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Lisa G. Materson, Mia Bay. To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Hill and Wang. 2009. Pp. viii, 374. $35.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 852–853, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.852
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Extract
Mia Bay has written an important book that chronicles the life of one of the most determined political figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the prominent anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. Discussing the significance of Wells's anti-lynching work, Bay explains that although she was “[n]ot the first African American to speak out against lynching, Wells was the first to gain a broad audience” (p. 6). Wells advanced a pathbreaking critique of mob violence that exposed the spuriousness of white supremacist claims that lynching served as justified punishment for black–on–white sexual violence. Wells revealed that, as Bay puts it, “[l]ynching had nothing to do with rape and everything to do with power” (p. 6) and served as a key piece of the scaffolding of the Jim Crow South. One of the book's strengths is that May does not present Wells's ascendance as a forceful advocate for racial and gender equality as inevitable. Rather, the text explores how a girl who was born a slave in rural Mississippi and lost her parents at the age of sixteen developed a trenchant analysis of lynching and crafted strategies for black protest that would serve future generations of civil rights activists.
