PHILADELPHIA — Three prominent scholars gathered to discuss the life and legacy of journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells in a two-hour panel discussion held last week in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love.
Sonia Sanchez, the poet laureate of Philadelphia, who retired in 1999 as the Laura Carnell professor of English and women’s studies at Temple University, was joined by historian John H. Bracey, Jr., the chairman of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Paula Giddings, a professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College and the author of the best-selling biography called Ida: A Sword among Lions.
“Ida was a warrior for peace and justice in this world,” Sanchez told the more than 200 people in the audience. “She teaches us that we can be activists, we can be fulfilled. She helps us to understand, what does it mean to be human?”
For Bracey, who grew up on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C. and had heard of Wells as a youngster, he did not come to fully appreciate her significance until he relocated to Chicago in the 1960s and got involved in the Civil Rights and the Black Liberation movements there as a graduate student.
“I knew the name, but the name didn’t mean much,” he confessed.
It was not until he discovered that the Ida B. Wells Housing Projects for Black families, which was built by the Chicago Housing Authority between 1939 and 1941 in the city’s South Side neighborhood, that he came to understand the significance of Wells as a pioneering activist and journalist who boldly took on lynching as her primary cause. “The community wanted her name on that building,” he said. “This was a very important, dangerous Black woman.”
For more than 40 years, Bracey has introduced Wells to his undergraduate and graduate students, teaching them about her social justice campaigns and the vociferous journalism that she actively practiced. “If something was wrong, she was on your doorstep. She lived a very long and principled life,” he said. “Her thing was: don’t compromise. If there’s oppression anywhere, that means we got work to do.”
