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A review by dennisfischman
To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells by Mia Bay
4.0
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.
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.