Mississippi Library Association

Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

Giddings, Paula. Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching.
New York: Amistead, 2008.
800 pp. $35.00 (hardcover)

Born in 1862 to slave parents in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida B. Wells-Barnett lived up to the subtitle of Paula Giddings’ detailed biography, a paraphrase from Psalm 57 (“My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire … and their tongue a sharp sword.”). Giddings uses Wells-Barnett’s diary, autobiography, and other publications, as well as extensive quotes from memoirs of her contemporaries and newspaper accounts, to trace her remarkable career as an activist, from her lawsuit against segregated railway cars in Memphis – a suit she lost, but which set a precedent for many legal actions to follow – through her years of passionate protest against the atrocities of lynching, her involvement with the women’s suffrage movement, and her unsuccessful campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois shortly before her death in 1931. Wells-Barnett was seldom idle, continuing her advocacy during her marriage to attorney and fellow activist Ferdinand Barnett and the rearing of their four children.
In her exhaustive mining of contemporary sources, Giddings also shows the devastating impact of Jim Crow laws on African American southerners – an impact all the more cruel following blacks’ progress during Reconstruction – and the way in which, as blacks left the South for other parts of the country, incidents of prejudice and violence increased in those areas as well. Wells-Barnett found herself investigating riots and lynchings in the Midwest as well as in southern states, and carrying her quest for allies into northeastern cities and across the Atlantic to Britain.
Giddings reveals a recurring pattern in Wells-Barnett’s career: pioneering efforts on her part were repeatedly followed by others’ taking over her ideas and presenting them in formats thought to be more palatable to white social reformers. At the same time, Wells-Barnett was marginalized in organizations she had helped to create, such as African American women’s associations and the NAACP. This pattern was partly a result of her confrontational nature and strong demands for change at a time when women were expected to be demure and retiring, but even more significant was the divergence of Wells-Barnett’s views on racial progress from those of powerful African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington. Washington advocated industrial education (as in the model of his Tuskegee Institute) and economic success as the best way for blacks to advance and felt demands for social and political equality would be too threatening to the white majority. Wells-Barnett believed that a liberal arts education was also important, that “separate but equal” was an oxymoron, and that black economic progress was also threatening and enraging to whites. She felt federal intervention was required to protect African Americans from violence and discrimination. Wells-Barnett also took on the explosive issue of interracial sexual relations and the myth that any black man who was lynched was a rapist. While her controversial stances resulted in a lack of credit for her work during her lifetime, she lived to see anti-lynching legislation passed in a number of states, and her courageous persistence laid the groundwork for many later advances in civil rights.
Giddings provides extensive annotated references and a bibliography. Ida: A Sword Among Lions is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.
(Note: this review is based on an uncorrected proof; the published work contains illustrations not seen by the reviewer.)

Kathleen L. Wells
Senior Catalog Librarian
University of Southern Mississippi

Entry Filed under: Book Reviews
Posted on: January 5th, 2009