‘You can’t just gloss over this history’: The movement to honor Ida B. Wells gains momentum

By Peter Slevin, The Washington Post

CHICAGO — Across the top, the grave marker at Oak Woods Cemetery reads BARNETT. Along the bottom, “Crusaders for Justice.” On the left, there is her name: Ida B. Wells, beside her husband’s….

Ida B. Wells, Oil on canvas, 44 x 36 inches, 2006, For the Kennedy School of Government

After a white mob reacted to one of her anti-lynching editorials by destroying the presses of her Memphis newspaper, the Free Speech, she carried the struggle to Chicago in the early 1890s and lived half of her life here.

Yet her pioneering work is all but unrecognized in the city, which has no shortage of statues and monuments to leading white men.

Michelle Duster, her great-granddaughter, aims to change that. For the past decade, Duster and a few friends have labored, dollar by dollar, to raise $300,000 to build a monument to Wells. They’re still barely halfway there, but the word is getting out….

The effort to honor Wells fits the moment, Savage said. “That’s one thing positive that these new monuments can do: People who may know nothing about Ida B. Wells will find things about this extraordinary woman they didn’t know anything about.”

Wells “challenged every type of convention,” including sexism in the civil rights community and racism in the women’s suffrage movement, Hannah-Jones said. “She refused to stay in her place at a time when doing something could be debilitating, could be dangerous.”

And yet the effort to build a monument in Chicago has not gone quickly.

“There are so many bigger projects that have been funded over a shorter period of time. It’s not that much money,” lamented Duster, who is editor of an anthology to be released this year titled “Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls.” She recently tweeted, “It’s #Idastime, but it should not be this hard.”

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