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Ida Wells-Barnett
Journalist Ida Wells-Barnett in 1893. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library
By Mary Jo Bane
Ida B. Wells-Barnett—daughter of slaves, anti-lynching activist, suffragist, integrationist—was extremely clear about what was essential and what could be compromised or delayed.
A chapter in her autobiography describes her work with suffragist Susan B. Anthony. On most issues the two women agreed about both goals and tactics. But at one point, Anthony explained to Wells-Barnett why she had not invited Frederick Douglass to address the Equal Suffrage Association in Atlanta, and why she did not support the foundation of a colored branch of the association: that she "did not want anything to get in the way of bringing southern white women into our suffrage association." Anthony asked Wells-Barnett if she was wrong. "I answered uncompromisingly yes, for I felt that although she may have made gains for suffrage, she had also confirmed white women in their attitude of segregation," wrote Wells-Barnett. Though Wells-Barnett continued to value her relationship with Anthony, she remained firm that the fight against racism—and lynching and segregation foremost—could not be compromised.
Reflecting on Wells-Barnett's life, on the controversies that seemed to stir around her, on the exclusion and failure she met often with her tireless courage, has helped me to put into perspective the challenges that Catholics—particularly Catholic women—confront in our times. Like Wells-Barnett, we face myriad injustices in our Church, our country, and the world. Like Wells-Barnett, we need to discern which challenges are most important and which must wait, knowing that the work we begin will not likely be finished in our lifetime.
Ida B. Wells was born in Mississippi in 1862, of slave parents who ensured that she was well educated for the times and that she developed a firm faith anchored in the Methodist Church. At age 16, she lost her parents to yellow fever and took responsibility for her five younger siblings, supporting the family by teaching at a school six miles from home. She moved to Tennessee and continued teaching, in Memphis and nearby, until she was fired for bringing anti-segregation litigation against the local railroad (more than a decade before Plessy v. Ferguson reached the U.S. Supreme Court). In 1889, she became a full-time journalist and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, then the city's leading African-American newspaper.
The brutal 1892 lynching of three respected members of Memphis's African-American community, acquaintances of Wells, shaped her life. She became a relentless anti-lynching crusader, first in print and then through public speaking, in this country and in the drawing rooms and lecture halls of Great Britain. She took risks: Against the argument that lynching was an understandable response to the rape of white women by black men, she documented that rape was often not the issue at all, and that white women were not immune to sexual attraction to black men.
At age 33, Wells married activist lawyer Ferdinand Barnett. They had four children, and Wells-Barnett (as she became known) balanced caring for the family with continued activism and a job, working as a probation officer in Chicago. She devoted considerable time to a variety of Negro organizations. She founded the Ida B. Wells Club for Negro women and the more activist Negro Fellowship League in Chicago; she helped found the NAACP, though her relationship with that organization as it developed was often stormy. During the last decade of her life—she died in 1931—she found herself pushed to the sidelines by the emerging Negro leadership, having alienated many people with her confrontational style and her difficult personality.
TWO TRAITS make Ida Wells-Barnett a hero to me. First, her deep faith motivated her total dedication to what she had discerned as her unique mission. She was active in church activities throughout her life and was a regular teacher of Sunday school classes. She was flexible about denomination, belonging at various times to Methodist, Presbyterian, and community congregations. The churches to which she belonged were segregated; this bothered her greatly, and she sometimes protested. But the failures of churches neither diverted her energies nor weakened her commitment to God or to Christian discipleship in the world. Catholics, especially Catholic women, might heed that example.
Second, Wells-Barnett worked for the long term. She lived through slavery, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. She died before lynching had been abolished, or integration begun, or equal participation by African-Americans in the economy and governance of our country could be achieved. Despite personal disappointments and setbacks to the cause of equal respect for all men and women, she did not lose faith in the worth of the goal or in its possibility.
I have been angered, as have many, by the clergy abuse scandal, by the institutional Church's continuing insensitivity to women, by the hierarchy's obsession with liturgical rubrics and its preoccupation with imposing its own norms of sexuality, marriage, and reproduction on a pluralistic democracy. Sometimes my anger at the Church distracts me from what I know is my own call to mission, God's invitation to work for peace and justice on this earth. I know that reform of the Church is important. A vibrant, inclusive, evangelizing Church serves God's kingdom and is worth the investment of time and passion. But at times, we as disciples must choose: We can work for the ordination of women, or agitate against war, or work for the alleviation of poverty afflicting a billion people.
In the long run, we know that the Spirit is with the Church and with the world. In the short term, the path is not always clear. Faithful disciples may take heart from and choose to follow the example of Ida B. Wells-Barnett: to be about the mission, to tolerate or work around the failings of the Church, to risk disapproval and exclusion, and to keep our eyes on the long term.
Mary Jo Bane is a professor of public policy and management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. For more on the life of Wells-Barnett, she recommends Linda O. McMurry’s To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (1998); Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (edited by Alfreda M. Duster, 1970); and Patricia A. Schechter’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform 1880–1930 (2001).
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