Book Review - Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time

Reviewed by J. Scott Jackson

Ida 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 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 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.

Stroupe writes: “It is so difficult to talk about race in America because we who are white continue to want to deny its power in our own individual and structural and institutional lives.”

Wells married Chicago attorney Ferdinand Barnett, a widower with whom she raised his two children and four more they had together. Immersed also in the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement, she faced the reticence of white feminist leaders to affirm her leadership, supposedly for fear of alienating Southern white sisters in the movement. She bristled when her compatriot Susan B. Anthony upbraided Wells for her “divided duty,” which (supposedly) pitted her family obligations against her activist vocation. Wells, as Meeks writes, understood the existential rift women of color have had to endure -- confronting the sexism in the racial justice movement, and racism in the feminist struggle -- while being effaced by stereotypes of women of color as “exceptional” and somehow immune to pain. A founding member of the NAACP (though her name was excluded from the leadership list), Wells also suffered marginalization from some civil rights leaders wary of her political radicalism. She exhorted President Woodrow Wilson to rescind discriminatory policies in the U.S. Army. Through trying times she persisted, working to organize women’s clubs for African American women and groups to aid the massive numbers of African Americans migrating north after the end of Reconstruction. Meeks emphasizes that Wells was a fallible, fraught human -- no plastic saint -- who was able to do extraordinary things through her tenacious courage, which we are invited to emulate.

Meeks argues that the journey toward liberation begins with intensive personal, inner examination. African- Americans, in particular, must name and dismantle the internalized racist projections that falsify their humanity, and they must affirm their true identities as graced children of God. In a parallel vein, Stroupe writes: “It is so difficult to talk about race in America because we who are white continue to want to deny its power in our own individual and structural and institutional lives” (p. 97). Stroupe shares how, in his own formation, it was the same loving and God-fearing family and church members who inculcated in him the corrosive ideology that people of color were inferior and, thus, that segregation and white supremacy were legitimate.

Far more than mere individual prejudice and opinions, racism stands among the legion corporate principalities and powers that the New Testament labeled as demonic. Confronting these forces entails repenting of the myriad ways, typically unconscious, that they have shaped us and we continue to perpetuate them -- exhibited, for example, in the discomfort that many white people feel when people of color exercise real agency and authority. We must be willing to make reparations for past and present wrongs if we are to hope to glimpse the Beloved Community, where all human beings will stand together as equals. Along this path, Ida B. Wells is among the great cloud of witnesses whose prophetic word we ignore at our peril. ♦

J. Scott Jackson is an independent scholar and theologian who lives in Northampton.