{"id":18,"date":"2019-12-15T04:59:27","date_gmt":"2019-12-15T04:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/africana-studies-1109-fall-2019-racial-consciousness\/?post_type=te_announcements&p=18"},"modified":"2019-12-17T04:05:07","modified_gmt":"2019-12-17T04:05:07","slug":"ida-b-wells","status":"publish","type":"te_announcements","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/africana-studies-1109-fall-2019-racial-consciousness\/announcement\/ida-b-wells\/","title":{"rendered":"Ida B. Wells"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) dealt firsthand with the complexities of being black and being a woman in the post-reconstruction South. One of the biggest trials of her identity as a woman was when Wells was denied a seat in the ladies\u2019 car of a train on multiple occasions, resulting in her pursuing a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southern railroad company. She won the initial trial on the basis that the judge saw the issue being more of a class than race and because he saw Wells as a lady, describing her as, \u201ca person of lady-like appearance and deportment, a school teacher, and one who might be expected to object to traveling in the company of rough or boisterous men, smokers and drunkards.\u201d However, Wells lost her case in front of the Tennessee State Supreme Court on the basis that she was not a lady. The railroad lawyer painted an image of Wells as an overly aggressive black woman who dared sit next to a white woman, using her insistence on being able to sit in the ladies\u2019 car as his evidence. This evidence was accepted and Wells lost her case; her description changed from a woman of \u201clady-like appearance and deportment\u201d to someone who aimed to \u201charass\u201d the railroad company and had too much \u201cpersistence\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wells\u2019 determination to fight for her rights violated the \u201csubmissive\u201d pillar of the cult of true womanhood. The cult of true womanhood was an idea that dominated the United Kingdom and the United States in the 19th century consisting of four cardinal values: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. To be submissive, a woman was \u201cto work in silence, unseen\u201d and to \u201crepress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defense, in gentle submission\u201d (Welter, 1966). Wells was not one to submit and continued to refuse to do so when she began her career as a journalist and wrote <\/span>Southern Horrors<\/span><\/i>. She was so outspoken that after publishing the editorial outlining the true causes of lynching, <\/span>The Evening Scimitar<\/span><\/i>, a white newspaper, threatened to \u201cbrand him with a hot iron, and perform on him a surgical operation with a pair of tailors\u2019 shears.\u201d(Bay 105)\u00a0 assuming that Wells was a man.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"See<\/p>\n

So how did Wells become so outspoken and learn to think so analytically the way she did? Wells\u2019 experience as a black woman and an awareness of the intersection of her race and gender shaped the way she thought. As a black woman, Wells become well-aware that she would not be able to completely fit the expectations of a lady, including the cardinal rule of purity. Her status as a black women automatically branded her as unpure. Wells cared for her younger siblings alone for a time after her parents died, but she soon become the subject of gossip because of her unsupervised status and the hypersexualization of black women. Just by being a black woman, people would assume she had \u201cloose\u201d morals, so at only sixteen, Wells had learned to become hypervigilant of her sexual representation. She ended up writing to her grandmother Peggy to come live with her and her young siblings in order to stop the slander (Bay 33).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Although unfortunate, the sexual slander she experienced shifted her perceptions of race and question narratives constructed about black people. This shift likely played an important role in spurring her inquisition of the causes of lynching. Wells experienced sexual slander influenced by race, and experienced the subsequent slander of her lynched friends following the memphis lynchings. She knew the black men who were lynched to be good and honest people, and yet due to their race and the view of black men as predatory, they were branded as rapists and their lynchings were justified. This experience helped shift her perceptions of black men and lynching in general. Prior to her firsthand experience with lynching, she had bought the idea that many of the lynchings were due to rape or attempted rape, even once saying that \u201cperhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life\u201d if a man was lynched for rape (Bay 100). However, her experience with these false narratives helped her realize that lynching was nothing more than a power play that had become racialized as a form to keep black people in submission even after slavery had been abolished.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n