Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was a lioness.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Born into enslavement in Mississippi in 1862 she rose to become one of the foremost voices in this nation against lynching and injustice, as a journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, and an early leader in the civil rights movement. She is one of my sheroes. I have written about Wells-Barnett before, in The Ballot and Black Women, and in They marched and battled for the ballot.
There are two biographies of her you should read. The first is Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, by black historian Paula Giddings.
Heralded as a landmark achievement upon publication, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching—a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.
At the center of the national drama is Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). Born to slaves in Mississippi, Wells began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies' car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation's first campaign against lynching. For Wells, the key to the rise in violence was embedded in attitudes not only about black men, but also about women and sexuality. Her independent perspective and percussive personality gained her encomiums as a hero—as well as aspersions on her character and threats of death. Exiled from the South by 1892, Wells subsequently took her campaign across the country and throughout the British Isles before she married and settled in Chicago. There she continued her activism as a journalist, suffragist, and independent candidate in the rough-and-tumble world of the Windy City's politics.
With meticulous research and vivid rendering of her subject, Giddings also provides compelling portraits of twentieth-century progressive luminaries, blacks and whites who worked with Wells during some of the most tumultuous periods in American history. In this groundbreaking work, Paula J. Giddings brings to life the irrepressible personality of Ida B. Wells and gives the visionary reformer her due.
She was also the subject of the documentary film,
Ida B. Wells: a Passion for Justice.
The second biography is To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, by Mia Bey.
Born to slaves in 1862, Ida B. Wells became a fearless anti-lynching crusader, women’s rights advocate, and journalist. Wells’s refusal to accept any compromise on racial inequality caused her to be labeled a “dangerous radical” in her day but made her a model for later civil rights activists as well as a powerful witness to the troubled racial politics of her era. Though she eventually helped found the NAACP in 1910, she would not remain a member for long, as she rejected not only Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism but also the moderating influence of white reformers within the early NAACP. In the richly illustrated To Tell the Truth Freely, the historian Mia Bay vividly captures Wells’s legacy and life, from her childhood in Mississippi to her early career in late-nineteenth-century Memphis and her later life in Progressive-era Chicago.
It is fitting for Women's History Month, that we look at Wells-Barnett, through the lens of black female historians, like
Paula Giddings and
Mia Bey.
Professor Paula Giddings is the author of three books on the social and political history of African American women: When and Where I Enter: The Impact on Black Women on Race and Sex in America; In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement; and, most recently, the critically acclaimed biography of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, Ida: A Sword among Lions. She is also the editor of Burning All Illusions, an anthology of articles on race published by The Nation magazine from 1867 to 2000. She is also a former book editor and journalist who has written extensively on international and national issues and has been published by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jeune Afrique (Paris), The Nation, and the journals Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, among other publications.
Before attaining the position of professor of Afro-American studies at Smith College, Professor Giddings had taught at Spelman College, where she was a United Negro Fund Distinguished Scholar; Douglass College/Rutgers University as the Laurie Chair in Women's Studies; and Princeton and Duke Universities.
Mia Bey is a Professor of History and Director, Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University and has authored
To Tell the Truth Freely: the Life of Ida B. Wells. Hill & Wang, February 2009.and
The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Bey speaks of Wells-Barnett in these two brief bio clips.
Paula Giddings is a veteran of both civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. I encourage you to listen to an address she gave, at the 2014 Gender & Work Symposium, on "Relationships among Women".
She discusses Ida Wells Barnett, intersectionality, race and gender in progressive movements - past and present. (the clip here does not include her introductory remarks)
There have been a lot of questions, comments and controversies here on Daily Kos recently about "intersectionality." It is time for all people who consider themselves to be progressive to understand this in both theory and practice.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Black Superheroes without black culture. The New Republic: Black superheroes in Hollywood act a lot like white superheroes.
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It's valuable to imagine an American cinema in which the iconic heroes are black instead of white. And as Villian's project makes clear, it's not that hard to imagine it; there are plenty of talented black actors who deserve such role. But simply replacing white actors with black actors, while important to the diversification of Hollywood, would nonetheless be a rather superficial move. After all, a black superhero could have different priorities than a white one.
Superheroes are usually avatars of law and order; they fight crime. But our country's massive criminal justice system, from "broken windows" policing to sentencing disparities, discriminates against African Americans. A black superhero, then, could be so much more than an African American actor in a white superhero's costume. Black superheroes could challenge the entire genre itself.
For the most part, they haven't done so. X-Men: Days of Future Past borrows from the history of racial genocide, but its actual black characters, Storm (Halle Berry) and Bishop (Omar Sy) are no different than any of the oppressed white folks, except with smaller parts. When DC Comics debuted Black Lightning in the late '70s, the titular character fought crime in Metropolis' Suicide Slum. The notion that Superman's Metropolis even had a slum was, perhaps, an acknowledgement of racial and class disparities. But as Osvaldo Oyola points out, "whatever promise was present in its setting and exploration of racial politics of superhero genre remains untapped." Lightning just bashes supervillains, like any white superhero. Christopher Priest's run on Black Panther tries to shake off the usual genre default by making its main character the ruler of a super-advanced African nation, but the initial arc of the series has him wandering around New York, hitting criminals. As James Lamb wrote in a post acidly titled "Superman Is a White Boy":
Race and gender minority superheroes present pale knockoffs of the White male power fantasies that transcended comic panels decades ago. What was Manhunter but a low budget Nightwing who replaced the tonfa with a glowing metal rod? Under Reginald Hudlin’s pen, Black Panther explicitly devolved into an African Captain America, known more for marrying [Storm,] the most famous African superhero in American comics than his own exploits…. In our world, the most famous, most powerful, most influential superhero ever devised is a straight White man. Here, meaningful diversity in superhero comics is not possible. The superhero concept is a racial construct, used primarily to derive profit from printing White male power fantasies ad nauseam for a core audience of ostracized children.
If Superman is a white boy, and superheroes are a white power fantasy, are distinctively black superheroes even possible? In science fiction, writers like Marge Piercy and Samuel Delany have used non-white characters, and non-white history, to challenge the genre and upend some of its colonial preconceptions. The superhero genre has never really attempted a similar project, at least not in the mainstream. But if you look further afield, there are some interesting possibilities.
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On Saturday, Duranord Veillard of Spring Valley, N.Y., marks the twin milestone with his wife, Jeanne. The Root: Man Celebrates 108th Birthday and 82 Years of Marriage to 104-Year-Old.
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Duranord Veillard knows a lot about longevity, but Saturday is a milestone for the record books. USA Today reports that not only will Veillard celebrate turning 108, he will also celebrate 82 years of marriage to his wife Jeanne, who is 104.
The husband and wife are believed to be the oldest couple in New York’s Rockland County, the report says, and both will celebrate their birthdays this weekend. Veillard’s wife, Jeanne, will turn 105 in May, but both will celebrate their birthdays at their home this weekend with family, friends and others, notes the report.
Veillard, a native of Haiti, studied law and lived in Port-au-Prince. He married Jeanne in November 1932 and together they have raised five children. He obtained a visa to visit the United States in 1968 after losing his job as a judge and never looked back, the report says. He settled in Spring Valley, N.Y., and worked as lab technician at the Good Samaritan Hospital for 10 years before retiring.
During an early birthday celebration Thursday at the couple’s home, Jeanne recounted to USA Today how they met.
“I found him in the street,” she joked in Haitian creole to a room full of relatives, the news outlet writes.
The Veillards, who leave home only to go to the doctor, have 12 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren, the report notes.
Duranord Veillard on Saturday celebrates his 108th birthday. His wife of 82 years, Jeanne, seated next to him, is 104.
USA TODAY SCREENSHOT
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A new August Wilson documentary shows why black storytellers matter. The New Republic: Why it's important August Wilson spoke about the black experience.
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Last week, PBS premiered a new tribute to Wilson, the American Masters documentary August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand. The film takes its title from a 1996 Theatre Communications Group conference keynote address where Wilson said:
We do not need color-blind casting. We need some theaters. We need some theaters to develop our playwrights. Without theaters, we cannot develop our talents… Black theater is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital. It just isn’t funded.
In an
essay later that year, Robert Brustein derided Wilson’s address as a “rambling jeremiad” that backed “subsidized separatism.” In the film, Brustein, a former New Republic theater critic, tried to clarify those sentiments—specifically noting that he primarily opposed Wilson’s view that black actors shouldn’t appear in plays written by white playwrights. Others, however, offered that the critic simply didn’t understand that Wilson’s emphasis on African American culture wasn’t putting down anybody else. As actor S. Epatha Merkerson said in her interview for the film: The playwright just wanted black actors to work. But I’d go further. The documentary underscored just how important it is that people—especially those, like ours, prone to cultural erasure—have someone as skilled as Wilson telling our stories.
The Ground on Which I Stand offers a new lens into how Wilson articulated local experiences into universal themes on the stage. The film visits the Hill District almost immediately, the home of the real-life characters who would later find themselves dramatized in Wilson’s lauded plays. This is the same place where Wilson, who died in 2005, set nine of the ten plays about the African American experience that form his "Pittsburgh Cycle." He didn’t always name the city, however. Even Wilson's award-winning play, Fences, set in the 1950s, never specifies the city in which it’s set. But my mother recognized it right away.
"The setting was the back porch of a board house, facing a dirt road alleyway," she told me of the first time she saw Fences performed. "I felt I as though I was thrust back in time to my grandmother’s and grandfather’s porch on Chauncey Street,” she said. “The set and the script brought back deeply buried childhood memories: The chickens in the backyard that would later wind up on our dinner plate. The scar I have on my knee from the torn screen on the door. Every time I look at it, I think of that house.”
The neighborhood didn’t always evoke pleasant recollections. The Ground on Which I Stand outlines how Wilson became a truant thanks to racism in his school, going on to educate himself for years in the public library. His early playwriting work with the black-nationalist Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh was created, as he states in the film, with the explicit goal of politicizing audiences who viewed them. To do that, he wrote in the meter of conversations he heard in local diners and pool halls. And as Wilson himself said in an archive interview featured in the documentary, he saw more success when he “listened” to the fictional characters he created. Soon, he found it difficult to “get them to shut up.”
"Wilson’s articulation of the speech, behavior, and emotions that he heard, saw, and felt in that community brilliantly communicated the pain of unequal treatment in work and in life," my mother said. She cited the example of African American men being barred from trade unions (and therefore from higher wages), and the wretched gender dynamics in the home that often emerged from that disrespect. She also noted how Wilson took care to depict "the joy at what might by some be considered small things, such as getting the extra money to buy some fabric to make a new dress."
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The Justice Department report, which is expected to be released this week, will force Ferguson, Mo., to either negotiate a settlement or face being sued for civil rights charges. New York Times: Dept. of Justice to Fault Police on Racial Bias in Ferguson
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The Justice Department has nearly completed a highly critical report accusing the police in Ferguson, Mo., of making discriminatory traffic stops of African-Americans that created years of racial animosity leading up to an officer’s shooting of a black teenager last summer, law enforcement officials said.
According to several officials who have been briefed on the report’s conclusions, the report criticizes the city for disproportionately ticketing and arresting African-Americans and relying on the fines to balance the city’s budget. The report, which is expected to be released as early as this week, will force Ferguson officials to either negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department or face being sued by it on civil rights charges. Either way, the result is likely to be significant changes inside the Ferguson Police Department, which is at the center of a national debate over race and policing.
Ferguson erupted into angry, sometimes violent protests after a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in August. The Justice Department investigated that shooting, and officials have said they will clear the officer of civil rights charges. That finding is also expected soon.
But the report into the broader practices of the local police department will give the context for the shooting, describing the mounting sense of frustration and anger in a predominantly black city where the police department and local government are mostly white.
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Hundreds of boys in South Sudan have been kidnapped and forced to become child soldiers, the United Nations children's agency says. BBC: Many South Sudan boys 'kidnapped to be child soldiers'.
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South Sudan is in a state of civil war with forces loyal to President Salva Kiir pitted against rebels led by former Vice-President Riek Machar. The campaign group Human Rights Watch has accused both sides of using child soldiers.
Unicef said the boys were abducted by the Shilluk Militia, under the control of Johnson Oloni. The government has previously said it has no control over the group.
"We fear [the children] are going from the classroom to the front line," said Unicef's representative in South Sudan, Jonathan Veitch. Witnesses report seeing children as young as 12 carrying guns, according to the UN.
The seizure of the boys happened in an area known as Wau Shilluk, in oil-rich Upper Nile state. The UN believes 12,000 children were used as child soldiers across South Sudan last year.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
It might be a journey along a southern route, it might meander along the old Route 66. It might be a journey to discover something lost, something found, something hoped for, something hated, something feared, something loved.
It might be a journey to discover something about community, or to discover something about the individual self.
But most importantly, it might be a journey to discover...
America
A name only once
crammed into the child's fitful memory
in malnourished villages,
vast deliriums like the galloping foothills of the Colorado:
of Mohawks and the Chippewa,
horsey penny-movies
brought cheap at the tail of the war
to Africa. Where indeed is the Mississippi panorama
and the girl that played the piano and
kept her hand on her heart
as Flanagan drank a quart of moonshine
before the eyes of the town's gentlemen?
What happened to your locomotive in Winter, Walt,
and my ride across the prairies in the trail
of the stage-coach, the gold-rush and the Swanee River?
Where did they bury Geronimo,
heroic chieftain, lonely horseman of this apocalypse
who led his tribesmen across deserts of cholla
and emerald hills
in pursuit of despoilers,
half-starved immigrants
from a despoiled Europe?
What happened to Archibald's
soul's harvest on this raw earth
of raw hates?
To those that have none
a festival is preparing at graves' ends
where the mockingbird's hymn
closes evening of prayers
and supplication as
new winds blow from graves
flowered in multi-colored cemeteries even
where they say the races are intact.
-- Kofi Awoonor
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