Yours for Justice, Ida B. Wells:
The Daring Life of a Crusading Journalist by Philip Dray
is an inspiring story of a determined and influential woman. Ida B. Wells was
born in Mississippi during the Civil War; her parents were slaves. When she was
about three, the Emancipation Proclamation freed her family, and Ida’s parents immediately
began to strive for a new life. The oldest of eight children, Ida was a great
help to her parents. She learned to read in school and helped with chores; she
especially enjoyed reading the newspaper to her father, who could not read.
When she was sixteen, Ida lost her parents to yellow fever. Not wanting her
family broken apart, she pledged to take care of her siblings; with the help of
her grandmother and other relatives she managed to do so by becoming a teacher.
Eager to be a writer or journalist, she never hesitated to speak up about
issues in society and even sued a railroad company when she was unceremoniously
removed from a train car due to her race. She did not succeed in her suit but
was heartbroken primarily because Jim Crow laws were adversely affecting so
many black people. She put her thoughts about the facts of the day into print,
inspiring others to seek the truth about conditions under which people
suffered. Deeply saddened when a good friend of hers who owned a small grocery
store in Memphis was killed, she was horrified to learn that her friend’s death
had been a lynching (an execution outside the law) provoked merely by her
friend’s business success. Blacks fled from the community in fear, and no one
would stand up for the truth. Knowing that lynching was killing innocent
people, Ida dedicated herself to writing and speaking about it; those who
wished to silence her burned her newspaper offices. Relocating to New York
City, she published an article for the New York Age, a well-known black
newspaper. She believed that “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of
truth upon them,” and she did. Opposition to lynching was not the only campaign
in which her words made a difference. She was a founder of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), worked for
integrating public schools and establishing kindergartens for black children in
Chicago, and joined the woman suffrage effort (indeed, integrating it by
refusing to march separately from the white suffragists). Stephen Alcorn’s
dramatic artwork conveys the narrative of this illustrated biography perfectly;
further notes about Ida’s life, the practice of lynching and a timeline are
appended. Ages 7-11.
