A New Generation Meets Ida

For most of a century, Ida B. Wells was the most important American many people had never heard of.

She was written out of the textbooks she belonged in, her name a footnote where it should have been a headline. That is changing. In historically Black colleges and universities, in high-school classrooms, in reading groups and film clubs, students are meeting her for the first time, and recognizing something familiar. She was young when she started. She was told to wait her turn. She refused.

What draws a new generation to Ida is not that she was perfect or safe. It is that she was barely into her twenties when she sued a railroad for forcing her from her seat, and won at first, before a higher court overturned the ruling. She was not yet thirty when she took on the most violent taboo in American life and named it in print. She did not ask permission. She built the platform she was denied.

The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press. Ida B. Wells

Her methods, in young hands

Rise With Wells exists to put those methods, verify, document, publish, organize, into the hands of the people inheriting the fight. Through Bylines for Justice, students and citizen writers report the truths their own communities are living, and add them to a growing record. Through campus and newsroom partnerships, we help the next generation of truth-tellers learn the craft she perfected.

The goal is not admiration. It is apprenticeship. A legacy is not a thing you inherit; it is a thing you take up. A new generation is meeting Ida B. Wells, and instead of building her a pedestal, they are picking up her pen.