Ida B. Wells is an American hero.

Inspiring but also depressing as hell. Wells was such a powerhouse--tireless in speaking out about racism, violence, and gender politics. But so many of the injustices and obstacles she was facing in the late 1800's are the exact same problems we're still dealing with today. #sameshitdifferentcentury

Anti-lynching crusader, she was an incredible woman.

I had heard the name over & over again & it finally dawned on me to find a book to read about her. I was shocked to find that there was so much about her life that I had no idea about. This book had so many different things about her life that were eye opening. Learning about the various places that she lived & how she had a family as well. The issues she faced was unbelievable & so unfortunate. Seeing how she became friends w/ certain people yet others she was not inline with was also surprising. The amount of people she inspired during all her travels was amazing. The way she stood up for women & Black women especially was not something everyone was able to do. So yeah it's worth the read.

I'm not a huge fan of biographies, but the legacy of Ida B Wells is so important and under-reported in the broader histories of civil rights that I wanted to know more. Her pioneering use of investigative reporting and media analysis to fuel her anti-lynching campaign is critical to how we still understand extrajudicial killings of black people in America.

If someone wanted to make a very long and sporadically entertaining video, the faces I made all all the shaking of my head as I read about male usurpation of her work and political power, and the constant and annoying betrayals by white feminists would be a decent candidate. The book was fairly dry and ends rather abruptly, but it's a pretty good overview of her struggles and accomplishments.

The life of ex-slave, journalist, and activist Ida B. Wells is inherently exciting, and author [a:Mia Bay|54716|Mia Bay|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] captures its arc. Even while she provides us with careful scholarship, she drives home the repetitive violence directed against Black people that Wells exposed, denounced, and organized to end, all her life. She also illustrates the sad truth that the high point for white people against racism was in the early post-Civil War years, during Reconstruction.

For most of Wells's life (1862-1931), former abolitionists abandoned Black men (mostly) to lynching directed at keeping them "in their place"--or lynching just for sport! White Americans and the Black leaders like Booker T. Washington who curried their favor bought into the myth that lynching was a response to Black men raping white women. As a woman, Wells was able to decry rape while pointing out, with evidence and statistics, that Black men who were never even accused of rape were lynched as well as Black men who were in consensual relationships with white women (shocking some of her white feminist friends).

Bay shows how Wells' race, class, and gender all gave her a powerful lens from which to view the evils of U.S. society, without ever falling into academic jargon about race, class, and gender. She clearly considers Wells a hero, and to her credit, she also shows the defects of her virtues: her inability to compromise, her tendency to start organizations and not know how to run them from the inside. She was the ACT UP of the anti-lynching movement. The NAACP shunted her to the side, but without her, there would have been no Walter White, no Thurgood Marshall, and no Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

One other aspect of this book that I enjoyed was the loving attention paid to Wells' romantic life. When she finally did marry Chicago lawyer Ferdinand Barnett, they were a love match and a power couple. I enjoyed the picture of Ferdinand at home cooking sometimes so Ida could be out on the road, getting a prosecutor to investigate a sheriff who let a Black man be lynched. Hats off to him, as well.

“Born to slaves in1862, Ida B. Wells became a fearless antilynching crusader, women’s rights advocate, and journalist. Well’s refusal to accept any compromise on racial inequality, cause her to be labeled a “dangerous radical“ in her day, but made her a model for later civil rights activists as well as a powerful witness to the troubled radical politics of her era. In the richly illustrated To Tell The Truth Freely, the historian Mia Bell vividly captures Wells’s legacy in life from her childhood in Mississippi to her early career in the late 19th century Memphis and her later life in progressive era Chicago.
Wells’s fight for radical and gender justice begin in 1883 when she was a young schoolteacher, who traveled to her rural school house by rail. Forcibly ejected from her seat on a train. One day on account of her race Wells immediately sued the railroad. Though she ultimately lost her case on appeal in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, the published account of her legal challenge to Jim Crow changed her life, propelling her into a career as an outspoken journalist and social activist. Also a fierce critic of the racial violence that marked her era, Wells went on to launch a crusade against lynching that took her across the United States and eventually to Britain. Those she helped found the NAACP in 1910 after re-settling in Chicago. She would not remain a member for long. Always militant in her quest for racial justice Wells rejected not only Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism, but also the moderating influence of white reformers within the early NAACP, the life of Ida B. Wells and her enduring achievements are dramatically recovered in Mia Bay’s To Tell The Truth Freely.” - Quote from the inside cover of my copy of To Tell The Truth Freely.

I was really expecting to enjoy this book as I did not know much about Well’s life before starting this book. I did learn some things about her life but I was sadly disappointed by the way the book was written. The chapters seemed to drag on and on without an end in sight. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

This is an excellent account of an extraordinary journalist-author-activist of indefatigable persistence and courage. During her life she was often deemed abrasive, confrontational, ‘unladylike’, by other Black leaders. Later groups like SCLC and especially SNCC and the Black Power movement would follow her lead in engaging in ‘direct action.’

Ida B. Wells is so inspiring - someone who fought for her ideals and stood firm in her beliefs every day of her life. Glad I got to know more about her in this book, and I hope she gets a statue in every city she lived in!