 after dedicating her life to the battle against racial injustice. Yet her pioneering work is all but unrecognized in Chicago, which has no shortage of statues and monuments to leading white men.

There is the grave marker at Oak Woods Cemetery. It reads BARNETT. Along the bottom, “Crusaders for Justice.” On the left, there is her name: Ida B. Wells, beside her husband’s.

Ida B. Wells's gravesite in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. (Taylor Glascock for The Washington Post)
Ida B. Wells’s gravesite in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. (Taylor Glascock for The Washington Post)

Then, there was a housing project, erected in 1941 and called Ida B. Wells Homes. It grew to 1,662 units, but it did not end well. The project succumbed to neglect and dysfunction before the last building was torn down in 2011, doing no honor to her name.

That’s it.

Michelle Duster, her great-granddaughter, aims to change that. For the past decade, Duster and a few friends have labored, dollar by dollar, to raise $300,000 to build a monument to Wells in Chicago. They’re still barely halfway there, but the word is getting out.

“You can’t just gloss over this history,” said Duster, a writer and lecturer who sees a need for Wells’s example these days. “She not only believed in certain principles and values but she sacrificed herself over and over and over again. She was called fearless. I don’t believe that she had no fear. I believe she had fear and she decided to keep going forward.”

A monument will honor the legendary activist, as well as introduce her to people who aren’t familiar with her place in American history.

People who may know nothing about Ida B. Wells will find things about this extraordinary woman they didn’t know anything about,” said Kirk Savage, an art historian at the University of Pittsburgh who studies public memorials.

In 1862, Wells was born in Holly Springs, Miss., a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation. She passed a teacher’s exam at age 16 and taught school. In 1884, after she moved to Memphis, three railroad workers forcibly removed her from a train for refusing to leave a car reserved for white women, even though she had purchased a ticket. She sued and won, only to see the verdict overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Wells began writing newspaper columns and purchased a share of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. When three of her black friends were lynched after opening a grocery store in competition with a white-owned business, she started investigating and challenged the assertion that large numbers of black men were raping white women.

The city of Memphis, she wrote, does not protect an African American “who dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.” After a mob destroyed the printing presses, she moved for good to Chicago in the early 1890s. There, she married lawyer Ferdinand Barnett, had four children, worked as a probation officer and supported migrants from the South, all the while traveling widely to oppose racial terror.

Wells “challenged every type of convention,” including sexism in the civil rights community and racism in the women’s suffrage movement, New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said. “She refused to stay in her place at a time when doing something could be debilitating, could be dangerous.”

Hannah-Jones, whose 75,000 Twitter followers see her handle as Ida Bae Wells, also worked to create the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Journalism, designed to increase and elevate investigative work by people of color.

Last month, Hannah-Jones flew to Chicago to help raise money for the Wells monument, which has been a slow-moving project.

Agnes Fenton of Englewood, NJ Turns 110, Has "Nothing to Complain About"

God and Johnnie Walker Blue are the keys to longevity says Agnes Fenton, who turns 110 years old on Saturday. Fenton still lives in her own home in Englewood.
God and Johnnie Walker Blue are the keys to longevity says Agnes Fenton, who turned 110 years old on Saturday. Fenton still lives in her own home in Englewood. NJ. (AMY NEWMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)

“The birthday is just another day,” Agnes Fenton whispered, pooh-poohing the milestone she reaches Saturday.  Fenton, who has a lovely face, celebrated No. 110.
And just like that, the beloved Englewood resident — who has extolled the wonders of Miller High Life and Johnnie Walker — punched her ticket into the ultra-exclusive “supercentenarian” club.
Of the 7 billion people on the planet, a microscopic number are 110 or older. Robert Young, director of the Gerontology Research Group, which keeps track of supercentenarians, estimates 600. Dr. Thomas Perls, founding director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University School of Medicine, of which Fenton is a participant, puts the number at 360.
That means roughly 1 in every 10 million people in the world is a supercentenarian.  Which makes Agnes Fenton special.  Just don’t tell her that.
When a reporter visited her in the run-up to the big birthday, Fenton answered “lousy” when asked how she felt.  But she warmed to the conversation and emphasized that God is the reason she’s lived this long.
“When I was 100 years old, I went to the mirror to thank God that I was still here. And I thank him every morning,” she said in a voice one must strain to hear. She sat in a wheelchair at the kitchen table in her green-shingled, Cape Cod-style home near Route 4.
“He gave me a long life and a good life, and I have nothing to complain about. … You’ve got to have God in your life. Without God, you’ve got nothing.”
Agnes Fenton was born Agnes Jones on Aug. 1, 1905, in Holly Springs, Miss. She spent her early years in Memphis and ran a restaurant there called Pal’s Duck Inn. Fenton, who has no children, came north to Englewood in the 1950s with her second husband, Vincent Fenton. She worked as a cafeteria manager for a magazine publisher, then as a nanny. Her husband, whom she called “Fenton,” died in 1970.

Fearless Journalist And Early Civil Rights Activist Ida B. Wells Honored With Google Doodle for her 153rd Birthday


When Ida B. Wells was 22, she was asked by a conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company to give up her seat on the train to a white man. She refused, and the conductor attempted to forcibly drag her out of her seat.  Wells wouldn’t budge.
“The moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn’t try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.”
The year was 1884 — about 70 years before Rosa Parks would refuse to give up her seat on an Alabama bus.  Wells’ life was full of such moments of courage and principle. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, Wells was a vocal civil rights activist, suffragist and journalist who dedicated her life to fighting inequality.
On July 16, Wells’ 153rd birthday, Google honored the “fearless and uncompromising” woman with a Doodle of her typing away on typewriter, a piece of luggage by her side.
“She was a fierce opponent of segregation and wrote prolifically on the civil injustices that beleaguered her world. By twenty-five she was editor of the Memphis-based Free Speech and Headlight, and continued to publicly decry inequality even after her printing press was destroyed by a mob of locals who opposed her message,” Google wrote in tribute of Wells.

The journalist would go on to work for Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean and the Chicago Conservator, one of the oldest African-American newspapers in the country. As Google notes, she “also travelled and lectured widely, bringing her fiery and impassioned rhetoric all over the world.”
Wells married Chicago attorney Ferdinand Barrett in 1895. She insisted on keeping her own name, becoming Ida Wells-Barnett — a radical move for the time. The couple had four children.  Wells died in Chicago of kidney failure in 1931. She was 68.
Every year around her birthday, Holly Springs celebrates Wells’ life with a weekend festival. Mayor Kelvin Buck said at this year’s event that people often overlook “the historic significance of Ida B. Wells in the history of the civil rights struggle in the United States,” per the South Reporter.
article by Dominique Mosbergen via huffingtonpost.com