She gave us the truth so we could act: Ida B. Wells, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the 1619 Project
Feb 19, 2022
Written by Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” - Ida B. Wells
This last week has taken me to places I did not expect, and has yet again reinforced the bumpy road that lies ahead for those of us committed to understanding this journey. Yes, people receive their PhDs in Black History and are steeped in it for years and here I am, still at the rim and feeling daunted. There is so much more to write about Ida B. Wells’ and Nikole Hannah Jones’ work than the space allotted here, and I am aware that the topics I am choosing to write about represent my own power to define this specific narrative.
I met Wanda Swan, CEO and Founder of Start by Talking, in late 2020 through her Anti-Oppressive Advocacy course. Having worked in the field of survivor advocacy for folx impacted by sexual violence, I learned from Wanda that there is so much history in the advocacy field that had been willfully ignored because it centered the Black women who started the anti-violence movement. Ida B. Wells is prominent among them as an activist, suffragist, abolitionist, and perhaps one of the most vocal anti-lynching journalists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Ida B. Wells taught, advocated, and reported with data, venom, and a hard-edged love and enduring hope in what was an incredibly dangerous time for her to do any of those things. Her work is groundbreaking, illuminating, unfathomably courageous, and strategic and smart in ways that I can’t fully grasp.
Her influence is clearly present in the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind the 1619 Project, and abolitionist activist Mariame Kaba – both of whom worked together with Wells’ great granddaughter, Michelle Duster, to raise sufficient funds to build a monument to Wells in Chicago. The monument, a gorgeous tribute to her legacy and work, was unveiled in 2021. [A not-so-side note: There are over 2,000 memorials in the U.S. dedicated to the Confederacy. This makes me think about how easily certain truths are celebrated, and the effort involved to provide counter narratives.]
(The Ida B. Wells Monument in Chicago, Ill.)
Last week, we talked about the Red Summer, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how much our educational systems tell us about Whiteness by teaching about Blackness in ways that serve to uphold White Supremacy. Wells’ work speaks directly to this. In this video, Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about the foundational contributions Wells made to the field of journalism and to Hannah Jones’ approach to reporting, in terms of Wells’ pushing to the forefront big questions around whose stories get told and whose truth counts. Wells used data and investigative skill to tell truths that White folx spent time, energy, and money to avoid and undermine – both in the political systems that Wells’ reporting sought to dismantle, and in the responses and backlash aimed directly at her. Her precise observations about Black humanity, White womanhood, the violence she witnessed, and the dynamics in the South shed light on the realities that weren’t being portrayed by mainstream White media.
The White backlash to both Wells and Hannah-Jones is profound. This speaks to a multi-layered attempt to keep history in the hands of Whiteness. This has deep ramifications, not only in the recent laws being passed that ban the teaching of Hannah-Jones’ work, but also in the day-to-day maintenance of the status quo. I didn’t know about the Red Summer (much of which was covered by Wells) until a few weeks ago. While I had heard about Ida B. Wells, the impact of her work is just now starting to sink in. These are the implications of White Supremacist dominance over our educational system – the very dominance that Ida B. Wells sought to overturn through her journalism. She gave us the truth so we could act.
(Tweet from Nikole Hannah-Jones, after both she and Ida B. Wells were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.)
Born enslaved in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells grew up around ideas of activism – her father co-founded Rust College, an Historically Black College. When Wells was just 16, however, both her parents died from yellow fever and Wells became a teacher and caregiver to her five younger siblings. In 1882 she moved to Memphis where she became a journalist and co-owner of a local newspaper. I am glossing over some significant aspects of her life, including the fact that she sued the railway company for discrimination, and taught in Tennessee’s public school system, where she further saw educational and racial inequities. For the purposes of this piece, though, I’m going to focus on a few things that happened during Wells’ time in Memphis.
First, let’s define lynching. Lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received the due process afforded them under the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. Why didn’t the police enforce the law, you might ask? White Supremacy, policing’s violent roots in slave patrols, and the fact that the Venn diagram between lynch mobs and law enforcement often looked more like a circle, with law enforcement participating, being present at what as often the public spectacle of murder, turning over Black men and women to lynch mobs, and not intervening when mobs arrived at the jailhouse. When Wells lived in Memphis, three of her friends who owned a successful grocery store – Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart - were lynched. This is the same impetus that drove many riots of the Red Summer - Black folx subverting White Supremacy, in this case through financial success. After this, Wells devoted her journalistic career to investigating lynchings across the South. She published a piece telling Black Memphis-area residents to leave, decrying a city that wouldn’t protect its citizens. After publication, 6,000 Black residents left the city, leaving White residents very upset that so much of the labor force had left.
The other piece of Wells’ experience in Memphis has to do with how she wrote about the rape myths associated with lynching. I have not yet finished reading the Red Record, in which Wells details the gruesome murders of Black men and women in 1894, identifying lynching victims and telling their stories, which she was able to do after attending lynchings and interviewing people in their aftermath. It’s an incredibly painful read, and in the opening pages Wells notes that between 1864 and 1894, 10,000 Black folx were lynched and in that same time, “for all these murders only three white men had been convicted”. Please read that last sentence again. I spent so much time in the first few pages of her report, reading these numbers, saying these names, looking up these places. For so long, I separated myself from this, thinking this violence happened somewhere far away and then I saw a picture of white folx at a lynching – they were often public spectacles – and I saw people that looked like me and I wondered about the choices I would have made had I lived there, then. I’ll get to that more in a bit.
(Manuscript of Ida B. Wells' The Red Record)
I’ve been trying to think of a way to bring up Wells’ investigation on the roles White women played in lynchings, specifically through these rape myths. This is heavy, multi-layered, and crawls up right close to my heart as a White woman who has worked in the field of advocacy for survivors of sexual violence. Nearly 25% of the lynchings of Black folx in the South were based on charges of sexual assault, almost always alleging that a Black man had raped a White woman. Most laws, policies, and institutions at the time rejected the idea that White women could consent to having sex with a Black man, and so definitions of “rape” here were incredibly broad. Ida B. Wells saw through this, noting, among many other complicated aspects of this assertion that, “Nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” The insinuation that consensual interracial relations existed, along with the anger that White folx felt at the fleeing of their labor force at Wells’ call was enraging enough to the White community for them to burn down her office and threaten her life, forcing her into exile.
By exposing consensual interracial relationships, Wells thus exposed the lie behind so many lynchings. But she didn’t stop there. She talked about many other aspects of this. She brought into her reporting ideas that Black men were lynched for allegedly raping White women whose perpetrators are actually White men – and investigated stories where the survivor herself told of a White perpetrator. She talked about Black men being lynched for in fact protecting their families from being raped by White men. She reported on Black women being lynched as well, for crimes often, yet again, committed by White men. Wells reported on one Eliza Woods, lynched for poisoning a White woman. The victim’s husband confessed to poisoning her only after Eliza had been brutally murdered in front of a crowd of white people in a celebratory, carnival-like setting.
Many lynchings were made into a public spectacle, sometimes with thousands of White folx attending, backing traffic up for miles. They would pack food, wear their Sunday best, bring their children, and hope for mementos – often in the form of clothing or body parts from the departed. There was a sickeningly vibrant theme to these murder events: vendors selling food and drinks, and people purchasing postcards with a picture of the body on it. They gathered and watched brutal, sometimes hours-long murders unfold. There is so much to unpack here. Wells was often reporting on lynchings from these public events. Because she was also a working mother, she often took her children with her. I have been imagining the preparation done in the Wells household and the preparation done in a White household for the same lynching event. The getting ready, the packing of food, the words spoken. I have been thinking about Whiteness in this, about how this was a little over 100 years ago. About how the violence, trauma, and brutality of this imprints in people’s genetic makeup, and around how Whiteness has been steeped in violence for centuries, in ways that doesn’t serve anybody: Vikings, the Dark Ages, all the torture. How it really is part of who we are, part of what we carried when we came here, stole the land we now live on and stole the labor we still profit off of, from slavery to prisons. I think about how we still glorify violence in our media, our speech, our music, our actions, our sports, our laws. Whiteness and White Supremacy have been dictating this the whole time, regardless of the participants.
(A postcard from the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, 1883)
It’s a quick line from that, then, to the work being done to outlaw Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project. The work being done to deny that we ever did this, to deny that we built institutions and laws and policies and tall, 15-foot-high platforms on which we murdered innocent men and women in front of their families, as White families cheered. We could instead be holding ourselves accountable to that history and seeing all the ways in which everything around us is still so shaped by it, seeing that if we don’t divest from it, we will continue to perpetrate the same mistakes. Instead of burning down the offices, banning books, and sending death threats, we could listen to the Black women who continue to tell us the truth.
While I can’t say how I would have behaved back then (although I would like to assume the best, clearly – we all would), I want to reiterate that we do have choices now. We can choose where we place our energy – toward accepting or rejecting truths. Instead of addressing the real issue at hand, white folx in the South chose to blockade roads to prevent Black families from fleeing to the North. They chose to resort to more violence instead of answering to their own ineptitude. White women in particular chose (and choose) to uphold violent social mores through silence or by active participation. The patriarchal and White Supremacist force to protect White women’s perceived sanctity from the racist trope of the Black male rapist led to thousands of lynchings. White women bore responsibility then for vocalizing and mobilizing to put a stop to it, to listen and to tell the truth, and to interrogate the multiply oppressive systems around them, and we bear that same responsibility now.
Additional Resources:
Here is a fascinating episode of NPR’s Fresh Air that outlines the anti-1619 Project legislation being passed in many states
I cited this report above, and I really encourage you to take a look. It’s from the Equal Justice Initiative, a project committed to “ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society” (eji.org). Page 20 of the report speaks about the lynchings that occurred in Paris, Texas, and the ongoing racial violence.
Here is a beautiful article about the Ida B. Wells monument .
If you’re interested in learning more about how White and Black folx hold racialized trauma in their bodies - as mentioned when talking about how White folx carried trauma over from the Dark Ages, Vikings, etc., please read Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands.
