Family, admirers keep Ida B. Wells' legacy alive

May 28, 2003|By Deborah Hallman, Special to the Tribune.

Growing up in the small north Mississippi town of Holly Springs, Leona Harris and her contemporaries had never heard the name of the town's most historically significant figure. There were no mentions in the schoolbooks. No plaques or statues on the courthouse lawn.

It wasn't until Harris was a student in the 1960s at Chicago's Woodrow Wilson Junior College, now Kennedy-King College, that she learned about anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and the fact that this social reformer had been a native of Harris' hometown. Harris was on a school-sponsored trip to Africa when, she recalls, she mentioned to her traveling companions that she was from Holly Springs. Another person in the group commented, "Oh, you're from Ida B. Wells' town."

"I thought to myself, this woman must be a great person, because people here know something about her," says Harris, 62. "I promised myself then, I made a vow to myself, that when I get back to the States, I'm going to learn all I can about this woman, Ida B. Wells."

Harris kept that promise and, today, with a group of volunteers in Mississippi, has put together a permanent tribute to Wells with the establishment of a museum on the grounds where Wells was born in 1862. The volunteers have been working to preserve the legacy of a woman who spent her life--much of it in Chicago--seeking social justice and racial and gender equality. It's an effort supported by Wells' own descendants, who also are working to promote her message of social justice through their family foundation.

First, a little history for those who may associate the name Ida B. Wells with the Chicago public housing development named for her in 1939, or the U.S. postage stamp issued in her honor in 1990.

Wells could rightly be considered a forerunner to civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. In 1883, Wells was on a train from Memphis returning to her teaching job in Woodstock, Tenn. The 21-year-old had paid for a seat in the first-class ladies' car only to have the conductor insist that she move to a second-class smokers' car. When she refused, the conductor dragged her off the train. Wells sued the railroad and was awarded $500 in damages, though the verdict was overturned on appeal. The experience was Wells' introduction to the inequities of the justice system, which she would spend her life seeking to reform.

"People in Chicago have been saying `Ida B. Wells' for ... years without really tying into who she was or what she was doing," says Chicago resident Donald Duster, 71, one of Wells' four surviving grandchildren.

Duster and his siblings are the children of the late Alfreda Barnett Duster, who edited her mother's autobiography, "Crusade for Justice," published in 1970 and which opened the door for more recent generations to learn the scope of Wells' work.

Almost a decade after the train incident, Wells found her calling. As violence against blacks increased in the late 1800s, Wells came to know the horrors of mob rule firsthand when three Memphis merchants who were close friends of hers were lynched following an altercation with a band of white men who physically attacked their grocery business. The terror of such acts was compounded by the inaction of legal authorities, and the belief that some white leaders may have participated in the crime.

Lifelong crusade began in the 1890s

Working as a journalist by that point in the early 1890s, Wells used her voice to organize boycotts and to urge blacks to leave Memphis. She herself left town under threat of violence, and began a lifelong crusade against lynching that took her to the British Isles, New York and, ultimately, to Chicago.

In Chicago, she rose to prominence on many fronts. At the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, Wells wrote a pamphlet with Frederick Douglass, attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett, whom she would later marry, and others, to protest the lack of black representation at the fair. Wells also became active in the suffrage movement, organizing the first black women's suffrage organization in the city, and she joined forces with social reformer Jane Addams to fight the segregation of public schools. Wells also was the first black woman to run for the Illinois Senate, though it was an unsuccessful bid.

Author Paula J. Giddings, who has written a biography of Wells that is expected to be published by HarperCollins in 2004, says Wells set an example of courageous leadership in this country that has yet to be exceeded.

"This is a woman who never flinched. Never flinched," says Giddings, a professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. "She just had a sense of right and wrong, and went toward the right ... never flinching because of fear of social standing, because of fear of slander" or even fear for her life.

Wells' work against lynching led her to become not only an impassioned public speaker but also a pioneer in investigative journalism and, later, a founder of the NAACP.