Annotated Highlights from the Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells
Creators: name: Gundlah, Hope
Publisher: name: University of Chicago
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Ida B. Wells; Civil Rights Activist; Women's Rights Activist;

description: It is perhaps because Ida B. Wells’s accomplishments were so numerous and various, that she has largely faded from American cultural consciousness today. Her contributions to the early civil rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement made her, during her time, an internationally famous figure. Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, Wells began working as a schoolteacher. In 1883, Wells was commuting to school via train and took her usual seat in the ladies’ car when she was ordered to move; though trains did not yet have official “Jim Crow” cars for passengers of color, Black passengers were expected to sit in the dirty smoking car. When Wells refused to move, she was dragged from the car by the conductor and several other men while white passengers applauded. Wells successfully sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in the circuit court, but railroad successfully appealed the verdict in the state supreme court. Wells’s accounts of the incident sparked her career in journalism and activism. She continued teaching while writing as a regular correspondent for numerous Black newspapers throughout the country. Eventually, she became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech newspaper. Wells embarked on an investigative journalism tour of the South in the 1890s; her outspoken, honest reporting led an enraged white mob to burn down her newspaper office, but it also culminated in her famous Red Record, a collection of accounts and statistics regarding postCivil-War lynchings. Wells’s anti-lynching lecture tours in Britain forced America’s racist brutality onto the world stage. She ultimately settled in Chicago, where she founded the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, collaborated with Frederick Douglass to organize a boycott of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, formed the first women’s civic club for Black women in Chicago, and created the Alpha Suffrage Club to fight for Black women’s suffrage. As a Black American, Wells and her organizations faced discrimination from white women’s suffragists; simultaneously, as a woman, Wells was criticized by some Black civil rights activists for taking a traditionally male leadership role in the movement. Wells’s Memphis diary, currently housed in the Regenstein Library’s Special Collections, spans what one might assume to be the least interesting part of Wells’s life narrative: the period when Wells was a schoolteacher first entering the world of publishing. Her Memphis diary begins on December 29, 1885, during a visit to her birthplace of Holly Springs, Mississippi, and ends on September 12, 1887 in Woodstock, Tennessee. Notably, this timespan includes the Supreme Court case in which Wells’s victory against the railroad was reversed — on April 11, 1887, a distraught Wells writes, “The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court in my behalf, last week. Went to see Judge G. this afternoon and he tells me four of them cast their personal prejudice in the scale of justice and decided in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that the smoking car was a first class coach for colored people as provided for by that statute that calls for separate coaches but first class, for the races. I felt so disappointed, because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people generally.” Prior to this entry, Wells describes the sluggish progress of her case to the Supreme Court, and throughout the diary, Wells records numerous secondhand accounts of recent violence and miscarriages of justice toward Black Americans, about which she has heard or read. The majority of the diary, however, is not dedicated to philosophy or race relations, just as the personal diary of an average American writing today might include firsthand stories of micro-aggressions or descriptions of recent news stories that particularly sparked anger or concern in the writer, but would largely focus on the microcosmic events of the writer’s daily life. Wells began her Memphis diary when she was twenty-three, and filled it when she was twenty-five. What strikes me most in reading her words is how similar she sounds to modern women in their twenties — a “millenial” or “Gen-Z-er,” like myself and my fellows. Young Wells plays checkers and parcheesi, reads novels, goes to the theater, and forms a Dramatic Club with her friends where she performs as Lady Macbeth. She gets her picture taken often, but frequently notes that they seem worse the more she looks at them. She uses her diary to air her own judgments, often as bitingly witty as they are poetic, on novels (she is “disappointed in Vashti” by Augusta Evans Wilson), people (she calls the Hon. J. Pennoyer “a gas bag if not worse”), and events (upon hearing rumors that an acquaintance has been married, she proclaims, “If so, and to the woman they say, I pity him from the depths of my heart”). She is devoutly religious, unlike most young people today, but like many modern believers, she prefers an earnest, simple view of Jesus rather than “a far-away God”; she is interested in discourse from other religions, such as the Jewish and Mormon faiths; and she questions the church’s acceptance of caste distinctions. Much of young Wells’s daily life was dedicated to partaking in cultural activities, spending time with friends, and “networking” with different newspapers and influential figures in activism and publishing. While Wells experienced many of the same joyful memories as women entering the adult world today, she also faced similar struggles. A huge quantity of young Wells’s writing focuses on money; she fears that she may “never be out of debt,” rebukes herself for buying things like clothes that seem frivolous in hindsight, and laments that she cannot afford to see a doctor when she is sick. She bounces from boarding-house to boarding-house at a dizzying pace near the diary’s end. As a woman just starting out in her field, she struggles to be taken seriously; a male newspaper editor publicly proclaims that she does not know what she is talking about and does not “really write” anything. Wells, evidently taking some of this criticism to heart, vacillates between being self-deprecating about her own writing abilities and recognizing that she deserves more respect than she often receives. Wells’s emergence into professional life unfortunately also has much to offer to the contemporary conversation around consent, coercion, and the “Me Too” movement. As a woman in the worlds of publishing, teaching, and activism, Wells mostly meets male friends, but is distraught to find out that practically all of them desire more than friendship. Wells writes, “I do not wish to be married but I do wish for the society of the gentlemen”; however, her suitors, once attracted to her, refuse to remain her friends, demanding, as she says, “either love or nothing.” It seems that nineteenth-century men, like modern men, were taught to abhor “the friend-zone.” Once rejected, Wells’s former friends turn on her immediately. They call her heartless, accuse her of being a “flirty” who lures men in just for the fun of breaking their hearts, tell her she is incapable of love, and spread rumors to sabotage her relationships with other men. Some of them even try to get Wells fired from her teaching job; they write letters to her boss, saying that Wells’s youngest sister is actually her illegitimate daughter, and that Wells had been dismissed from a previous job for immoral conduct with another teacher — all, of course, false. Wells begins taking the men’s accusations of heartlessness to heart; when one suitor asks if she loves him, she writes, “I fear I don’t but then I also fear I shall never love anybody.” Wells loses so many friends as rejected suitors that she eventually tells one man that she “was not conscious of an absorbing feeling for him but I thought it would grow,” exclusively because “I feel so lonely and isolated and the temptation of a lover is irresistible.” One rejected suitor forcibly kisses Wells, causing her to feel “humiliated” and unable to “look anyone straight in the face,” but Wells blames the incident on her own indecision and fear, writing, “I feel that I have degraded myself in that I had not the courage to repulse the one [suitor] or the other.” Young Ida B. Wells’s experiences indicate striking similarities in nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century cultural notions surrounding gender and relationships. How far, one must ask, has American culture really progressed in its treatments of women and its teachings of men, and how can women find solace in Wells’s fiery prayers of anger and mercy until these behaviors are no longer perpetuated? These interactions with men are some of the many moments, interspersed between mirth and boredom, when twenty-three-year-old Wells is forced to grow up far too fast. Her younger siblings, whom she is raising with her Aunt Fannie’s help after their parents’ deaths, incline toward theft and gambling, and Wells earnestly prays that she might guide them well. Her prayers after the failure of her lawsuit — she writes, “O God is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us? Thou hast always fought the battles of the weak and oppressed. Come to my aid at this moment and teach me what to do, for I am sorely, bitterly disappointed” — and her accounts of new stories regarding racist violence seem to foreshadow her later writings, including her investigative journalism on lynchings. However, she also directly encounters micro-aggressions, which she typically downplays. While traveling by train with friends, Wells off-handedly mentions experiencing the “usual trouble about the first-class coach”; similarly, in recounting a church service, she writes, “Visited Miss Rosa Sheppard Thanksgiving, also heard a good sermon and witnessed practical evidence of ‘white folks’ Christianity,’ in the haste with which they passed us by when choosing a seat.” Wells’s takes note of these instances when they occur, as a means of silently voicing her frustration, but her narration always mentions them so casually that a reader could blink and miss them — they are almost second nature, part of the minutia of daily life, an undercurrent which Wells never allows to drag her under despite its subtle but constant insistence on her inferiority. Wells’s diary is thus not entirely composed of her activism, but provides insight into the conditions — both from Wells’s time and from her own analytic and moral tendencies — which cultivated her activism. It shows her to be a truly human woman in her twenties — one who was capable enough to handle herself in a virulent time and wise enough to channel her outrage into her writing. What follows is a transcript of what I view to be the most salient parts of Wells’s diary. These excerpts reflect the larger thematic findings I’ve expressed here, but also notably include specific names and titles of the people, places, publications, and media with which Wells engaged. I have also provided footnotes to clarify and analyze specific references Wells makes to such people, places, and media.