The founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 gathered two generations of prominent African-American women in the nation's capital: Josephine Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, now in her 70s; and…
Ida B. Wells could vote for President years before Alice Paul or Carrie Chapman Catt. How? Read on Changing state constitutions is hard. Who votes & who doesn’t is determined by each state; big changes almost always need constitutional amendment.…
If your New Year's resolution is to read more books, #CiteBlackWomen more, and/or meet new people... Join me in reading Paula Giddings' biography of Ida B. Wells and discussing it with companionable strangers. Details below. Time flexible. Happy…
By 1892, Ida B Wells’ Memphis paper was thriving. She traveled the Mississippi Delta selling subscriptions, tripling circulation. Free Speech was editorially fearless: Ida sharply called out any accommodation of white supremacy, even by Black…
Way down the rabbit hole tonight. Memphis cartes de visites circa 1880s, many from a Gebhardt Studios on Beale Street that had both black & white patrons. A whole cache on Flickr, lovingly annotated circa 2015 by someone I can't identify in real…
Ida B Wells’ crusade against lynching succeeded for many reasons: her investigative rigor, her talent as a writer and speaker, her relentlessness. But her first, crucial insight was recognizing that white women were lying. Thread. Until Ida published…