2008 Biography Finalist Ida: A Sword Among Lions, by Paula J. Giddings

by Jennifer Reese | Mar-06-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Jennifer Reese discusses Paula J. Gidding’s Ida: A Sword Among Lions (Amistad)

There was no more tireless or articulate a champion of the rights of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and hers should be a household name. But unlike contemporaries Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, slave-born journalist and activist Ida Wells is unknown to most Americans. Just what a shame that is, Paula J. Giddings makes clear in her fascinating and capacious new biography Ida: A Sword Among Lions, a book that doubles as a richly detailed history of race relations from the 1870s through the 1920s.

Wells was born in 1862, the child of Mississippi slaves who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Both of her parents died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, leaving teenaged Wells an orphan in charge of five younger siblings. She began teaching school to support herself, and eventually moved to Memphis. Here, in 1883, more than seventy years before Rosa Parks refused to stand for a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, Wells took a seat in the whites-only “ladies car” of the Chesapeake & Ohio railway. When the conductor asked her to leave, she declined. When he and several male passengers physically evicted her from the train, she found a lawyer and took her case to court. She made headlines when she won.

The same fiery spirit fueled her journalistic career. Her early writings tackled black fraternities (she disapproved) and encouraged African Americans to use the money they spent on whiskey to buy books instead. (As Giddings points out, she had a prissy streak.) She didn’t find her niche or her powerful, persuasive voice until 1892, when a close male friend was lynched by a white mob in Memphis.  Somebody “must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning,” Wells wrote. “And it seems to have fallen to me to do so.”

In thundering editorials, detailed reported investigations, speeches, and an international campaign, Wells fought for decades to explain, publicize, and end the horror of lynching, sometimes at risk of her life. That this extraordinary, courageous, and accomplished woman was already largely forgotten by the time of her death in 1931 is an injustice that Giddings’s book only begins to right.