Frederick Douglass's Children

Introduction

 

How often do we see the son or daughter of a famous parent match or exceed that individual’s accomplishments? 

 

Abraham Lincoln had children. So had Thomas Edison.  What do we know of Martin Luther King’s offspring? 

 

Imagine the pressure each child must have felt to become somebody extraordinary.  Life does not permit that to happen, usually.  That is not to say that the child will not live a praise-worthy, productive life.   That child’s life becomes interesting if for no other reason than to contrast accomplishment.  Was he a chip off the old block?  Was she her mother’s best self?  If not, then by how much not?  And does that matter?

 

I was curious to learn what I could about Frederick Douglass’s children.  He had five, two girls and three boys.

 

Rosetta, born 1839

Lewis Henry, 1840

Frederick Jr., 1842

Charles Remond, 1844

Annie, 1849

 

I would like to share with you what I have discovered.



Frederick Douglass's Women

Ida B. Wells, Part Four

 

For a long time, Wells thought of marriage and romantic relationships as oppressive, where women were expected to defer to men and flatter their vanity. But one day, she met a man who must have made her feel very differently, an attorney, writer, and fellow advocate for black rights named Ferdinand Barnett. She married him and they raised four children (Cools 3). She strived to balance caring for her family with her activism and her work as a probation officer in Chicago. As she aged, she devoted much of her time to African-American organization causes.

 

Wells-Barnett had been and continued to be indefatigable in her documentation of lynching.

 

Wells would do things like document every lynching in a year, breaking them down by cause and region. Through her research, she was able to demonstrate persuasively that many of these murders had nothing to do with rape, and many were perpetrated against the innocent, the insane, or the merely insolent.

 

Some of Wells’ methods of work recall today’s “digital media activists.” She circulated “pamphlets” of her own speeches about lynching. Later, when she couldn’t travel because she had a family (and changed her name to the very modern, hyphenated Wells-Barnett), she would… close-read the reportage of white newspapers to make her case. These papers “reported the deaths of [lynch victims] … black men in enthusiastic, almost pornographic detail, making Wells-Barnett’s case against mob violence for her.”

 

Wells even hired detectives to go on fact-finding missions for her when she couldn’t travel herself, either because of her family obligations or because of the many death threats that prevented her return to areas of the Deep South (Seltzer 1-2).

For many, including some of Well's liberal allies, it was a commonly held assumption that lynching resulted from anger about sexual attacks — but her analysis showed that less than a third of lynchings involved an accusation of rape. She also noted that sexual assault "committed by white men against Negro women and girls, is never punished by mob or the law."

Wells's work made it clear that lynching was being used to terrorize African Americans. Of course, some didn't want to listen to her facts — in an editorial about Wells's lectures abroad in 1893, the Washington Post noted she "studiously ignores the lynching of white men, and devotes all of her time to denunciation of the lynching of blacks."

In 1896, the Republican Women’s State Central Committee wanted the still-nursing Wells to travel and campaign for them across Illinois. To make the journey possible, they arranged for volunteers to take care of her firstborn everywhere she went.

Wells went on to have three more children, and would step back from some of her work in order to have more time for her family. But she'd demonstrated that combining marriage, children and a career wasn't impossible — and as she noted in her autobiography, which she started writing in 1928, "I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches" (Kettler 3-4).

In 1896, Wells-Barnett formed the National Association of Colored Women. In 1898, she led a protest in Washington, D.C., that called for President William McKinley to make reforms. She founded in Chicago the Ida B. Wells Club for Negro women and the more activist Negro Fellowship League. She published in 1900 her “Lynch Law of America” creed that argued that without representation in government, lawlessness against black Americans would continue to reign.

 

In 1908, the year after the occurrence of brutal assaults on the African-American community in Springfield, Illinois, Wells “attended a special conference for the organization that would later become known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Though she is considered a founding member of the NAACP, Wells later cut ties with the organization; she explained her decision thereafter, stating that she felt the organization, in its infancy at the time she left, lacked action-based initiatives” (Biography 5).

 

In January 1913, she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first such group for black women in Illinois. It would be for Ida the prelude to a major event in Washington, D.C. March 3, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inaugural.

When Washington, D.C.'s first suffrage parade was organized, for 1913, lead planner Alice Paul, a young Quaker woman, expressed concern that white women wouldn’t show up if they knew they had to march alongside black women. “As far as I can see, we must have a white procession, or a Negro procession, or no procession at all,” she reasoned. Wells-Barnett was told that the historic march was segregated and she would have to walk with an all-black group (Dionne 3).

Ida had brought members of the Alpha Suffrage Club to march. “The organizers of the march asked that they walk at the end of the parade.  She tried to get the White Illinois delegation to support her opposition of this segregation, but found few supporters.  They either would march at the end or not at all” (Wilson and Russell 1).

 

By the beginning of the 20th century,… many middle-class white people embraced the suffragists’ cause because they believed that the enfranchisement of “their” women would guarantee white supremacy by neutralizing the black vote (Williams 1).

 

5,000 women marched. One of the women, Mary Wilson, described what she saw.

 

“The violence erupted minutes after the parade began. The crowd broke through steel cables and spilled into the street. Men, many of them drunk, spit at the marchers and grabbed their clothing, hurled insults and lighted cigarettes, snatched banners and tried to climb floats. Police did little to keep order. Observed one of Paul’s supporters, ‘I did not know men could be such fiends.’”

 

By the end of the day, 100 marchers were taken to the local emergency hospital and “Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, responding to a request from the chief of police, authorized the use of a troop of cavalry from nearby Fort Myer to help control the crowd.”

 

The protesters had to have known the risk before they left the safety of their homes for Washington. But women, black and white, traveled across the country anyway to make their voices heard (Bernard 3-4).

 

Ida Wells-Barnett refused to march at the back of the parade with an all-black delegation. She noted, "If the Illinois women do not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost" (Kettler 5).  As the parade progressed, emerging from the crowd, she joined the White Illinois delegation, situating herself between two White supporters.

 

She continued to fight for African-American equality. “Working on behalf of all women, as part of her work with the National Equal Rights League [she] called for President Woodrow Wilson to put an end to discriminatory hiring practices for government jobs. She created the first African-American kindergarten in her community” … (Biography 6).

 

In 1917, a group of black soldiers were court-martialed after being involved in a riot in Texas; 13 of them were hanged before they could appeal their death sentences. Wells felt these soldiers were martyrs — willing to defend their country, then killed without due process — and had buttons made to commemorate them.

This drew the attention of government agents, who came to ask Wells to stop distributing the buttons. She refused, but the interaction was added to an intelligence file about her. In 1918, Wells was selected to be a delegate to the peace conference at Versailles that followed World War I. However, she wasn't able to go — considered "a known race agitator," the U.S. government denied her a passport (Kettler 6).

Wells-Barnett went on to serve as secretary of the National Afro-American Council. She founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League. Nevertheless, during the last decade of her life … she found herself pushed to the sidelines by the emerging Negro leadership, having alienated many people with her confrontational style and her difficult personality (Banes 2).

  

In 1930, Wells made an unsuccessful bid for the Illinois state senate. Health problems plagued her the following year.

 

Ida B. Wells died of kidney disease March 25, 1931, at the age of 68, in Chicago, Illinois. She left behind an impressive legacy of social and political heroism. With her writings, speeches and protests, Wells fought against prejudice, no matter what potential dangers she faced. She once said, "I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap" (Biography 9).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Banes, Mary Jo. “First Things: Ida Wells-Barnett.” Boston College Magazine. Summer 2004. Web. <http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/summer_2004/c21_wellsbarnett.html>.

 

Bernard, Michelle. “Despite the Tremendous Risk, African American Women Marched for Suffrage, Too.” The Washington Post. March 3, 2013. Web.  <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/03/03/despite-the-tremendous-risk-african-american-women-marched-for-suffrage-too/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a6ac17a81f55>.

Cools, Amy. ““Happy Birthday, Ida B. Wells!”  Ordinary Philosophy. July 16, 2017. Web. <https://ordinaryphilosophy.com/tag/ida-b-wells/>.

 

Dionne, Evette. “Women's Suffrage Leaders Left Out Black Women.” News and Politics. Aug. 18, 2017. Web. <https://www.teenvogue.com/story/womens-suffrage-leaders-left-out-black-women>.

 

“Ida B. Wells Biography.” Biography. The Biography.com Website. A&E Television Networks. January 19, 2018. Web. <https://www.biography.com/people/ida-b-wells-9527635>.

 

Kettler, Sara. “6 Fascinating Facts About 'Crusader for Justice' Ida B. Wells.” Biography.  July 15, 2017. Web. <https://www.biography.com/news/ida-b-wells-biography-facts>.

 

Seltzer, Sarah. “Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Crusader, Was the Godmother of the Social Justice Internet.” Flavorwire.  November 24, 2014. Web.  <http://flavorwire.com/489781/ida-b-wells-anti-lynching-crusader-was-the-godmother-of-the-social-justice-internet>.

 

Williams, Yohuru. “Women Who Fought for the Vote.” History. Web. <https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/women-who-fought-for-the-vote>.

 

Wilson, Midge and Russell, Kathy. ““Black Women & the Suffrage Movement: 1848-1923.” Wesleyan University. Web. <http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/suffrage.html>.



Frederick Douglass's Women

Ida B. Wells, Part Three

 

During her two tours of Great Britain, 1893 and 1894, and all the years thereafter to 1920 when women received the right to vote, Ida Wells had to battle white temperance and suffragist leaders who insisted upon including in their organizations racist Southern women.

 

Many leaders refused to advocate for the ending of lynching. … protecting white women’s virtue was often the excuse used to justify the brutal act. In the white imagination, black men’s insatiable sexuality was a threat to white women’s purity … After the passing of the 15th Amendment, Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton, the first woman to serve in the Senate, pushed this dangerous message: “I do not want to see a negro man walk to the polls and vote on who should handle my tax money, while I myself cannot vote at all,” she said. “When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue — if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts — then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary” (Dionne 3).

 

Other leaders accepted Southern white women into their organizations out of expediency. Getting the vote for women was more important than opposing lynching.

 

Many in the women’s suffrage movement resented the fact that the 15^th Amendment had granted the black man the right to vote but not the white woman. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National Women Suffrage Association, argued: ““You have put the ballot in the hands of your black men, thus making them political superiors of white women. Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses” (Dionne 5)!

 

During her 1893 and 1894 tours, Wells waged war against “one of the most formidable American leaders within the movement to gain women the vote, or suffrage: Frances E. Willard, national president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Throughout much of the 1800s, the women's alcohol temperance movement was a powerful force in the greater push toward women's suffrage. … To Willard, giving women the right to vote was the only way to rid the U.S. of evils of intemperance.  … She was even willing to court white Southern women, at the expense of blacks, even though her parents had been abolitionists. "'Better whiskey and more of it' is the rallying cry of great, dark-faced mobs," Willard said in an 1890 interview with the New York Voice. "The safety of [white] women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities."  Wells was incensed.  Willard “‘unhesitatingly slandered the entire Negro race in order to gain favor with those who are hanging, shooting and burning Negroes alive,’ Wells said in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice” (Fields-White 1).

 

Wells took Willard on during her second tour of England. “Willard was in England as the guest of Lady Henry Somerset, head of the British temperance movement. Both women were invited to speak before British temperance advocates on May 9, 1894.”

 

Wells came to the lecture armed with a copy of the 1890 interview with the New York Voice that echoed such racist thinking. Willard had told the publication that the local tavern "is the Negro's center of power ... the colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt."

 

When asked her opinion of Willard, Wells chose to read the interview. With Willard at her side and little time to actually speak, Wells asked the audience how influential white women could continue to turn a blind eye to the white mobs who threatened black lives. Afterward, she was able to get a British journal, the Fraternity, to reprint Willard's interview.

 

Lady Somerset was so enraged by Wells' commentary that she demanded that the Fraternity article not be printed, or Wells would never be heard in Britain again. The article was published anyway. Lady Somerset also sent a telegram to black abolitionist Frederick Douglass demanding that he publicly reprimand Wells. Douglass didn't give in to Lady Somerset's demands (yet Wells later sadly noted in a letter to Douglass that he did little to fully support her overseas campaign).

 

Lady Somerset and Willard were not done. Pushing to publicly embarrass Wells in the press, the pair arranged for another Willard interview with the Westminster Gazette, a London newspaper. This time it was conducted by Somerset, who gave Willard a platform for her version.

 

Willard talked about her family background and expressed concern for the plight of blacks. But she also stated that "the best people I knew in the South" had told her black people were threatening the safety of white women and children. She continued, "It is not fair that a plantation Negro who can neither read or write should be entrusted with the ballot."

 

Other U.S. publications — including the Memphis Commercial — weighed in with statements against Wells' character. The Commercial examined her career, painting "the saddle-colored Sapphira" from Holly Springs, Miss., as a harlot. The newspaper also stated that Wells was pushing her "foul and slanderous" outbursts on the British.

 

Even so, the media campaign didn't stop Wells. She lectured to audiences in London; was invited to dinner in Parliament; and before she headed home, helped Londoners establish the London Anti-Lynching Committee. Forming this group was a clear victory for Wells in the anti-lynching crusade. It comprised some of the most influential editors, ministers, college professors and members of Parliament. To Wells' surprise, Lady Somerset joined the committee, and Willard was among the Americans who also signed on (Fields-White 4-5).

 

Another crusader for women’s suffrage that placed expediency above justice for black Americans was Susan B. Anthony.

 

A chapter in her [Wells’s] autobiography describes her work with suffragist Susan B. Anthony. On most issues the two women agreed about both goals and tactics. But at one point, Anthony explained to Wells-Barnett [Wells’s married name] why she had not invited Frederick Douglass to address the Equal Suffrage Association in Atlanta, and why she did not support the foundation of a colored branch of the association: that she "did not want anything to get in the way of bringing southern white women into our suffrage association." Anthony asked Wells-Barnett if she was wrong. "I answered uncompromisingly yes, for I felt that although she may have made gains for suffrage, she had also confirmed white women in their attitude of segregation," … (Bane 1).

 

Before she joined the campaign for woman suffrage, Anthony was a temperance activist in Rochester, New York, where she was a teacher at a girls’ school. As a Quaker, she believed that drinking alcohol was a sin; moreover, she believed that (male) drunkenness was particularly hurtful to the innocent women and children who suffered from the poverty and violence it caused. However, Anthony found that few politicians took her anti-liquor crusade seriously, both because she was a woman and because she was advocating on behalf of a “women’s issue.” Women needed the vote, she concluded, so that they could make certain that the government kept women’s interests in mind.

 

Though Anthony was dedicated to the abolitionist cause and genuinely believed that African-American men and women deserved the right to vote, after the Civil War ended she refused to support any suffrage amendments to the Constitution unless they granted the franchise to women as well as men (Williams 1).

 

 

 Works cited:

 

 

Banes, Mary Jo. “First Things: Ida Wells-Barnett.” Boston College Magazine. Summer 2004. Web. <http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/summer_2004/c21_wellsbarnett.html>.

 

Bernard, Michelle. “Despite the Tremendous Risk, African American Women Marched for Suffrage, Too.” The Washington Post. March 3, 2013. Web.  <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/03/03/despite-the-tremendous-risk-african-american-women-marched-for-suffrage-too/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a6ac17a81f55>.

Cools, Amy. ““Happy Birthday, Ida B. Wells!”  Ordinary Philosophy. July 16, 2017. Web. <https://ordinaryphilosophy.com/tag/ida-b-wells/>.

 

Dionne, Evette. “Women's Suffrage Leaders Left Out Black Women.” News and Politics. Aug. 18, 2017. Web. <https://www.teenvogue.com/story/womens-suffrage-leaders-left-out-black-women>.

 

“Ida B. Wells Biography.” Biography. The Biography.com Website. A&E Television Networks. January 19, 2018. Web. <https://www.biography.com/people/ida-b-wells-9527635>.

 

Kettler, Sara. “6 Fascinating Facts About 'Crusader for Justice' Ida B. Wells.” Biography.  July 15, 2017. Web. <https://www.biography.com/news/ida-b-wells-biography-facts>.

 

Seltzer, Sarah. “Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Crusader, Was the Godmother of the Social Justice Internet.” Flavorwire.  November 24, 2014. Web.  <http://flavorwire.com/489781/ida-b-wells-anti-lynching-crusader-was-the-godmother-of-the-social-justice-internet>.

 

Williams, Yohuru. “Women Who Fought for the Vote.” History. Web. <https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/women-who-fought-for-the-vote>.

 

Wilson, Midge and Russell, Kathy. ““Black Women & the Suffrage Movement: 1848-1923.” Wesleyan University. Web. <http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/suffrage.html>.

Frederick Douglass's Women

Ida B. Wells -- Part Two

 

In 1893, Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition (forerunner of the World’s Fair) to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World.  The exposition featured exhibits from 46 countries, displayed new technologies, and introduced to the public many new consumer products.

African Americans wanted to be employed at the exposition.  They also wanted their racial achievements showcased.  Few acquired jobs and no exhibit spaces were allocated.  Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells published a pamphlet titled “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.”  The pamphlet, Wells later wrote

was a clear, plain statement of facts concerning the oppression put upon the colored people in this land of the free and home of the brave. We circulated ten thousand copies of this little book during the remaining three months of the fair. Every day I was on duty at the Haitian building, where Mr. Douglass gave me a desk and spent the days putting this pamphlet in the hands of foreigners (Chicago 1).

Wells reported that more than 20,000 people at the fair received copies.

For additional information about Frederick Douglass’s and Ida Wells’s involvement at the Columbian Exposition, read these posts:

“At the Fair” January 24, 2018, and “Activist Fervor Revived” January 31, 2018 -- http://authorharoldtitus.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2018-02-24T13:11:00-08:00&max-results=7

After the exposition, Wells chose to stay in Chicago rather then return to New York.  She worked at and contributed articles for the Chicago Conservator, the oldest African-American newspaper in the city. 
 

Later that year (1893), accepting the invitation of Catherine Impey, an English Quaker, she toured England, Scotland, and Wales for two months speaking to the British public about lynching practices in America.  “The lynching of black men and women seemed to have become a sport among Southern white mobs — reaching a peak of 161 deaths in 1892” (Fields-White 1).  She displayed during her speeches a photograph of a white mob and grinning white children positioned near a hanged black man.  Her speeches created a sensation, although some listeners remained skeptical of the veracity of her accounts.
 

I turn now to Ida Wells’s beliefs regarding race, injustice, and lynching based on the extensive research she had conducted prior to her 1893 and subsequent 1894 United Kingdom tours.

Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.  But Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee Stewart had been lynched in Memphis, one of the leading cities of the South, in which no lynching had taken place before, with just as much brutality as other victims of the mob; and they had committed no crime against white women.  This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was.  An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and “keep the nigger down.”   I then began an investigation of every lynching I read about (Curry 4).

 

She understood that race was used as a stratagem of order.  She abhorred the practice of white women being forced to declare falsely that they had been raped.   “The only rapist driven by racial antipathy are the ‘majority of the superior white men who are the fathers of mulatto children.’"  In instances in which a black man and a white woman had consensual intercourse, the white woman “was a willing partner in the victim's guilt, and being of the superior race must naturally be more guilty" (Curry 5).

 

She spoke of white women’s sexual interest in black men.  … White men constantly express an open preference for the society of black women.  But it is a sacred convention that white women can never feel passion of any sort, high or low, for a black man.  Unfortunately, facts don’t always square with the convention; and then, if the guilty pair are found out, the thing is christened an outrage at once, and the woman is practically forced to join in hounding down the partner of her shame.  Sometimes she rebels, but oftener the overwhelming force of white prejudice is too much for her, and she must go through with the ghastly mockery.  “What!” cried out one poor negro at the stake, as the woman applied the torch, egged on by a furious mob, headed by her relatives, “have you the heart to do that, when we have been sweethearting so long?”  It was this specific argument she [Ida Wells] made — lynching is punishment for the bare fact of white women’s sexual desire for black men — that brought her under constant threat of lynching herself.

“It may be remarked here in passing that this instance of the moral degradation of the people of Mississippi did not excite any interest in the public at large,” she wrote of one horrible lynching in which the victims were innocent.  “American Christianity heard of this awful affair and read of its details and neither press nor pulpit gave the matter more than a passing comment” (Seltzer 3-4)

Ida Wells “understood that the immorality of whites meant they would not be moved by the suffering they committed against Blacks. The gun as an instrument of self-defense has a special place in her political philosophy: a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has ‘to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched’” (Curry 6).

 

“While self-defense would arrest assault by lynchers, by itself it would not vitiate the cultural and civilizational motif of white supremacy that justified lynching. To do this,” Wells intended “to ‘shame’ and display as inferior the brutish civilization of white America to the world.”  She “was not swayed by the illusion of change in whites' hearts and minds.”  She “held that cultural and/or civilizing change must come from those other than the voiceless victims of white supremacy.”  A vigorous campaign against lynching would compel governors of states, newspapers, senators and representatives, and bishops of churches to declare one way or another their position regarding her and others’ condemnation of racial barbarism in America.
 

 

What Wells saw in Britain “was a disposition already formed against lynching stemming from Britain's abolition of slavery in the early 19th century. Like a good agitationist sociologist, she believed her tour in Britain could motivate the English to sanction and condemn the actions of America and expose the horrors of lynching the United States continued to deny internationally.  Wells … saw the receptivity of Britain to be linked with their economic stake in maintaining trade and imperial prestige, not some unrequited moral compassion for the Negro's humanity.  … By appealing to Britain's interest in being the world superpower, Wells … was able to effectively conduct her assault against the United States' image and negate its claim to a superior government

and democracy.  … Britain's receptivity to her plight could be used against white Americans as proof of Britain's moral and civilizational superiority and white Americas lawlessness” Curry 7-8).
 

 

Works cited:

Curry, Tommy J.  “T. Thomas Fortune’s Philosophy of Social Agitation as a Prolegomenon to Militant Civil Rights Activism.”  TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY.  Vol. 48, No. 4 ©2012 .  Indiana University Press.  Media.  http://thomasfortunehouse.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/4/8/25484353/thefortuneofwells.pdf

 

Monee Fields-White, “The Root: How Racism Tainted Women's Suffrage.”  Opinion Hosted by NPR.  March 25, 2011.  Media.  https://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134849480/the-root-how-racism-tainted-womens-suffrage

 

“Ida B. Wells: African Americans at the World's Columbian Exposition.”  Encyclopedia of Chicago.  Media.  http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1495.html

Seltzer, Sarah, “Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Crusader, Was the Godmother of the Social Justice Internet.”  Flavorwire.  November 24, 2014.  Media.  http://flavorwire.com/489781/ida-b-wells-anti-lynching-crusader-was-the-godmother-of-the-social-justice-internet