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Ida B. Wells Is Just Like Us: Bringing Babies to Work, Juggling Jobs, and Fighting for Freedom
In a new book, Michelle Duster shares intimate details of her great-grannie, Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells isn’t the household name she should be, especially when it comes to her place alongside other early civil rights activists. Very much a contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois, who was six years her junior, and Booker T. Washington, six years her senior, Wells was a suffragist, anti-lynching activist, and co-founder of the NAACP. Thankfully, her great-granddaughter Michelle Duster is sharing these details in a new book, Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells. This nonlinear account of Wells’ life shines a more robust light on the activist, writer, wife, and mother who was radicalized by the violent lynchings of three of her friends.
The Holly Springs, Mississippi, native and Rust College graduate wrote of the horrors in the pamphlets Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) and The Red Record (1895), leading many today to describe her as an investigative journalist. Her 1890s move from Memphis to Chicago, in fact, was prompted by her need to leave the South. And now, a major downtown street there bears her name, and locals remember how she created the first Black…
