Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 344

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Ida B. the Queen  The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells," by Michelle Duster.

 

Ida agreed that gaining the right to vote was important and deserved a fight, but she did not feel optimistic about how much change would come from white women voting. She disagreed with Susan B. Anthony and other white suffragists’ belief that securing the vote for women would also bring a “womanly” influence to government, making it less corrupt and more compassionate. Ida had been around too long and endured too much complicity from white women involved in holding up white supremacy to believe that white women’s votes would fix the ills of the world. As an African American woman who had faced both racism and sexism, she viewed the right to vote as a tool to address race-based oppression, as well as civil and social issues. She knew that southern white women could be expected to support their husbands’ cries of white supremacy. After all, some of them were descendants of slave owners or had benefited from the institution of slavery, so they inherently viewed Black women as inferior. Thus, suffrage extended only to white women would do little to bring on much-needed racial reform. 

But as women slowly gained more rights, one state at a time, Ida started to think that Susan B. Anthony was right after all: things might improve when all women won the vote. Despite the quest for the women’s vote, Black women were significantly excluded from white-dominated national suffrage organizations. Locally, Ida founded the Women’s Second Ward Republican Club and was a member of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA). She worked with white women in the efforts to gain suffrage in the state. “When I saw that we were likely to have limited suffrage and the white women were working like beavers to bring it about, I made another effort to get our women interested,” she wrote in her autobiography. Ida wanted to make sure that if white women got the right to vote, Black women did, too.

Ida’s primary aim was to write toward justice, not just away from racism.

Growing up in a time when close to ninety percent of formerly enslaved people were illiterate, Ida also understood the power that came from the ability to read, write, and speak clearly. And through their example, Ida’s parents taught her to be courageous, to believe that she had a voice, and that she should be politically and socially engaged, even if it was dangerous.