To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells

A Civil Rights Pioneer

Ida B. Wells (1862 - 1931) was one of the first individuals to expose and oppose the lynching that became prevalent in the South and elsewhere in the years following Reconstruction. In the latter part of her life and for many years thereafter, Wells's life and accomplishments were in danger of being overlooked and marginalized. With the publication of her autobiography, "Crusade for Justice" (1971) and of her other writings together with several biographies, Ida Wells has since the 1970s been receiving overdue recognition. Mia Bay's recent biography, "To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells" (2009) offers a solid if dry account of Wells's life and accomplishments. Bay, associate professor of history at Rutgers University, is the associate director of Rutgers's Center for Race and Ethnicity and the author of "The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830- 1925".

Wells's parents were slaves when she was born at Holly Springs, Mississippi. With the end of the Civil War, her parents became activists in support of Reconstruction, which became the dominant influence on her life. When Wells was 16, her mother and father and two siblings died in a Yellow Fever epidemic. Wells became a rural schoolteacher to support her remaining younger sisters. She attended college sporadically but was expelled from Rusk College in 1881 for reasons which remain obscure.

As a young woman, Wells moved to Memphis where she taught school and gradually found her way to writing and journalism using the name "Iola". Wells also filed a lawsuit against a railroad for forcing her to sit in a segregated, Jim Crow car. She ultimately lost her case on appeal. The defining moment of Wells's life occurred in 1892 when three male acquaintances in Memphis were lynched. Wells' investigated the lynchings and similar occurrences in the South and wrote about them in her paper. Wells rejected the claim of the apologists for lynching that the practice resulted from the rape of white women by black men. Wells wrote that lynching was instead a power move designed to keep African Americans in fear and servitude. But Southerners found particularly inflammatory Wells's findings that when sexual relationships between black men and white women occurred, these relationships tended to be clandestine, but consensual. She was forced to leave Memphis and lost all her property.

Moving to New York City, Wells became both famous and notorious. She worked with Frederick Douglass in protesting the exclusion of African Americans from participation or recognition in the 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair. She prepared a pamphlet for distribution during the Fair documenting the evils of lynching. She also made two trips to England where she was instrumental in organizing an anti-lynching society among the successors of the British abolitionist movement.

Following the Worlds Fair, Wells remained in Chicago and married a successful attorney, Ferdinand Barnett, with whom she had four children. She remained politically active for the rest of her life, but her fame was eclipsed by Booker T. Washington and then by W.E.B. DuBois. Wells helped found the NAACP, but her abrasive, confrontational and independent personality, together with her gender, denied her a leadership role in this or other national civil rights organizations. But she continued her crusade against lynching and was an activist in protecting the rights of the many African Americans pouring into Chicago as part of the Great Migration.

Bay offers a thorough and a sympathetic portrayal of Wells which draws on the autobiography and on Wells's other writings. Bay is good in showing Wells's relationships to other African American and feminist leaders, including Douglass, Washington, DuBois, and Susan B. Anthony, who counseled Wells against her marriage. Bay also writes with insight about how Wells's activist approach to African American rights was at odds with Booker T. Washington's accomodationist approach and with the subsequent approach of the NAACP which sought to vindicate African American civil rights through litigation and through legislation. Bay emphasizes, as she should, the role of gender in denying Wells a position of leadership within the African American community. But Bay's own text makes clear how tough and difficult Wells could be, even with her allies. Wells's own irascibility and temper seem at least as responsible for her independent status as was her gender.

I learned a great deal about Wells from this book, but I sensed a fire in the woman which Bay does not entirely capture. The book is well-documented and footnoted but lacks a bibliography. On the whole, Bay's book is effective in telling the story of an inspiring American who deserves to be remembered and admired.

Robin Friedman