Ida B. Wells was awarded a Pulitzer Prize on Monday, a symbolic gesture that cemented her place in history as a great American journalist.
With or without public accolades, she has always belonged there.
Wells’ fearless pursuit of justice during an era of mass lynchings set her apart from other journalists at the time. But like the issues she so passionately wrote about more than a century ago, recognition was not deemed urgent.
If you have not read the work of Ida B. Wells, now is the time. Much of her writings and other documents from her life dating back to 1884 are available online through the University of Chicago Library. The archival diaries, manuscripts and news clippings offer an up-close account of what bravery looks like in the face of terror.
Wells’ timeless pieces were written as blacks were under siege by rebel racists who killed rather than relinquish their positions of privilege. Even as she risked being lynched, she refused to back down from saying exactly what needed to be said.
Her reporting resonates today as much as it ever did. And there is much Americans can learn from it.
Though years have passed since lynchings regularly occurred, the societal issues of disenfranchisement, entitlement and denial that cultivated an environment in which the atrocities could flourish still exist.
Wells wasn’t only adept at pointing out the horrors of lynching — she did so in a way that exposed the hypocrisy of America itself, from its founding on the principles of democracy to its betrayal of the black people who helped build this nation.
One of her most relevant pieces, “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynchings,” was published in Original Rights Magazine in 1910. It is as relevant today as it was then. While the piece gives historical context to lynchings, it also provides a powerful subtext that addresses voter suppression.
It is fitting that the Pulitzer jury awarded the coveted special citation to the Chicago journalist posthumously in 2020, the year of an important presidential election.
No stronger message could be relayed today as America struggles with the disenfranchisement of the black vote. In what has been defined as a throwback to the Jim Crow South, African Americans and other minorities are facing insurmountable pressures at the polls.
Their names have been summarily erased from the voting rolls. Strict voter identification laws are being enacted in an attempt to make it harder for them to cast a ballot. Polling places are relocated to isolated places that are hard to get to. Once there, people must to wait in line for hours, often outside in the rain and cold.
Wells began her article about disenfranchisement this way: “The Negro question has been present with the American people in one form or another since the landing of the Dutch Slaveship at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619.”
What a resounding statement at a time when black people, though slavery had been abolished, were still considered to be a commodity.
She went on to reveal how the 14 slaves who arrived on the first ship were “harnessed to the plow” and forced to till the land to make it prosperous in an inhumane way that the colonists never would have done themselves.
Their value was undeniable, and “fourteen slaves became four million.”
“Their unrequited toil had made this country blossom as a rose, created vast wealth for the masters and made the United States one of the mighty nations of the earth,” she elegantly wrote.
Even the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which provided equal protection under the law to former slaves and granted black men the right to vote, became a mockery, she said.
“These rights were denied first by violence and bloodshed, by ku-klux klans, who during the first years after the Civil War murdered Negroes by wholesale, for attempting to exercise the rights given by these amendments, and for trusting the government which was powerful enough to give them the ballot,” she wrote.
She went on to describe how the government colluded with Jim Crow to repeal federal civil rights legislation and allow states to disenfranchise black people by writing their own local constitutions.
Meanwhile, black people lost everything they had earned since slavery — their homes, their land and even the chance for a quality education for their children. But all of it would go away, the government promised, “if (the black man) gave up trying to vote (and) minded his own business.”
The irony of it, Wells surmised, is that the efforts to keep black people from having a ballot could only occur because black people had no ballot.
“With no sacredness of the ballot there can be no sacredness of human life itself,” she wrote. “For if the strong can take the weak man’s ballot, when it suits his purpose to do so, he will take his life also.”
For writings such as this, Wells was threatened and labeled a liar and a race agitator.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that she was honored as the journalism industry is under siege and individual journalists are as likely to be considered villains who spread lies as they are conveyors of the truth.
Wells weathered the blatant attempts to discredit her work. She would not cower to demoralizing attacks by those who would benefit from her silence.
Today’s journalists must strive to be the kind of relentless crusaders she was. The passion Wells exhibited for pulling back the curtain of inequality and racial terrorism isn’t taught in journalism school. It’s something that grows in your gut, and over time, becomes an integral part of you.
Pursuing truth was Wells’ life’s mission until her death in 1931. America is better off because of her, but the equality for which she advocated, remains far from fruition.
Awarding her the Pulitzer Prize pushes our country a little bit closer to achieving it.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Dahleen Glanton is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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