'They Say' : Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race

As the premiere volume in the new series 'New Narratives in American History', (edited by Davidson and historian Michael Stoff), Jim Davidson proposes a narrative of the first thirty years in the life of activist Ida B. Wells as a means of charting the shifting definitions of race during the final decades of nineteenth-century America.

Few students have had the opportunity to consider the contrasting social identties pursued by African Americans following abolotion of slavery, nor to understand how whites'' skewed construction of those aspirations were a reaction against them. The story of Ida Wells provides a useful narrative frame for understanding the treacherous crosscurrents of race that shaped social identites.Wells was born into slavery in 1862, of mixed parentage, and raised in Mississippi. Her thrist for education and high social aspiration, combined with her strong personality, led her to speak out in ways often at odds with Victorian feminine ideals. She was expelled from Rusk Cllege in a dispute with its white president; she taught school in Memphis, where she brought a suit against the Chesapeake reailroad after being thrown off for refusing to leave the first-class cas; and she spoke out against the increasing segregation in the Memphis school system. After race riots and lynchings in Memphis in 1892, she embarked full-blown on the career for which she is now remembered, as an outspoken writer and lecturer against lynching.