That story.
Of course, the problem with that beloved story is that it wasn’t always true, and only applied to a select group of White men (like Andrew Carnegie) while the vast majority of people in the United States at the time were dealt an unfair hand, in one way or another.
In recent decades, history curricula and textbooks have been revised to shed more light on the inequities that have plagued our country since the beginning as a natural consequence of the fact that it was built on stolen land and labor. These changes to the traditional narrative have sparked some of the most virulent debates between the champions of this more inclusive history and the historians who find the new way of teaching American history to be gloomy and unpatriotic. (I bet you can’t guess which side I fall on.)
That said, the two narratives don’t have to be mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible to celebrate Andrew Carnegie, while also acknowledging the fact that the odds were stacked against most people. While most immigrants never made it out of poverty – never mind achieving Carnegie’s wealth – most of them worked hard and went down fighting. Moreover, the bootstrap narrative can and should be expanded to include other people besides wealthy White businessmen.
Take Ida B. Wells: born a slave in Mississippi, through sheer hard work, grit, and determination, Wells became an internationally acclaimed journalist and social justice crusader, helped found the NAACP, and ran for Illinois state senate, all during a period of American history when the rights and opportunities for Black women were extremely limited. If that’s not bootstrappy enough for you, I don’t know what is.
Wells’ early life is a bit Dickensian. She was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, right in the middle of the Civil War, but by all accounts had a fairly decent childhood. Her mother and father, known for their skills as a cook and carpenter respectively, maintained steady employment during the post-emancipation turmoil. Young Ida meanwhile, went to school and gained a voracious appetite for reading, although she lamented the fact that everything available to her was written by and about White people. Then, when Wells was a teenager, Holly Springs was ravaged by a yellow fever epidemic, that killed her parents and some of her siblings. At age 16, Wells took on the role of caretaker for her surviving younger sisters. In need of a job, Wells dressed herself up to look like an adult, and handily passed the qualifying exam to secure a teaching position. After five years of her relentless schedule of teaching and caring for her sisters, the Wells girls moved to Memphis, Tennessee to live with their aunt who helped share the burden of caring for the younger girls.
Ida B. Wells’ path to notoriety began while she was in Memphis, in the spring of 1884. Wells had bought a first-class train ticket and was comfortably enjoying her ride when the conductor asked her to move to the smoking “Jim Crow” car – despite the fact that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed equal treatment for Blacks in public transportation and accommodation. Wells refused to give up her seat and when the conductor tried to physically remove her, she bit him. The conductor enlisted the help of a couple of other men, who removed Wells, kicking and screaming the whole way. After the incident, Wells sued the railway company and won her case, only to lose it in a higher court when the railway company appealed the decision. It is worth noting that all this went down just after the Supreme Court declared sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional, but about 10 years before the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case, where the Supreme Court ruled that segregation (“separate but equal”) was chill and constitutional. (Oh, SCOTUS.)
Wells wrote an article about her experience that was published in a Black weekly newspaper, and the editor was so impressed by her writing, that he asked her to become a regular contributor. Wells’ weekly column, Iola, was so successful that within a few years, her articles started to be published in more prominent, national Black newspapers and a few years after that, she became an editor for the Memphis newspaper, Free Speech. During this burgeoning period of her career as a journalist, Wells had maintained her job as a teacher. However, her condemnation against White institutions for discriminatory practices eventually went too far in 1891 when she attacked the Memphis Board of Education for the conditions in Black schools. She was dismissed from her teaching job and became a full-time journalist.
The height of Wells’ career overlaps with the Progressive Era – a period between 1890-1920 in the United States when intellectuals, journalists, community activists, and some politicians pushed for reforms that would make the country better. Progressives put their energies into a panoply of issues, including education, women’s suffrage, better housing/working conditions, regulations on food and drug industries, and limits or prohibitions on the sale of alcohol. Typically, journalists known as muckrakers (like Wells) helped expose an issue (or range of issues) to the public using vivid descriptions and a new-fangled technology: photography. Many of these writers also played a role in organizing and attempting to fix the issues.
Ida Wells’ claim to fame was her exposé on lynching in the South. Three of Wells’ close friends opened a grocery store in Memphis, cutting in on the business of a White-owned grocery. A White mob attacked the three Black grocers who were arrested after wounding some of their White attackers. The Black men were then lynched. After the incident, Wells expressed her opinion in Free Speech that Black residents of Memphis should relocate – and some six thousand did in a period of two months. Wells herself stayed, and helped organized boycotts against White-owned businesses. She also began to write and speak about lynching, compiling a formal study that she published in 1892. In it, she exposed that Black men were being lynched for trivial crimes or fraudulent charges and scandalized White communities by suggesting that Black men lynched on “rape” charges, were overwhelmingly designed to cover up consensual relationships between White women and Black men. While Wells was on the lecture circuit in Philadelphia, her office in Memphis was destroyed by a White mob. Feeling that Memphis was no longer safe for her, Wells moved to Chicago, where she eventually married Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent lawyer. (Her house in Chicago is a national landmark, and is still standing, however, someone else lives there, so you can’t go inside – unless they invite you in for cookies and tea.)
During the early years of her marriage and during the infancy of her first son, Wells continued to be an active public figure, but after the birth of her second son and two daughters, Wells decided to temporarily withdraw from public life to raise her children.
Wells didn’t stay retired long. In addition to continually pressing for federal anti-lynching legislation (which by a narrow margin, never passed), Wells helped found the NAACP and was an active participant in the women’s suffrage movement, despite the fact that many Suffrage organizations were segregated. So, she formed her own Black women’s suffrage club and joined a famous march of suffragettes on Washington, DC in 1913.
With the exception of women’s suffrage in 1920, most of Wells’ hoped-for reforms never came to pass in her lifetime, but this never stopped her, and if it discouraged her, she didn’t show it. She continued to write and organize, particularly within the growing Black community of Chicago – she even ran for state senate in Illinois in 1930, impatient with the lack of progress. She lost the election, and died a year later, at the age of 69.
Although many of Wells’ endeavors ended in disappointment, she is the quintessential American hero: despite difficult circumstances, she worked hard and fought for what she believed was right. In the face of death and failure, she never gave up, and always hoped for and worked for a better future.
P.S. Now that you know a little something about Ida B. Wells, you can enjoy this Kate Beaton comic about her life.
Sources:
In addition, Project Gutenberg has published Wells' pamphlets as part of its collection of works in the public domain.
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