Family Plot

Episode 282 - Ida B. Wells - Her Power, Pen and Protests


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Our latest episode goes hog wild as we talk about the heroic Ida B. Wells.  From taking care of her brothers and sisters at the age of 16 after her parents and brother died of yellow fever to teaching in black schools to writing for local papers and taking on lynchings in the South.  And this wasn't even forty years after the Brooks Sumner Affair where South Virginia's Senator Preston Brooks attacked Massachussets Senator Charles Sumner hitting him over the head many times after he gave a powerful Anti-Slavery speech.  And this was a black woman born into slavery who told the truth about lynchings in a way the South was not ready to hear.  A lynch mob would tear her newspaper asunder, force the papers owner to sign a retraction at gunpoint while she happened to be in New York...and in New York she stayed continuing to write the truth about lynchings in the South, even going to England where she spoke publicly about the issue, embarassing the US abroad.  Even when she campaigned for women's suffrage, she refused to march in the back, jumping in the middle of the parade as it happened walking with white female suffragists.  Largely forgotten by history, she was quoted by US. President Joe Biden when he signed the US first anti-lynching law in 2022.  So come with us down the trail of history and lets learn about this firebrand in our first informational episode of 2026!

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