Entertainment, Books - Army Times

Biographer praises Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching crusader

On Sept. 15, 1883, a young black teacher in Memphis, Tenn., boarded a Chesapeake & Ohio Railway train, intending to ride in the first-class car. “She carried a parasol — a ‘lady’s’ accessory that complemented the customary hat, gloves and full-length dress corseted and cinched tightly at the waist.”

The C&O, following the separate-but-equal law, provided a first-class “colored” car that was “every bit as nice in comfort and appearance as the car designated for white travelers.” However, “while conductors strictly enforced the rules against swearing, drinking, and smoking in the ladies’ car, they often failed to do so in the colored car.”

When the young woman entered the colored car and bought a first-class ticket, she saw an inebriated white man, who was smoking.

Exercising her rights as a first-class passenger, she headed for the ladies’ car. When she handed the conductor the ticket, he told her to leave the coach, saying that it was only for whites. When she refused to leave, the conductor attempted to pull her from her seat, tearing the sleeve off her dress. She resisted, scratching him and then biting his hands. Eventually, refusing to be forced into the colored car, she chose to leave the train, “disheveled but determined.”

The young woman was Ida B. Wells. She took the case to court, and won, to the disgust of the white establishment. According to “Ida: A Sword Among Lions,” by Paula J. Giddings, a local headline read “A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages ... What it Cost to Put a Colored Teacher in a Smoking Car ... $500.”

The eldest child of slaves who were later freed, Wells always had been independent. She was 16 when her parents died in a yellow fever epidemic, and rather than have the family split up she worked to care for her siblings. She became a teacher, a journalist and a dauntless campaigner against lynching, traveling throughout the United States and even to Britain to crusade against the brutal murders that were committed with impunity. She was active in the suffragist movement, too.

Wells spoke her mind; she was what was known as a “difficult woman,” and many black leaders chose to ignore her for a variety of reasons. Wells and her work were not mentioned in books that lauded others’ efforts. For 40 years, her daughter fought to have her mother given the credit she deserved.

“A Sword Among Lions” is not easy to read. Because Wells’ efforts had gone mainly unacknowledged for so long, it’s probable that the author wanted to make up for that deficiency; the book’s 800 pages, including lengthy notes, extremely lengthy bibliography and index, can be hard to absorb. Also, the descriptions of numerous lynchings can be difficult to deal with. The excesses of Caligula and the horrors of the Inquisition look kindly by comparison. By the time victims died, death was a mercy.

But each time one lays down this book to escape, inevitably one picks it up again, and continues to read, in admiration — and in understanding — of a woman too remarkable for her time, a “difficult” woman who had to wait for the better part of a century to receive (posthumously) the respect due her.