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Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

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In 1893, the "Chicago Inter-Ocean", a mainstream metro newspaper, commissioned 30 year old Ida Wells to investigate a crime. A black man, accused of murdering two white girls, had been mutilated, burned to death and left hanging from a telegraph pole. Wells made the trip, assumed the identity of the dead man's widow, tracked down eyewitnesses and published her findings in detail.

The Introduction describes the history of lynching and serves as a backdrop to Wells's crusade against lynching:

"The origin of the term "lynching," according to James E. Cutler, author of "Lynch-Law" (1905)[a full copy can be found on Google Books], the first scholarly text on the subject, is attributed to Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace (and brother of the founder of Lynchburg). Lynch established informal, extra-legal citizen juries during the Revolutionary War years when official courts were few and traveling to them through British-occupied territories was perilous. The common sentence for those found guilty--mostly horse thieves and Tories--was thirty nine lashes with a whip. By the 1830s, when southern abolitionism reached its height, lynching was associated more with those who threatened the slave order. Following the Civil War, the practice became more murderous with the bloody struggle for power among northern federalists, Confederates, and newly enfranchised black men.

"However, it wasn't until 1886, when increasing numbers of rural blacks migrated to southern cities, that the number of African Americans lynched exceeded that of whites: a trend that continued even as blacks became increasingly disenfranchised; had largely eschewed their political aspirations in favor of building institutions, acquiring wealth, and eliminating ignorance; and ex- Confederates had regained control of their state governments. Both Wells and Cutler cited what were surely conservative estimates by the Chicago Tribune, which reported that 728 persons were lynched between 1882 and 1891, the majority of them African American men. The statistics further showed that less than a third had been accused of rape, much less guilty of it."

In 1893 Wells was established as a black journalist, co-editor and part-owner of the "Memphis Free Speech". A white mob seized the three black men and killed them in a railroad yard duplicating wounds suffered by three white deputies. Wells urged her black readers: "Save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts." Memphis blacks took her advice and departed by the thousands to the West, and those who stayed behind boycotted streetcars and quit their jobs. Business owners panicked and commerce "came to a standstill," Wells would recall with some satisfaction.

Wells used the "Free Speech" to respond to an editorial supporting lynching. The South was menaced by the "horrible and bestial propensities" of black men, whose seething ambition was to catch a white woman alone. Lynching, the paper argued, was a defensive act by noble whites protecting chaste women from depraved blacks. Wells replied that, according to her own investigations, some lynchings involved black men who were guilty of nothing more than having had consensual sex with a white woman. If lynchings were sometimes proof of a white woman's desire for a black man, Wells argued, then the future lynching of blacks by white men would lead others to draw conclusions "which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."

Despite the firestorm created by her editorial, Wells continued her fight. She gave 102 lectures in Britain to bring international pressure on the U.S. She helped to introduce anti-lynching legislation in six states. Eventually, Wells married a successful Chicago attorney, had four children, wrote in defense of prisoners on death row, opened a reading room and social center in Chicago, ran for public office, and was part of a contingent that met with President Woodrow Wilson in 1913 to protest civil-service segregation.

Ida Wells Clubs opened in cities across the country, and benefactors sent money to her causes. But the women's suffrage movement generally avoided Wells because its leaders didn't want to alienate Southern women. Black ministers asked her to mute the sexual themes in her writing about lynching and women's rights, and W.E.B. Du Bois took credit for excluding her from NAACP leadership positions. Government agents investigated her for treason after passage of the Espionage Act of 1917.

This is a carefully researched biography, describing a real American heroine, and her efforts to stop a terrible crime. I found that it added a very useful dimension to Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells.

Robert C. Ross 2008

Giddings' biography presents the life of a woman whose courage and intelligence transcends the time in which she lived. Wells story resonates with the troublesome duality of being black and intelligent during a time that most of society saw African Americans as less-than-human. Moreover, Giddings' research builds step-by-step to grow an illustration of Wells resplendent in its examples of unintended consequences. Each violent action by the racists unintentionally shines light on Wells poetic writings that casts each action in its stony hatred for all humanity not only black humanity. Consequently, Giddings' prose flows through each active time of Wells' career as a journalist and writer of civil rights chapbooks almost as though she were channeling Wells herself since Wells story builds from one hair-raising escape from one bigoted southern town to the next. Pick it up.

I wanted to read about this wonderful woman I've heard so much about. I also wanted to read about her since she lived during the same time as my great grandparents . I've been studying the family history and I get a great since of what their lives were like. A must read for anyone wanting to know the history of that day. Lots of things happening then apply to our current history. Written in excellent style and great understanding.

Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a great biographic start for students of history. It provides thought provoking and pain staking details of a hurricanic time in American history...and Ida B. Wells-Barnett was the eye of the storm. She uprooted anyone or anything that stood in the way of justice for African-Americans- from lynchings to women's suffrage, jobs and politics. As a woman, she was before her time in aggressive-ness, assertiveness, and intelligence. I would dare say that the majority of her problems with her contemporaries were gender related. Giddings took a complicated and complex woman during a crucial era and produced a compelling contribution to African American history and the history of the Women's Movement. The book was too long, but will wet your appetite to learn more about the people, places, and events so thoroughly documented in this biography.

This is a well researched book on an American Heroine. Ida wrote when it was dangerous for Black People and Women. 1880's to 1930. Paul Giddings has done a masterful job of bringing this story to the forefront. The book is long but worth every minute. I only wish I could see a picture mentioned in the book about Ida marching in the 1913 Women Suffrage March in Washington DC with her White Illinois Delegation. She refused to march in the back as the Southern Women Delegations asked. AS a student of history, I would give this a A Plus.

Title: Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
Author: Paula J. Giddings
Rating: ****
Tags: lynching, women, suffrage, civil rights, ida b. wells, frederick douglass, non-fiction

Ida B. Wells, at least until the publication of this book, was something of a footnote in history, her role in anti-lynching campaigns played down by those who came after her.

Gidding's book restores Wells reputation, in great detail. Actually the book was hard for me to get through. It is long and heavy, not good with my minor carpal tunnel. But I decided to finish the book and am glad that I did.

Wells was born a slave in 1862. Her parents were skilled though, and made an easier transition to freedom than many others. Unfortunately they died young, and Wells and her siblings were forced to survive on their own. Wells lived in Memphis and was a teacher. Black civil rights, gained afer the Civil War, began to be eroded pretty quickly. Wells first came to public attention with an anti-lynching article in 1892, against the lynching of three men, one of whom was a friend of hers. Her anti-lynching campaign helped propel her into journalism, but she was forced into exile from Memphis in fear of her life. She traveled a lot, eventually winding up in Chicago, where she married a lawyer named Ferdinand Barnett and had four children with him. She never stopped working for civil rights for African-Americans and women, and for improving conditions for blacks.

In her anti-lynching campaigns, she investigated incidents in detail, and published the results in pamphlets, while also writing articles refuting that the cause of most lynchings was black male rape of white women.

Wells could be a contentious personality, and it cost her over her life. But what also cost her was just the unwillingness of many to hear the cold hard facts she wanted revealed. She was farther to the left politically than most, insisting on civil rights when it was far more popular to follow Booker T. Washington in saying that black vocational education was more important than rights, that it would improve the economic conditions and raise the status of the race. Wells knew that, for one thing, it wasn't a lot of use to educate blacks for jobs that they wouldn't be hired for because of their skin color.

Giddings gets into some sickening detail in eiscussing lynchings, but these are the facts. The events were brutal... not just death, but torture before death. Reading these horrors don't make one proud of being white. Even progressive whites were often unable to understand the degree of their racial prejudice. Ida made them uncomfortable because she would tell that they were wrong and why.

So all in all, this is a story that shows the worst of humanity, prejudice so strong it destroyed lives in so many ways, but also of those who had the courage to speak up, and to never give up, despite every possible discouragement. It reinforces what I've thought for a long while, that society advances by evolutionary change rather than revolutionary. Revolutions tend to provoke reaction that sends things back to where they were or worse. Yet society needs the revolutionary voices to raise consciousness and introduce new progressive ideas. Ida B. Wells was one of those voices.

Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a book that in the end rewards the effort of reading it.


Publication Amistad (2008), Hardcover, 816 pages
Publication date 2008
ISBN 0060519215 / 9780060519216

This book tells a story of American History. It is depressing but it tells a story everyone needs to know about. We have to know our history in order to understand where we are today and how we got here.