Book Review - Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time Reviewed by J. Scott Jackson
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da B. Wells, the intrepid anti-lynching journalist and women’s suffragist, rarely shied away from confronting injustice. In this provocative and timely work, co-authors Catherine Meeks (a retired African American professor of socio-cultural studies) and Nibs Stroupe (a white Protestant pastor) lift up Wells as a model of and catalyst for the essential conversations on justice that press upon church and society today. Wells’ life and witness, as Meeks writes, forces us to confront the question: “What does it mean to be a liberated person?” (p. ix). Meeks, who directs the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta, and Stroupe, retired from a long pastorate at the multicultural Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia, are prolific author-educators, who both grew up in segregation-era Arkansas. Their life-projects converge in this profile that retrieves Wells’ voice as the legacy of white supremacy and repression continue to echo today in mass incarcerations and in the extra-judicial killings carried out by police that have ignited nationwide protests. In these essays, the authors interweave their personal stories with those of Wells, offering critical analyses and historical context along the way. Each chapter ends with questions to facilitate individual and group reflection. Meeks and Stroupe admit openly-shared differences of perspective that have enriched their
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conversations and helped keep each of them real. “It is critically important for all people, whether white or people of color, to learn how to have honest conversations about issues of race without seeing the difficult parts of these conversations as an invitation to vacate the path to healing,” Meeks writes (p. x). The authors are not naively sanguine about the long, arduous struggle by which we inch toward equality and reconciliation. Indeed, Well’s own life-long quest to express her full humanity shows the importance of engaging battles whose outcomes we may never see in our own lifetimes. Ida B. Wells was born in 1862 in Mississippi, the daughter of an enslaved man who later would found a school for freed African Americans. After both her parents succumbed to Yellow Fever, Wells, then 16 years old, raised her younger siblings, taking on a teaching job in Memphis to support them. Once while commuting, she refused an order to move to the “black” train car. It took several white men to forcibly eject her from the train. She sued, and a lower court vindicated her, only to have that ruling devastatingly reversed on appeal. When three of her friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892, Wells embarked on a critical investigation documenting and exposing hundreds of lynchings, debunking the widespread lie that these murders were
Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Times By Catherine Meeks and Nibs Stroupe. Foreword by Stacey Abrams. Church Publishing, 160 pages, $19.95.
necessary to keep black male sexuality in check; her reporting named them for what they were -- acts of white supremacist terrorism. After a blistering editorial in her Memphis paper Free Speech, her office was burned down and a price put on her head. She moved to New York and continued her journalism, lecturing twice in Great Britain. She continued to write books against lynching, and her unfinished autobiography was published posthumously. Wells married Chicago attorney Ferdinand Barnett, a widower with whom she raised his two children and four
