Ida Wells Quotes

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap

A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.

If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

Burning and torture here lasts but a little while, but if I die with a lie on my soul, I shall be tortured forever. I am innocent.

I know it's hard to not do well at something, and I know it's hard to need help.

Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect.

The matter came up for judicial investigation, but as might have been expected, the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait the result of the investigation—that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward.

It thought about the magic that happens when you tell a story right, and everybody who hears it not only loves the story, but they love you a little bit, too, for telling it so well. Like I love Ms. Washington, in spite of myself, the first time I heard her. When you hear somebody read a story well, you can't help but think there's some good inside them, even if you don't know them.

What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women.

Lee Walker, colored man, accused of raping white women, in jail here, will be taken out and burned by whites tonight. Can you send Miss Ida Wells to write it up?

The miscegnation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it does seem to me that notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservation of our rights.

In nearly all communities wife beating is punishable with a fine, and in no community is it made a felony.

I wasn’t sure if I was the one to continue carrying this mantle of those who came before me like Ida B. Wells, Essie Robeson, Addie Hunton, and Maggie Walker.

Whoever came up with the ida of labeling classified documents with larger-than-life red stenciling that advertises—or at least hints at—the contents was a schmuck, I think. You might as well put a tag that says OPEN ME! on it. If it were up to me, I'd hide all secrets in back copies of Reader's Digest.

Not only is it true that many of the alleged cases of rape against the Negro, are like the foregoing, but the same crime committed by white men against Negro women and girls, is never punished by mob or the law. A leading journal in South Carolina openly said some months ago that “it is not the same thing for a white man to assault a colored woman as for a colored man to assault a white woman, because the colored woman had no finer feelings nor virtue to be outraged!” Yet colored women have always had far more reason to complain of white men in this respect than ever white women have had of Negroes.

The shorter Negro stood gazing at the horrible death of his brother without flinching. Five minutes later he was also hanged.

Then these lynchers went quietly away and the bodies of the woman and three men were taken out and buried with as little ceremony as men would bury hogs.

ASKING WHITE WOMAN TO MARRY HIM May 23, William Brooks, Galesline, Ark.

Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells and Rosa Parks are not exceptional Black women as much as they are epitomes of Black womanhood.

Down through the druid wood I saw Wildman join with Cleaver Creek, put on weight, exchange his lean and hungry look for one of more well-fed fanaticism. Then came Chichamoonga, the Indian Influence, whooping along with its banks war-painted with lupine and columbine. Then Dog Creek, then Olson Creek, then Weed Creek. Across a glacier-raked gorge I saw Lynx Falls spring hissing and spitting from her lair of fire-bright vine maple, claw the air with silver talons, then crash screeching into the tangle below. Darling Ida Creek slipped demurely from beneath a covered bridge to add her virginal presence, only to have the family name blackened immediately after by the bawdy rollicking of her brash sister, Jumping Nellie. There followed scores of relatives of various nationalities: White Man Creek, Dutchman Creek, Chinaman Creek, Deadman Creek, and even a Lost Creek, claiming with a vehement roar that, in spite of hundreds of other creeks in Oregon bearing the same name, she was the one and only original...Then Leaper Creek...Hideout Creek...Bossman Creek...I watched them one after another pass beneath their bridges to join in the gorge running alongside the highway, like members of a great clan marshaling into an army, rallying, swelling, marching to battle as the war chant became deeper and richer.

There can be no possible belief that these people were inspired by any consuming zeal to vindicate God’s law against miscegenationists of the most practical sort. The woman was a willing partner in the victim’s guilt, and being of the “superior” race must naturally have been more guilty.

LYNCHED BECAUSE THE JURY ACQUITTED HIM The entire system of the judiciary of this country is in the hands of white people. To this add the fact of the inherent prejudice against colored people, and it will be clearly seen that a white jury is certain to find a Negro prisoner guilty if there is the least evidence to warrant such a finding. Meredith Lewis was arrested in Roseland, La., in July of last year. A white jury found him not guilty of the crime of murder wherewith he stood charged.

LYNCHING STATES Mississippi, 15; Arkansas, 8; Virginia, 5; Tennessee, 15; Alabama, 12; Kentucky, 12; Texas, 9; Georgia, 19; South Carolina, 5; Florida, 7; Louisiana, 15; Missouri, 4; Ohio, 2; Maryland, 1; West Virginia, 2; Indiana, 1; Kansas, 1; Pennsylvania, 1.

for all victims of the terrible injustice which puts men and women to death without form of law. During the year 1894, there were 132 persons executed in the United States by due form of law, while in the same year, 197 persons were put to death by mobs who gave the victims no opportunity to make a lawful defense.

What the hell do you want, Kid?" "You know damn well what I want.

The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt.

When you hear somebody read a story well, you can’t help but think there’s some good inside them, even if you don’t know them.

The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press. -Ida B. Wells

Sometimes you have to have the clarity that Ida B. Wells had when she told white people the truth about themselves and their lynching lies.

Those who commit the murders write the reports

LYNCHED FOR NO OFFENSE Perhaps the most characteristic feature of this record of lynch law for the year 1893, is the remarkable fact that five human beings were lynched and that the matter was considered of so little importance that the powerful press bureaus of the country did not consider the matter of enough importance to ascertain the causes for which they were hanged.

when I see the same enormities practiced upon beings whose complexion and blood claim kindred with my own, I curse the perpetrators, and weep over the wretched victims of their rapacity. Indeed, truth and justice demand from me the confession that the Christian slaves among the barbarians of Africa are treated with more humanity than the African slaves among the professing Christians of civilized America; and yet here sensibility bleeds at every pore for the wretches whom fate has doomed to slavery." Such testimony would seem to furnish

…With no sacredness of the ballot there can be no sacredness of human life itself. For if the strong can take the weak man’s ballot, when it suits his purpose to do so, he will take his life also.” [Ida B Wells, “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynchings,” Original Rights Magazine 1, no. 4 (June 1910): 43-45]

A romance is never just a romance, there's adventure, mystery and movement. You need a grand, dramatic setting - the Swiss Alps were always an personal favourite of mine - and a chance meeting, on a train, a cruise, or perhaps the hero and heroine find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island. The men are normally rich, well-to-do - but never vulgar with their money. Young men lack the maturity to take control so an older man is essential to provide the reassurance the heroine's needs. There's always a fair amount of turbulence before he sweeps in to save the day. A happy ending is an absolute must.

Though we may make the points of our weapons as sharp as needles and edges as sharp as razors, there is only one man who can haul us out of this mire, the very man who, lanterned like the Marsh Spite, has led us into it – Jason, son of Aeson. Hercules himself chose him as our captain, and obeyed him faithfully as long as he was with us. Now why was this? Jason is a skilled archer, but not the equal of Phalerus or Atalanta; he throws the javelin well, but not so well as Atalanta or Meleager or even myself; he can use a spear, but not with the art or courage of Idas; he is ignorant of music, except that of drum and pipe; he cannot swim; he cannot box; he has learned to pull well at the oar but he is no seaman; he is no painter; he is no wizard; his sight is not keen above the ordinary; in eloquence he is below anyone else here, except Idas, and perhaps myself; he is hasty-tempered, faithless, sulky and young. Yet Hercules chose him as our captain and obeyed him. I ask again: why was this?

Exactly,” Gertie said. “This hot young stud claiming to be a marine stationed in the Middle East friended her on Facebook. Apparently, he sent her long letters and poetry and even a nude photo.” “Doesn’t sound like anything worth putting a bra on for,” Ida Belle said. “Well,” Gertie said, “in all fairness, that photo is probably the closest Beulah will ever get to male plumbing.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “The Internet is full of male plumbing. It’s like the Walmart of man parts.

Negro, and also that which was used to lead him from the jail, were eagerly sought by relic hunters. They almost fought for a chance to cut off a piece of rope, and in an incredibly short time both ropes had disappeared and were scattered in the pockets of the crowd in sections of from an inch to six inches long. Others of the relic hunters remained until the ashes cooled to obtain such ghastly relics as the teeth, nails, and bits of charred skin of the immolated victim of his own lust.

I also found that what the white man of the South practiced for himself, he assumed to be unthinkable in white women. They could and did fall in love with the pretty mulatto and quadroon girls as well as black ones, but they professed an inability to imagine white women doing the same thing with Negro and mulatto men. Whenever they did so and were found out, the cry of rape was raised, and the lowest element of the white South was turned loose to wreak its fiendish cruelty on those too weak to help themselves.

(Lynched for Wife Beating) In nearly all communities wife beating is punishable with a fine, and in no community is it made a felony. Dave Jackson, of Abita, La., was a colored man who had beaten his wife. He had not killed her, nor seriously wounded her, but as Louisiana lynchers had not filled out their quota of crimes, his case was deemed of sufficient importance to apply the method of that barbarous people. He was in the custody of the officials, but the mob went to the jail and took him out in front of the prison and hanged him by the neck until he was dead. This was in Nov. 1893.

South Carolina had thirteen lynchings last year, ten were charged with assault on white women, one with horse stealing and two with being impudent to white women. The first of the ten charged with rape, named John Peterson, was declared by the white woman in the case to be the wrong man, but the mob said a crime had been committed and somebody had to hang for it. So John Peterson, being the available ‘somebody,’ was hanged. At Columbia, South Carolina, July 30th, a similar charge was made, and three Negroes were hanged one after another because they said they wanted to be sure they got the right one.

Homer's Hymn to Venus Published by Garnett, "Relics of Shelley", 1862; dated 1818. Verses 1-55, with some omissions. Muse, sing the deeds of golden Aphrodite, Who wakens with her smile the lulled delight Of sweet desire, taming the eternal kings Of Heaven, and men, and all the living things That fleet along the air, or whom the sea, Or earth, with her maternal ministry, Nourish innumerable, thy delight All seek ... O crowned Aphrodite! Three spirits canst thou not deceive or quell:— Minerva, child of Jove, who loves too well Fierce war and mingling combat, and the fame Of glorious deeds, to heed thy gentle flame. Diana ... golden-shafted queen, Is tamed not by thy smiles; the shadows green Of the wild woods, the bow, the... And piercing cries amid the swift pursuit Of beasts among waste mountains,—such delight Is hers, and men who know and do the right. Nor Saturn's first-born daughter, Vesta chaste, Whom Neptune and Apollo wooed the last, Such was the will of aegis-bearing Jove; But sternly she refused the ills of Love, And by her mighty Father's head she swore An oath not unperformed, that evermore A virgin she would live mid deities Divine: her father, for such gentle ties Renounced, gave glorious gifts—thus in his hall She sits and feeds luxuriously. O'er all In every fane, her honours first arise From men—the eldest of Divinities. These spirits she persuades not, nor deceives, But none beside escape, so well she weaves Her unseen toils; nor mortal men, nor gods Who live secure in their unseen abodes. She won the soul of him whose fierce delight Is thunder—first in glory and in might. And, as she willed, his mighty mind deceiving, With mortal limbs his deathless limbs inweaving, Concealed him from his spouse and sister fair, Whom to wise Saturn ancient Rhea bare. but in return, In Venus Jove did soft desire awaken, That by her own enchantments overtaken, She might, no more from human union free, Burn for a nursling of mortality. For once amid the assembled Deities, The laughter-loving Venus from her eyes Shot forth the light of a soft starlight smile, And boasting said, that she, secure the while, Could bring at Will to the assembled Gods The mortal tenants of earth's dark abodes, And mortal offspring from a deathless stem She could produce in scorn and spite of them. Therefore he poured desire into her breast Of young Anchises, Feeding his herds among the mossy fountains Of the wide Ida's many-folded mountains,— Whom Venus saw, and loved, and the love clung Like wasting fire her senses wild among.

Individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism have built renowned and racially homogenous ministries, but these have been cold comfort to those members of the body of Christ who exist outside the boundaries of racial whiteness. If white Christians are to reckon with racial discipleship, we must also look critically at the deeply held assumptions that have thus far hindered our attempts to address racial segregation and injustice. While it’s been over a hundred years since Ida B. Wells and Dwight L. Moody overlapped in Chicago, the dynamic they illustrate continues today. In the current cultural moment, black Christians are fighting for more equitable criminal justice policies, immigrant churches are advocating for policies that don’t separate asylum-seeking parents from their children, and Native American believers are lamenting as ancient tribal lands are being polluted by oil pipelines. At the same time, there are prominent white Christians publicly debating whether justice, from a biblical vantage point, can ever be social. Some of these leaders wonder whether justice can even be considered Christian when not limited to an individual. As disheartening as this divide is between white Christianity and many Christians of color, white Christianity’s tools help us to see why we haven’t been able to move past it.

Haiti as an independent republic accepted the invitation extended to her along with other nations, and erected a building on the World's Fair grounds. She placed Frederick Douglass in charge of this building to represent the Haitian government. Mr. Douglass had been sent as minister to Haiti from this country a few years before this, and had so won the confidence of this little black republic that it in turn gave him the honor of being in charge of their exhibit. Had it not been for this, Negroes of the United States would have had no part nor lot in any official way in the World's Fair. For the United States government had refused her Negro citizens participation therein.

The next morning the newspapers carried the news that while our meeting was being held there had been staged in Paris, Texas, one of the most awful lynchings and burnings this country has ever witnessed. A Negro had been charged with ravishing and murdering a five-year-old girl. He had been arrested and imprisoned while preparations were made to burn him alive. The local papers issued bulletins detailing the preparations, the schoolchildren had been given a holiday to see a man burned alive, and the railroads ran excursions and brought people of the surrounding country to witness the event, which was in broad daylight with the authorities aiding and abetting this horror. The dispatches told in detail how he had been tortured with red-hot irons searing his flesh for hours before finally the flames were lit which put an end to his agony. They also told how the mob fought over the hot ashes for bones, buttons, and teeth for souvenirs.

Ida’s World Famous Maple Bacon Fudge 1 cup white sugar 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup heavy cream 1/3 cup of butter 1/4 cup of pure maple syrup 5 slices of thick cut bacon, cooked and crumbled 2 teaspoons of vanilla 1/4 teaspoon of salt In a large heavy bottom saucepan, add brown sugar, white sugar, butter, cream, and maple syrup. Stir until well blended and place over medium heat.  Bring mixture to a boil, stirring constantly.  Lower heat to medium and continue to stir for about 7-9 minutes or until the mixture reaches the soft ball stage (drop a small amount of mixture into cold water and form to a ball with your fingers). Remove from the heat.  Add vanilla and crumbled bacon and let sit without stirring for about 10 minutes. After mixture has cooled, stir vigorously until mixture begins to thicken and loses its gloss.

When, therefore, the Book of Enoch blames the angelic sons of God, rather than their earthly wives, for the depravity of relations said to exist between them as spirits and mediums, we may well ask if this be not a matter on which the writer of the Book of Enoch has carelessly accepted current legends. May it not be that he, too, believed all depraved psychical manifestations to be due to "evil sprits", and that he was totally unaware of the occult law which brings these things to pass with a medium who, ignorantly but persistently, fails in clear thinking or correct loving?

Not Your Stereotypical Southern Belle By Betsy Shearon, George Grits I grew up being more interested in scoring touchdowns than wearing tiaras. I never particularly wanted to get married and was well into my thirties before I even got engaged. And although I am a devoted aunt, the call of motherhood for me has always sounded strangely similar to the “Warning Will Robinson!” cry on the old Lost in Space television show. Still, I consider myself a true Southern Girl, simply because, as we say in the South, my mama done raised me right. I say, “yes, ma’am,” “no, sir,” “please” and “thank you.” I am respectful of my elders, even my great-aunt Ida Mable, whose food we were never allowed to eat at family reunions. (Suffice it to say that eccentricity not only runs in my family, it pretty much gallops.) I always wear clean underwear in case I am in an accident. And I always leave the house clean before I go on a trip in case I get killed and strangers have to come into my house to get my funeral wear (this is despite the fact that I have yet to read an obituary that said, “she left a husband, two children, and an immaculate house.”) And I know things that only Southern girls know, such as the fact that it is possible to “never talk to strangers and at the same time greet everyone you meet with a smile and a hello. I know that it is possible to “always tell the truth,” but to always answer “fine” when someone asks how you are--even if your hair is on fire at the time. It is this knowledge that allows us to turn the other cheek when people say ugly things like “Southern girls are stupid, barefoot and pregnant.” Southern girls realize that, given the swollen feet and ankles that accompany pregnancy, going barefoot when possible is actually a very smart and sensible thing to do--and that the Yankees who say things like that probably wouldn’t talk so ugly if their feet didn’t hurt, bless their hearts.

Ida was clearly exasperated by the fact that despite the motives that accompanied the lynching statistics published year after year—which Ida included in nearly every article—“law-abiding and fair-minded people should so persistently shut their eyes to the facts.” Ida continued, “This record, easily within the reach of every one who wants it,” made it “inexcusable” for anyone not to debunk the presumption from the beginning.

Wells-Barnett’s experience with the ways that lynching victims were criminalized, and her progressive belief in the ability of persons to change for the better, gave her another perspective.

Du Bois spoke about the relationship of black disenfranchisement to cheap surplus labor in the South; Celia Parker Woolley delineated the relationship between race, women’s rights, and labor. Wells-Barnett began her talk by enumerating the 3,284 men, women, and children who had been lynched since Reconstruction, and she illustrated the relationship between lynching and the lack of citizenship rights.

Local Democrats did their part by distributing a poster that pictured Ferdinand with exaggerated Negroid features: a fly-in-the-buttermilk reminder for those who customarily voted straight Republican tickets.

Now he and other former allies, such as newspaper publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, began to question Roosevelt’s emotional stability and subsequently the leadership of Washington, who continued to remain loyal to him.

Oh, yes you do. You and I are different from the rest of them. We could never bind ourselves to someone who doesn’t understand us. The Ida Fosters of the world are all well and good for George and Clarence, but not for the likes of us.

In particular, it does not record the deployment of the false rape accusation in the Jim Crow period as, in Ida B. Wells’s words, “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized".

She gulped, "Mother, I’m serious." Mabel pleaded with her eyes, "she doesn’t look well." "Your sister is a fantasist and a brat," Clara responded. "What?" Mabel was surprised at her cold-hearted response. She knew her mother wasn’t one to mince words, but the harshness of these was even worse than she expected. "She always fills her head with nonsense, and when it doesn’t come to fruition, she implodes. She’s been like that since she was a child. You should know it as well as I do." Clara said sternly. "But mother!" Mabel argued, desperate for her mother to see how her daughter needed help. "Don’t mother me!" Clara spat, "you’re just as bad!" Mabel recoiled as her mother spoke. "You pander to her. You spoil her. You make such a fuss over her when she tantrums. This is what happens when you raise a child like that." Clara pointed her finger like a dagger of blame. "When in reality, you’re doing it because you want to feel needed. She would have been better off if you’d just left her to herself." "Get your own life," she said firmly, leaving a millisecond gap between each word before dismissing her daughter from the table. Mabel was furious. She lifted herself out of her seat and started to storm out of the kitchen before turning back, "Just so you know," she got her mother’s attention, "neither of us asked to be here." Mabel spat. Clara shrugged, "no one does.

George chortled alongside her before trying to move her hair away from her face. He picked up a golden strand that ran over her eyes and pushed it gently behind her ear, the way a father might do with a child. The pair paused for a moment, both of them getting that uncomfortable feeling someone was watching them. George looked over his shoulder and noticed two well-dressed ladies walking by and whispering to one another. He pulled away from Mabel immediately. Red-faced and windswept, the pair moved slightly further apart from one another, and their smiles faded. "I do wish they wouldn't stare," Mabel said sulkily. "Don’t mind them, you can’t change what they do." George reminded her of the words that helped her through her sister's marriage. "I just don't know what will get them to stop!" she wailed. "You could never talk to me ever again?" George joked. He stared at Mabel as the words left his mouth, waiting on her reaction to be sure she knew he was kidding. For so long now, she had been the most stable part of his existence. She would be there for him after every shift, the person he hoped he could always rely on. He was relieved when she laughed in response. "Yes, either that or marry you!" she sneered, turning to him and expecting him to turn pink with embarrassment and tell her she was mad. But he didn't.

Yet, Black women, in particular, suffer from the stigmatization of Black male sexuality, to which the injunction, "Believe women," too readily gives cover, just as Dalit women suffer specifically from the sexual stigmatization of Dalit men. When we are too quick to believe a white woman's accusation against a Black man, or a Brahmin woman's accusation against a Dalit man, it is Black and Dalit women who are rendered more vulnerable to sexual violence. Their ability to speak out against the violence they face from men of their race or caste is stifled, and their status as counterpart to the oversexed Black or Dalit male is entrenched. In that paradox of female sexuality, such women are rendered "unrapable" and thus "more rapeable". Ida B. Wells patiently documented the lynchings of Black men on trumped-up claims of raping white women. But she also recorded the many rapes of Black women that inspired no lynch mobs and at which little notice was taken. One such case was that of Maggie Reese, an 8-year-old girl raped by a white man in Nashville, Tennessee. The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case: she was Black.

Added to residential segregation was the powerlessness of blacks to keep vice out of their communities.

Black resistance caused lynchings to spike in the early 1890s. However, the White lynchers justified the spike in lynchings as corresponding to a spike in Black crime. This justification was accepted by a young W. E. B. Du Bois, by the middle-aged, ambitious principle of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, and by a dying Frederick Douglass. It took a young antiracist Black woman to set these racist men straight. Mississippi-born Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells recoiled from the lynching of friends and the sheer number of lynchings during the peak of the era in 1892, when the number of Blacks lynched in the nation reached a whopping 255 souls. She released a blazing pamphlet in 1892 called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. From a sample of 728 lynching reports in recent years, Wells found that only about a third of lynching victims had “ever been charged with rape, to say nothing of those who were innocent of the charge.” White men were lying about Black-on-White rape, and hiding their own assaults of Black women, Wells raged.11

It’s obvious. Look—see? The black kids are over there hanging out with the black kids. The jocks have their territory. Mary Ida and those other sorry girls are standing over there at the water fountain where you know they’ll always be. We’re sitting here on the bleachers, where boys like us always sit. It’s only the first day of school, but we’re already stuck where we’ll all be for the rest of the year. Who said you had to go there? Nobody. But you did. You went automatically. You had no choice. It’s like, I don’t know, in your blood cells or something. That’s what I mean, a law of nature. The universal law governing the motion of bodies at school.

Lexy rolled her eyes. Nans, Ruth, Ida and Helen were amateur detectives. Though they were all well past the age of seventy, they still kept active and had been successful in solving many cases. They even had a name for themselves — The Ladies Detective Club. The problem was, they saw murder everywhere.

Men tend to rebel when young and become more conservative with age, but women tend to be more conservative when young and become rebellious as we grow older. I’d noticed this pattern in the suffragist/ abolitionist era, when women over fifty, sixty, even seventy were a disproportionate number of the activists and leaders—think of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells—but I’d assumed it was due to the restrictions placed on younger women by uncontrolled childbirth and their status as household chattel: hard facts that limited all but a few single or widowed white women, and all but even fewer free women of color.

Having come of age in Bronzeville, Mom had seen urban renewal several times over. She’d known this geography back when the area teemed with tenement housing, cold water flats, and kitchenettes. She had moved her family into Lawless around the time the Ida B. Wells Homes had begun its slide. The city’s housing authority had stopped screening applicants as it once had, and not long afterward it would get rid of its on-site janitorial staff. It simply stopped demanding of itself and its residents the things required to maintain a healthy and humane development. Later still, residents would have to contend with dysfunctional policing practices and crooked cops. The acclaimed investigative reporter Jamie Kalven, a dear friend, would write extensively about a team of corrupt Chicago officers who operated for years in the Ida B. Wells housing project and others. Then the world would look at what ails Chicago, particularly its violence, and pretend to wonder how it happened and how to fix it.

During my stay here in your city [Chicago] I have been visited by several groups of your people—all of whom have recited the story of the wrongs and injustices heaped upon the race; all of them appealing to me to denounce these outrages to the world. I have asked each delegation 'What are you doing to help yourselves?' Each group gave the same answer, namely, that they are so divided in church, lodges, etc., that they have not united their forces to fight the common enemy. At last I got mad, and said, 'You people have not been lynched enough! You haven't been lynched enough to drive you together! You say you are only ten millions in this country, with ten times that number against you—all of whom you say are solidly united by race prejudice against your progress. All of you by your own confession stand as individual units striving against a united band to fight or hold your own. Any ten-year-old child knows that a dozen persons fighting as one can make better headway against ten times its number than if each were fighting singlehanded and alone.' What you need in each community is a solid organization to fight race prejudice wherever shown. That organization should be governed by a council of your best men and women. All matters affecting your race welfare should be passed on by that council and loyally obeyed and supported by all members of your race. Until you do that much, it is useless to appeal to others to do for you what you can best do for yourselves.

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. -Ida B. Wells

In life as in story," writes Arthur Frank, "one event is expected to lead to another." Our medical system has sold us a story of remedy, progress, technology, professionalism, and trimph. Frank suggests that our society is willing to hear only those illness narratives that conform to the idae of "restitution": "I was well, I got sick, I am well again." "It's nothing," we insist before a procedure, knowing that medicine will shortly deliver a triumph." "I'm fine," we say afterward, as though nothing has fundamentally shifted inside us. We crave the clean plot arc, one those around us can understand and stomach. When we try to tell the story of the phone calls, pointless and insane, our listeners lean away. And yet we cannot separate individual treatments, however sophisticated, from the system in which they are rendered, if that system is providing nto safety and care but frustration, futility, and impotence. If that system creates experiences that look less like restitution and more like what Frank calls chaos narratives. "In the chaos narrative, troubles go all the way down to bottomless depths," writes Frank. "What can be told only begins to suggest all that is wrong. The second feature of the chaos narrative...is the syntatic structure of 'and then and then and then.'... "The lack of any coherent sequence is an initial reason why chaos stories are hard to hear;...they are threatening. The anxiety these stories provoke inhibits hearing...The story traces the edges of a wound that can only be told around...In the lived chaos there is no mediation, only immediacy. The body is imprisoned in the frustrated needs of the moment." Chaos narratives, writes Frank, expose the fundamental contingency at the heart of living, allthe ways we cannot control our bodies or our lives, all the ways our lives can be wasted, and they are, for this reason, unbearable.

In 1919, prior to the riot, Police Chief John Garrity told an incredulous Ida Wells-Barnett that he “could not put all the police in Chicago on the South Side to protect the homes of colored people,” which seemed, in so many ways, as good as saying that the bombs were not his problem.

Saudi Arabia continued its policy of supporting jihad and spreading Wahhabism with Koran and Kalashnikov to the war's end and beyond. By the time the guns fell silent, Riyadh had lavished the Bosnian jihad with well over a billion dollars in aid, much of which went to fund the holy warriors.

Susan B. Anthony should not, of course, be held personally responsible for the suffrage movement’s racist errors. But she was the movement’s most outstanding leader at the turn of the century—and her presumably “neutral” public posture toward the fight for Black equality did indeed bolster the influence of racism within the NAWSA. Had Anthony seriously reflected on the findings of her friend Ida B. Wells, she might have realized that a noncommittal stand on racism implied that lynchings and mass murders by the thousands could be considered a neutral issue.

Dad had bought a stack of these biographies, towering over one hundred now. Martin Luther King Jr. Frederick Douglass. Mary McLeod Bethune. Richard Allen. Ida B. Wells. Dad kept urging me to pull from the tower for every writing project.

Bilbo made it to the governor’s mansion without citizens like Ida Mae or Miss Theenie having any say as to his getting into or remaining in office. He later ascended without them to the U.S. Senate, where, in 1938, the year Ida Mae finally migrated to Chicago, he helped lead one of the longest filibusters in the history of the Senate, the one to thwart a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime. At one point in the filibuster, he rose to speak on behalf of his constituents—not the entire state of Mississippi but the white voters there—and in opposition to the interests of half the state. He spoke in defense of the right to kill black citizens as white southerners saw fit. “If you succeed in the passage of this bill,” Bilbo told his Senate colleagues, “you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousand fold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.

It was only in the 1990s, in Bosnia, that "the Che Guevara of Islam"43 really came into his own, developing al-Qa'ida into the flexible, well-funded multinational jihadi organization it became. It was the Bosnian civil war that transformed bin Laden and his cadres into the backbone of the mujahidin worldwide.

May we help you with the dishes?” Ida asked. “You may not.” “Are you sure?” said June. “We really don’t mind.” “No, no. You’ve got your work to do, and to tell the truth I’ve entered into a period of my life where I actually enjoy doing the dishes, and by myself. Which is odd when I consider to what degree I always loathed the practice before; but recently it feels like time well spent. What does it mean?” Bob was nearly asleep in his chair; Mr. More gently crushed his foot under the table and said, “Someday, Bob, when you’re an aged specimen like me, and you find yourself suddenly enamored of folding the laundry or edging your lawn, remember your long-gone friend Leslie More telling you to accept whatever happiness passes your way, and in whatever form.” “Okay,” said Bob. “Because it’s a fool who argues with happiness, while the wiser man accepts it as it comes, if it comes at all.