Regardless of the personal sacrifice that was involved in her work, she was focused on fighting for the betterment of a country even though, as an African American and a woman, she faced discrimination on multiple fronts. She lived through some of the more violent and lawless times in American history. She put herself in dangerous situations in order to investigate the details of devastating riots. And because of her revealing the truth, calling out exact names of people, and encouraging disenfranchised people to fight back against the establishment, her own life was threatened. Despite the danger, criticism, and marginalization she faced, she somehow drew on a higher power and an inner strength to keep going—many times alone.
As our country experiences efforts to divide and oppress people based on race, religion, gender, or economic class, the life and legacy of Ida B. Wells can be a guide and inspiration for those who are committed to equality and justice. Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time will help people reflect on her principles, struggles, and unwavering commitment to speaking truth to power. Reflecting on the past and drawing on the life experiences of an incredible fighter for justice can bring needed strength and inspiration to current and future leaders who do work to help this country live up to its true potential where there is truly life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.
—Michelle Duster
author, speaker, educator
great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells
I met Nibs Stroupe for the first time one Sunday a few years ago when he stood at the small podium in the dining room–turned–sanctuary at Open Door Community. It never occurred to me then that we would come to this day, coauthoring a book on this woman who is very precious to me.
Nibs and I grew up less than forty miles from one another in Arkansas. He lived in Helena and I lived in a small community called Moro. Though as a little white boy his life and experience were very different from mine in many ways, there are so many ways in which we were walking a parallel path. As you read this book, you will begin to see the ways in which this parallel path was forged, and how our souls were kin to one another, though we were some miles apart geographically and, in many ways, light years apart culturally in our little Arkansas oppressive worlds. Both of us were poised toward the search for liberation from our earliest days and while we had no way to name that quest, there was an inexplicable spirit of grace that moved us along that path and kept us in its protective grip in order to make sure that we found the path.
Both of us are grateful that we found the path and that God’s grace has helped us to stay on that path of the search for personal and collective liberation. Though Nibs, along with his wife, Caroline, had the good fortune to pastor a progressive congregation in Atlanta and I have enjoyed a productive professional life as an academic, we continue to be unwilling to settle for easy answers and the cheap liberation that avoids the struggle of building deep relationships across lines of difference.
What does it mean to be a liberated person? This question has fueled the inner and outer journeys for both of us for many decades and we are grateful to continue to have the courage to ask ourselves that question even though we have caught few glimpses of the answer. Thus, here we are two Arkansans, one African American female and one white male, taking a look at one of the most powerful women in our historical record through our respective lenses. Nibs is correct that this is not a book that a white man should have tried to write alone and I think that the conversation in this book has been enriched by our writing it together; Wells invites us into spaces that we might prefer to avoid on our own. It is critically important for all people, whether white or people of color, to learn how to have honest conversations about issues of race without seeing the difficult parts of those conversations as an invitation to vacate the path to healing. We have been able to engage one another in ways that would not have happened if we had been working on this book alone. We were both enriched and challenged by working together and offer this book to all of the readers with the hope that it will have a similar enriching effect.
We hope that the conversations that we have forged both in the words of the text and in our own hearts will be a source of encouragement, challenge, and example to all who read this book of ways that we can embrace the journey of racial healing. We hope that all who read this book will be challenged to be more than a half shade braver in the daily journey of working to be more open to that deep call from the heart to seek racial healing and wellness both as an individual and for the whole community.
—Catherine Meeks
Why Ida B. Wells? Because she did the work no one else would do. She kept showing up where she wasn’t wanted. She worked with people who would work with her. She worked with people she didn’t agree with and with whom she fought constantly. She worked for the betterment of a country that saw her doubly, as a black woman and as a second-class citizen. She lived through some of the darkest times in American history and did not live to see the biggest advancements that her daily work yielded in later decades. Yet she believed in herself, and in her ability to get things done, not just for herself, but for her fellow citizens.
Born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on the land owned by the man who “owned” her father and mother, Jim and Elizabeth Wells, Ida was born just before General Grant’s troops captured Holly Springs in the Civil War. It would be a few more months before Union control of Holly Springs was solidified, but Ida Wells lived the early years of her life in slavery, yet under the oversight of the Union army. On the land where she was born, there now stands not the house of her former owner but rather a museum in her honor and memory.
And remembered she should be! Though born into slavery, she came to consciousness in the time of the Emancipation Proclamation and the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. Thus, her primary definition was not “slave,” not “property of white people”; her primary definition was daughter of God, woman held in slavery by those who professed the idea that all people are created equal. She never allowed that oppression narrative of slavery to enter her heart and consciousness and to become internalized. She never accepted the idea that she and her family were slaves because they were supposed to be slaves. She understood from the earliest stages that she was held as a slave because of the oppressive nature of the masters, and this consciousness made a huge difference in her life and in her imagination.
To gain deeper insight into the dilemma that confronted Wells and continues to serve as the foundation for white supremacy in the twenty-first century, we must travel through several treacherous paths in a short amount of time. This will include race and the naming of the races, as well as the perpetual crushing of people by pushing them to the margins. The modern system of race was not developed as a way to classify the different branches of the human family, but rather as a way of dominating the different branches of the human family. When it developed in the 1600s, as the Enlightenment and science began to grab hold of the European consciousness, it was rooted in the colonizing of the world. The purpose of the system of race was domination, not classification of the great diversity of the human family. If the dignity of the individual