Shine a Light on Injustice

What journalists can learn from Ida B. Wells

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it does seem to me that notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservation of our rights” ― Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Constitution Foundation, 2018)

Black women cannot afford to look at America through rose-colored glasses. There is no proverbial time in American history that we would instead return to because inequities are a staple of our citizenship. For white people, America is a sacred democracy, while Black people have lived under the autocratic rule since the inception of this country. Despite these hardships, many Black women achieved greatness by fighting against human rights violations, which deprive us of our agency.

The life and commitment of Ida B. Wells can offer guidance to those engaging in advocating for Civil Rights. Born in 1862 to enslaved parents, she dedicated her life to fighting against a system that treated Black people as second-class citizens. As a Black woman, she experienced misogynoir throughout her life but decided to leave the world better than she found it.

The abolition of slavery after the Civil War became the foundation of Ida B. Well’s life work as a teacher, journalist, anti-lynching activist, community organizer, and woman suffragist (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2018).

Her life and work have contemporary relevance as Black women continue to experience police brutality personally and within their families. White supremacist extremist groups have grown emboldened in recent years. Ida B. Well’s work can help us stay grounded as we continue to experience violence and voter disenfranchisement.

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. — Ida B. Wells, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader (Staff, 2018).

Each journalist must choose her fate. For Ida B. Wells and many other Black women, their writing provided an outlet for community organizing, inspiration, and advocacy in a world that attempts to silence them. She believed that we could right the wrongs in life by shining a light on the injustices we see. Only once the public becomes aware of the obscene inequities will they be forced to confront the consequences of denial.

Journalistic Advocacy

Ida B. Wells wrote about race issues initially in church newsletters. Her deep passion led her to become the editor of a local Memphis newspaper called the Free Speech. She expressed her innermost thoughts about the poor condition of Black schools, communities, and living standards.

She took a militant stand against the suppression of Black Civil Rights in the South (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2018).

She held no punches back and decided that honesty and clarity outweighed any potential consequences. Her journalistic advocacy got her fired by the all-white Memphis school board. After losing her job, she committed to writing as her full-time endeavor.

In the modern era, the public often relies on police departments’ self-reporting and mainstream media sources. However, Ida B. Wells encourages us to apply due diligence in our pursuit of justice. We cannot wait for an abusive system to self-report.

Anti-Lynching Advocacy

Although lynching someone by hanging someone in a tree was common, mobs used numerous methods such as shooting, stabbing, beating, burning alive, and torture (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2018).

While many people think of lynching as limited to public hangings, it refers to extrajudicial killings, which may or may not be caused by hanging.

Every generation of Black people witnesses lynching, which leaves psychological scars on the Black community. One lynching, in particular, is called Ida B. Wells to action.

In 1892, a white grocery store owner, William Barrett, became angry after Thomas Moss and other Black men opened a competing store across the street. One day a minor dispute led to a fistfight between the supporters of both men (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2018).

After the initial altercation, the Black men armed themselves, awaiting the white store owner and his allies’ return. When their mob arrived to attack the store, the Black men fired into them to defend themselves from attack. Unfortunately, the sheriff and the sheriff deputies were amongst the men in plain clothing. They injured three white men, with one losing an eye. The local sheriff came back to arrest the three Black men. However, they never made it to the courthouse. These white men wanted revenge and gathered in a mob. In a rage, they dragged their bodies to an open field and shot them, aiming at their eyes until they died.

The matter came up for judicial investigation, but as might have been expected, the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait the result of the investigation — that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward― (Wells-Barnett, 2018).

Ida B. Wells became outraged at this injustice, writing about in an editorial published in the Free Speech. While a Grand Jury decided that the murderers were “unknown,” the entire town of Memphis knew who committed the crimes. Denial of guilt is a common trend in cases that involve Black victims by either law enforcement or white supremacists. The Grand Jury declared, “this crime was committed” at “the hands of person’s unknown.”

Wells argued that the real cause of lynching was to enforce white supremacy and keep Black people down. The mob spirit has grown, she explained as Black people advanced in property, ownership, business, and education (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2018).

Using her journalism, she encouraged thousands of Memphis’s Black families to move to a different town. Many relocated to Oklahoma in the aftermath of the Memphis Lynching due to Wells’ insistence.

Black, people had to cut on spending money at local stores and riding the local trolly to save money. This boycott had a negative financial impact on the city, infuriating local white community leaders. They targeted the building that housed the Free Speech’s printing press, setting it on fire and leaving a death threat for Wells.

In response to the south’s hostility, she moved up north, becoming editor and part-owner of the New York Age. She documented information about the Memphis Lynching and other research pertinent to the prevalence of extrajudicial killings.

She continued to advocate against lynching for many years to come, publishing pamphlets like Southern Horrors (1892) and the Red Record (1895), which documented lynchings. These writings became instrumental in speaking out against the injustices Black people experienced in America. Her report even gained international attention.

Ida B Wells’ anti-lynching campaign soon gained the attention of former British abolition leaders who invited her to cross the Atlantic to give a series on lectures. She traveled to Britain in 1893 and 1894 and was enthusiastically received by British audiences (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2018).

Her campaign against lynching effectively galvanized support from the Black community and many white American and British abolitionists.

Contemporaries consider Ida B Wells’ reporting one of the most detailed of that period because she included dates, names, times, and the stated purpose for each lynching. Wells’ statistical analysis disproved a powerful negative stereotype about Black men. While white men typically justified the practice of lynching as an essential means to protect the virtue of white women, Ida B. Wells’ documentation exposed the fact that most of these lynchings were unrelated to any accusation.

Wells described cases that involved innocent victims, the mentally disabled, and those lynched for no known reason. She also introduced a new category of ‘spectacle lynchings’ that involved thousands of participants (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2018).

The same white people guilty of dehumanizing Black people through lynching refused to put their names in their white-owned paper. They never wanted to take responsibility as executioners in these extrajudicial killings. These Christian men believed that Black people were inherently inferior and treated them as slaves long after abolishing slavery.

She proved that facts matter even in the most trying times. We should never relinquish our right to speak out against injustices.

Modern Day Implications

Too often, people fail to realize how prominent these incidences are. As a result, many fail to understand the frequency that white people violate Black people’s Civil Rights.

The public killing of George Floyd is an example of a modern-day lynching. As he begged for his life, officer Derek Chauvin continued to keep his knee on his neck, as seen in the videos released to the public. Instead of taking him to court, he took the law into his hands. Lynchings assume the guilt of a Black person without using the judicial system.

Ahmaud Arbery was lynched when he was gunned down while jogging three months ago in Glynn County, Georgia, Yancy and others say. Back in 2011, James Craig Anderson was, too, when he was dragged to his death in Mississippi, just 13 years after James Byrd of Texas met his fate in the same fashion (McLaughlin, 2020).

America is not better than it was before; it is only different. When public lynchings were at they heyday, most white people refused to fight against the atrocities, unjustly accusing Black men of raping white women.

These dangerous stereotypes paint Black people as over sexual and devoid of moral clarity. This narrative of calling Black people dangerous, as many opponents to Black Lives Matter claim, is an old racist trope used to justify public lynchings.

Senator Rand Paul and the Republican party currently oppose the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal crime even though it passed the House of Representatives with bipartisan support. The fight for criminal justice reform and policing reform is also at a standstill.

Black Women Suffragist

Wells believed strongly in the ‘sacred ballot’ as the way for Black people to fight racism in all its forms (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2018).

Voting was vital for her as she realized that Black people’s conditions would remain stagnant without proper representation. Black people remain underrepresented in the House of Representatives and Congress. While many argue that voting does not help Black people, it cannot help unless there are enough like-minded people in power positions that support progressive legislation. We cannot dwell in past failures but instead put our efforts into charting a path forward.

Ida B. Wells became a well-known women’s suffragist. She worked hard to advocate marginalized groups of Americans. However, even the battle against patriarchy became marred with racism.

At the last minute, the parade organizers ruled that the Black suffragists would have to march in a separate unit so as not to offend southern members of Congress (Constitutional Rights, Foundation, 2018).

Even the liberal white women wanted to separate themselves from Black women in fear that it would hurt their cause. This segregational tactic was a tell-tell sign that their Black liberty was not their goal. Ida B. Wells refused to participate in a segregated march but continued to fight for women’s rights.

As discussed in a previous article, the 19th amendment did not provide voting rights for all Black women. However, some Black women in Northern states did gain the right to vote at that time, and Ida B. Wells registered and encouraged other Black women to exercise their rights.

Conclusion

There is no return because we never left. … I don’t think we’re going back to a dark chapter. All the chapters in the book have always been devastating for black people — Emory University philosophy professor George Yancy (McLaughlin, 2020).

America has always treated Black people with hostility, particularly when we choose to speak out about injustices. We cannot wait until the news reports on injustices. Instead, the responsibility falls clearly on us. They do not have the incentive to keep this dialogue going.

In the middle of our American racial reckoning, many white people continue to deny racism and the harmful impact on our country. Even as the evidence mounts, some still refuse to confront the ugly truth. The amount of white Americans who believe in racism has decreased since the public lynching of George Floyd.

Strangely though, as the bloody evidence of systemic anti-Black racism piles up, white Americans appear less, rather than more, convinced of its existence (Henderson, 2020.

While overt racists are responsible for the unadulterated violence we see, white denial is a shield that allows murderers to walk free. Current statistics show that one in 1,000 Black men will die at the police’s hands, and advocates understand that these are not all justifiable homicide. We have to speak out because every one of these men did not reach the national apparatus. As John Lewis suggested, we need to get into some good trouble.

Year after year statistics are published, meetings are held, resolutions are adopted, and yet lynchings go on — Ida B Wells (Wells-Barnett, 2018).

In America, we need to call these extrajudicial killings by their proper name — lynchings. In honor of Ida B Wells, who fought to expose the cruelty of this all American pastime, journalists, educators, and everyday citizens must shine a light on the injustices that have long characterized this nation.

A society for investigative reporting bears her name; the New York Times — which once branded her “a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress — just published a belated obituary, and there are moves to name a street after her in New York and build a monument in Chicago (Smith, 2018).

Our takeaway is that we need to call out these injustices and not expect praise for it. These murders, at the hands of white supremacists and police, are unpopular things to highlight. Americans think of white men as virtuous and law enforcement as heroic, so writing about inequities contradicts America’s understanding. Ida B. Wells demonstrated the benefit of fighting for the Black community. She took away the white racists’ most incredible tool — denial.

Articles Curated in Equality, Race, Beauty, and Feminism

References:

Constitutional Rights Foundation (Ed.). (, 2018). Bill of Rights in Action. IDA B. WELLS AND HER CRUSADE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE.

Henderson, F. A. (2020, September 24). Understanding the Origins of White Denial. Retrieved October 01, 2020, from https://knowledge.insead.edu/blog/insead-blog/understanding-the-origins-of-white-denial-15281

McLaughlin, E. (2020, June 03). America’s legacy of lynching isn’t all history. Many say it’s still happening today. Retrieved October 01, 2020, from https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/lynching-america-george-floyd-ahmaud-arbery-breonna-taylor/index.html

Smith, D. (2018, April 27). Ida B Wells: The unsung heroine of the civil rights movement. Retrieved October 01, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/27/ida-b-wells-civil-rights-movement-reporter

Staff, N. (2018, July 20). The Way to Right Wrongs: Celebrating the Legacy of Ida B. Wells. Retrieved October 01, 2020, from https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/07/16/way-right-wrongs-celebrating-legacy-ida-b-wells

Wells-Barnett, I. (2018, April 27). ‘Lynching is color-line murder’: The blistering speech denouncing America’s shame. Retrieved October 01, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/27/ida-b-wells-barnett-national-negro-conference-chicago-speech