Sojourner Truth: 1799-1883
- Freed slave, eloquent and spoke out against slavery.
- Her fame stems from her meeting with President Lincoln and her bestseller, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
Harriet Tubman: 1822-1911
- Also a best-selling author. Advocate of greater racial and sexual equality.
- Born into slave family, she escaped and afterwards rescued over 300 slaves through her escape route network.
- Spied for the Union in the Confederate territory during the Civil War, risking capture and re-enslavement.
Ida B. Wells: 1862-1931
Most famous campaigner against lynching, born into slavery in Mississippi.
- Her father was one of the first few blacks that prospered from emancipation and sent her to university.
She taught in Tennessee, but campaigned against Jim Crow laws at the same time, suing a railroad company for refusing to let her sit in the first-class car.
She criticised segregated schools and was fired in 1891.
- Due to urbanisation and increasing black literacy with the ‘Black Press’, Wells became a journalist.
She wrote about lynching and criticised blacks as a ‘disorganised mass’, that passively accepted oppression and applauded ‘true’ men in Kentucky, who burnt white property in retaliation for lynching.
Her journalism got her expelled from the South so she moved to the North, where de facto segregation did not reach.
- Her anti-lynching campaign made her one of the most famous blacks of the 1890s, but still many blacks criticised her, calling her crazy, and stirring up trouble for the black community.
Apart from aging abolitionist, Fredrick Douglas, Wells did not think much of contemporary black leaders:
Initially a supporter of the National Afro-American League (est. 1887), she soon derided its male leadership for lacking organisational skills and intelligent direction.
‘By their child’s play’ they illustrated ‘the truth of the saying that Negroes have no capacity for organisation.’
After falling out with the NAACP and contemporaries, she turned to local issues.
- She helped Southern blacks adjust to Chicago life, mobilising women to campaign for the right to vote, and worked to elect Chicago’s first black alderman- Oscar DePriest.
- After WW1, where returning black soldiers were seen as a threat to white jobs, Wells and her lawyer husband defended blacks accused of ‘rioting.’
- She helped establish a Chicago branch of the first black trade union, Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Du Bois said that Wells helped ‘awaken the conscience of the nation.’ But her ‘work has been easily forgotten because it was taken up on a much larger scale by the NAACP and carried to greater success.’
Wells made lynching a national issue and contributed to its decrease in the 1890s.
She died in 1931 virtually forgotten outside of Chicago.
Wells illustrates the growing educational opportunities for freed blacks, increasing black activism and problems for disenfranchised Southern blacks as well as female involvement.