of the Constitution: does the idea of “all {men} created equal” in the Declaration of Independence apply to those people held as slaves? The slaveholders won the battle at the constitutional convention, and indeed people held as slaves (and native Americans) were deemed to be 60 percent human beings.7
The second passage occurred at the Civil War, Reconstruction, and its aftermath. Through the dedication of many abolitionists and soldiers and the deaths of almost 700,000 in the Civil War, some progress was made to seek to establish the humanity and citizenship of those designated as “black.” In a speech given in 1965, James Baldwin describes the situation, “So where we are now is that a whole country of people believe I’m a ‘nigger,’ and I don’t, and the battle’s on! Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either. And that is the crisis.”8 The idea of “niggers,” an idea at the heart of white supremacy, dwells deeply in the American psyche, however, and it did not take long for the slaveholders to use violence, racism, and legislation to reestablish what Doug Blackmon calls “neo-slavery.”9 By the decade of the 1890s, white supremacy was in full bloom in the South and in other places. The 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson reinforced and codified this idea that Baldwin illuminated, that we as a country believed that we needed our “n-words.” Neo-slavery was firmly reestablished, and it would last until 1965.
Fortunately for us all, there were people classified as “black” (and a few classified as “white”) who were determined to fight for the idea of equality and the recognition of the humanity of black people. All through those years, there were strong voices such as Ida Wells, who fought for a different point of view, a view more closely aligned with the idea that all people are created equal. This led to the third passage, which caught fire in the 1950s, with the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, and the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. These and many other actions would lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which offered the promise of ending neo-slavery. As before in the other two passages, white supremacy roared again. We are not sure how the transition for this third passage on race and white supremacy will end in our country.
Nibs remembers his sense of hope on a cold, dark January morning as he arrived at the Silver Springs Metro Station to get on the train about 6 a.m. In spite of the cold and early hour, there was a festive atmosphere, as more and more people boarded the train as it made stops on the way to Union Station in DC. We were celebrating a moment that we had thought we would never see—the inauguration of the first black man ever elected president of the United States. We passed through the security checkpoints near the Capitol, and then found our seats. There were over one million people in the National Mall that day, and as far as I could tell, we were all celebrating this remarkable achievement and this remarkable person.
And now, as we write this, we see the answer of white people to the Obama presidency: we are in the third year of the presidency of Donald Trump. He was elected by white people, with the majority of white people of both genders voting for him. We should not be surprised at this turn of events. With a few notable exceptions, the idea that white men are superior has been a staple of the American scene since the European beginnings. The idea that “all men are created equal” was originally intended to mean white men, but fortunately others have heard that it applies to them! Many of us were surprised that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, yet history reminds us that whenever there is some advance toward racial or gender justice, there is a backlash and a regathering of white male power.
The election of 2020 will tell us much about our future, but for now we must seek the wisdom and justice that we can. This is a crucial time in our history, and another time of great danger, as reactionary forces seek to turn back the small tides of progress that has been made. Though it feels brand new and unique, our time bears many similarities to the years after Reconstruction, when hard-won rights for African Americans were stripped away by the resurgence of the power of white supremacy. Thus, it is fitting to turn to our elders and witnesses, as we are doing in this book.
Ida Wells was born in slavery, grew and matured during Reconstruction, and fought fiercely for the freedom that she found in the Reconstruction time. She did this while it was being stripped away in a tidal wave of racism and white supremacy. Her life and witness offer hope and possibility for us.
Though American history is rather pessimistic on this level, we choose to be inspired by Ida Wells whose life was dedicated to the idea of equity and justice for all. Her life and witness remind us of the fierceness and dedication needed to be a voice for justice, touching so many points of “intersectionality”: categories such as race, gender, class that overlap one another and are in conversation—and often in tension—with one another. And we are focusing on her because her witness has been greatly undervalued in American history. In these challenging times, we must be guided by her life and witness—though she did not win as many victories as one wishes she had, she was never defeated.
1. Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 35.
2. For fuller discussion of this development, see Nell Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010).
3. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Documents of American Prejudice, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 11.
4. George Orwell, Animal Farm (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1954).
5. Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” 11.
6. Miriam Decosta-Willis, ed., The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 140–41.
7. Laurence Goldstone, Dark Bargain (New York: Walker and Company, 2005), 104–7.
8. James Baldwin, Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 325–32.
9. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 402.
The life of Ida Wells has become much better known over the past thirty years, when we first encountered her witness.1 While we assume that readers will know a bit of her story, a review of the highlights is in order.
Ida Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Her father was held as a slave but also was a skilled carpenter, and her mother insisted on education for their children. When freedom came in 1865, her father, Jim Wells, was