Synopses & Reviews
Pioneering African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is widely remembered for her courageous antilynching crusade in the 1890s; the full range of her struggles against injustice is not as well known. With this book, Patricia Schechter restores Wells-Barnett to her central, if embattled, place in the early reform movements for civil rights, women's suffrage, and Progressivism in the United States and abroad. Schechter's comprehensive treatment makes vivid the scope of Wells-Barnett's contributions and examines why the political philosophy and leadership of this extraordinary activist eventually became marginalized.
Though forced into the shadow of black male leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington and misunderstood and then ignored by white women reformers such as Frances E. Willard and Jane Addams, Wells-Barnett nevertheless successfully enacted a religiously inspired, female-centered, and intensely political vision of social betterment and empowerment for African American communities throughout her adult years. By analyzing her ideas and activism in fresh sharpness and detail, Schechter exposes the promise and limits of social change by and for black women during an especially violent yet hopeful era in U.S. history.
Review
[This] is an ambitious interpretive study of Wells-Barnett's career as a reformer. It makes a persuasive case for her importance, even central importance, over a fifty-year period. (Barbara Sicherman, Trinity College)
Review
The depth of insight and sensitivity of the author?s analyses of black leadership and gender politics are unsurpassed. (Kevin K. Gaines, University of Michigan)
Review
[This] is an ambitious interpretive study of Wells-Barnett's career as a reformer. It makes a persuasive case for her importance, even central importance, over a fifty-year period. (Barbara Sicherman, Trinity College)
Review
This book manages to get behind the African American woman's legendary veil of dissemblance to reveal the struggles of a pioneer who was as often as at odds with herself as she was with the whites and men who structured her world. (Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University) The depth of insight and sensitivity of the author?s analyses of black leadership and gender politics are unsurpassed. (Kevin K. Gaines, University of Michigan) [This] is an ambitious interpretive study of Wells-Barnett's career as a reformer. It makes a persuasive case for her importance, even central importance, over a fifty-year period. (Barbara Sicherman, Trinity College)