Ida B. Wells Taught us That Care and Justice Go Hand in Hand

Yahoo

27-02-2025

Daniel (L) and Michelle (C) Duster attend the dedication of a monument to their great-grandmother, journalist, educator, and civil rights leader, Ida B. Wells on June 30, 2021 in Chicago, Illinois. Credit - Scott Olson—Getty Images
Upon returning to the White House, President Donald Trump launched a sustained assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the nation, dismantling programs in the federal government and emboldening corporate leaders to cut their own diversity and inclusion initiatives. The Trump administration's reinvigorated attack on DEI has brought renewed scrutiny to Black History Month and the celebration of Black ideas, culture, and people in American politics.
It is tempting to insist that our contemporary moment is exceptional, but assaults on the lives and stories of Black people are hardly unprecedented. Telling the stories of people like Ida B. Wells provides essential lessons about how to perseverance against against such attacks. For Wells, care for her community was central to an enduring practice of political resistance to racial injustice.
Born in 1862, Wells was an influential Black journalist and anti-lynching advocate. Today, she is renowned for being a principled and brave advocate for racial justice who was willing to make enormous sacrifices. She was not naïve to the potential consequences of her anti-lynching advocacy. To condemn lynching and the American political institutions that perpetuated it, she understood, would risk inviting violence against herself, a risk that she anticipates and reflects on in her autobiography. While willing to sacrifice her own life for the cause, she refused to ask her Black neighbors, friends, and colleagues to do the same when her anti-lynching advocacy put the broader Black community in Memphis in danger.
In May 1892, Wells published her first anti-lynching editorial, just months after three of her Black friends and neighbors—Thomas 'Tommie' Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry 'Will' Stewart—were brutally lynched in Memphis. Unfortunately, Wells was right to anticipate hostile retaliation. In the days following her editorial, many white journalists called for her lynching and a white mob ransacked and destroyed her newspaper office.
Wells was not in Memphis, by happenstance, when her editorial was published. Instead, she was traveling to a conference in New York. She learned of the many threats made against her life and the destruction of her newspaper from her friend, T. Thomas Fortune, upon her arrival up North. When confronted with the difficult choice of staying in New York or returning to Memphis, Wells's first thought was not of the cause but of the safety of her colleague, J.L. Fleming, down South.
I'm Ida B. Wells's Great-Granddaughter, and I'm Still Fighting Her Fight for the Vote
On a busy train platform in New York, Wells also considered the well-being of the Black community in Memphis. Many of her friends begged her to stay up North, lamenting the enormous loss of life that would ensue if she returned to Memphis. Not only would she surely have been lynched, but her colleagues at the newspaper would have been killed. Many of her Black male friends offered to fight off her white assailants, but Wells believed this would only mean more Black widows and fatherless children. In the end, she chose to stay up North and continue her anti-lynching advocacy in New York and eventually Chicago. She would never return to Memphis and described herself as 'exiled' from the South.
While willing to make unimaginable sacrifices to try to awaken the conscience of white Americans to the injustice of lynching, Wells also took great care to protect her Black community, knowing full well that her efforts to confront racial injustice would incite violence against them. She thought of her colleagues, embracing a model of political resistance that centers care for her Black neighbors and friends. This care, in and of itself, was an act of political resistance to racial injustice.
Wells offers us a model of political resistance to racial injustice that implies the complex negotiation of principles when confronted with sustained pressures, in practice, by the institutions and norms that perpetuate white supremacy and racial oppression. Even Wells, one of the most extraordinary advocates of racial justice in American history, refrained from directly confronting white supremacists when her advocacy would mean more Black loss. She was deeply committed to her anti-lynching advocacy, but she was equally committed to caring for Tommie Moss's widow, Maurine, and their children, Betty and Thomas, Jr.
This is the Wells, I want to suggest, that we must fastidiously celebrate this Black History Month as she affords us enduring insights into what it means to be a crusader for justice. In the continued fight for racial justice and amid reinvigorated efforts to erase Black contributions to American history, Wells would urge activists to be steadfast in speaking truth into the world and advocating relentlessly for a more racially just America. Yet she would also remind us of the importance of caring for one another in the fight against oppression.
Wells died while writing her autobiography, leaving the manuscript unpunctuated and unfinished. In the final line, she reiterates the famous adage that 'eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.' Wells may have been right about the unending demands of freedom. In many ways, we continue to fight her fight against the erasure of Black history in American history. She was also right that it is a heroic act to care for our fellow humans while we pursue a more just world.
Dr. Amy Gais is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Comparative Literature and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Coerced Conscience (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and is writing a book on freedom and resistance in African American political thought.
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