Ida B. Wells and the Forces of Democratization

The work of Ida B . Wells is receiving increasingly close scrutiny today, since her diaries and other writings have been published, making an overall assessment of her accomplishments easier. We often think of her as someone who wrote extensively on lynching, and the republication of many of her pamphlets a decade or two ago has reminded us of how much courage, fortitude and perseverance it took to be able to author the works in the first place. But an important part of Wells ' s trajectory is her sheer staying power; she was on the same path, so to speak, from her teenage years, and she often felt the need to maintain a true course when others around her were giving way to temptation. It is easy to say that Wells believed in American democracy as a government for all ; more remarkable, perhaps , is the fact that Wells also felt the need to be a tire less activist in the sense of being a community organizer. Indeed, it could be argued that the most rewarding part of Wells ' s lifework was that done in Chicago that resulted in community halls , lending libraries and cross-cultural effort lasting at least a generation or two. Here, as Wells recounts, for instance, in Crusade for Justice, she is bent on doing whatever the situation seems to require at whatever the cost. l