Political Failure, Ideological Victory: Ida Wells and Her Early Work

Abstract

The long Gilded Age, beginning at the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the black slaves, ended with a nadir in American race relations and the height of white supremacist activity. This period also saw the beginning of empowerment for American women, who by the end of the age had earned the right to vote and had expanded the amount of wage-earning women in the workforce more than two-fold. One of the figures cutting across both trends is Ida B. Wells, a prominent yet often-forgotten African-American female writer. Beginning with her journalism and anti-lynching crusades into her work with feminism, Wells was an intellectual radical whose ideas on race, gender, and acceptable behavior would not enter the political norm until decades after her death. As a consequence, Wells's work was subject to widespread condemnation or avoidance and one of the foremost minds on race relations died with her work suppressed – often deliberately – by not only the white community but other black leaders. Her early work is focused on as illustrative of two historical trends: first, the tendency for "radical" thought to become more mainstream over time, especially on issues of race and gender, and second, the difficulty faced by non-whites and non-males to gain any attention for their work.

Political Failure, Ideological Victory: Ida Wells and Her Early Work by Matthew Schilling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License