Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers

Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She co-founded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement, working alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony. This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, and edited by Well's youngest daughter, Alfreda M. Duster, relates Wells's private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice. This updated edition includes a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing, new images, and a new afterword by Ida B. Wells's great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster.

Paula Giddings has written an important and influential biography of Ida B. Wells--crusading journalist and pioneer in the fight for women's suffrage and against segregation and lynchings. Ida B. Wells was born into slavery and raised in the Victorian age yet emerged, through her fierce political battles and progressive thinking, as the first "modern" black women in the nation's history. Wells began her activist career when she tried to integrate a first-class railway car in Memphis. After being thrown bodily off the car, she wrote about the incident for Black Baptist newspapers, thus beginning her career as a journalist. But her most abiding fight would be the one against lynching, a crime in which she saw all the themes she held most dear coalesce: sexuality, race, and the law.

In the generation that followed Frederick Douglass, no African American was more prominent, or more outspoken, than Ida B. Wells. Her crusade against lynching in the 1890s made her famous, or notorious, across America, and she was seriously considered as a rival to W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T.Washington for race leadership. This book was the first full biography of Wells. Her career began amidst controversy when she sued a Tennessee railroad company for ousting her from a first class car, a legal battle which launched her lifelong committment to journalism and activism. In the 1890s, Wells focused her eloquence on the horrors of lynching, exposing it as a widespread form of racial terrorism. Backing strong words with strong actions, she lectured in the States and abroad, arranged legal representation for black prisoners, hired investigators, founded antily nching leagues, sought recourse from Congress, and more. Wells was an equally forceful advocate for women's rights, but parted ways with feminist allies who would subordinate racial justice to their cause. Using diary entries, letters, and published writings, McMurry illuminates Wells's fiery personality, and the uncompromising approach that sometimes lost her friendships even as it won great victories.

The Collected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a compilation of some of Ida B. Wells most well known works published in the peak of her anti-lynching organizing gives insight into how events like yellow fever epidemic transformed her into a internationally famous journalist, public speaker, and activist at the turn of the twentieth century. This text includes three major works written by Wells: "Southern Horros: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," "The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States," and "Mob Rule in New Orleans." All three works were published between 1892 and 1900.

The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells tracks the young Ida through her transition from schoolteacher to a fearless crusader against lynching in the late 19th century. This "meticulously edited contribution to the study of American women's diaries and late-19th-century women's and black history" (Kirkus Reviews) offers an intimate look at the hopes, thoughts and day-to-day life of the young woman who would later become the celebrated civil rights activist and antilynching crusader.