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Reviews
| "They Say:" Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race, by James West Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 256 pages. $21.95, cloth.
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| James West Davidson's biography of the first thirty years of Ida B. Wells's life is actually a biography of racial and gender construction in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Her childhood was reflective of Reconstruction—a period in which African Americans gained access to education and political participation so long denied under the racist laws and customs of the slave South. Raised in this era, Wells was trained as a teacher and internalized Victorian ideas about what it meant to be a respectable woman. As she grew to adulthood, however, her own circumstances as well as relations between blacks and whites would be fundamentally altered. |
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Davidson adroitly points out that Wells's activism began as a result of her own experiences. Despite adhering to the conservative notions of what it meant to be a "lady" in late nineteenth-century America, Wells found that race trumped concerns over gender as she was forcibly removed from a segregated railroad car, as her reputation was questioned for publicly meeting with white men, and as she was removed from a teaching job for challenging the ethics of white male school administrators and black female teachers in a newspaper article. Her crusade against lynching grew out of her relationships in Memphis when a particularly brutal and confusing assault on black men was defended by the white press as protection of white women's virtue, though Wells knew it to be a question of economic competition between white and black grocers. |
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The practice of lynching as a justifiable response to a perceived of threat against white women's sexual reputations virtually never occurred prior to the Civil War in the South, though scholars, most notably Martha Hodes, have pointed out that interracial relationships even between white women and black men were not as rare as casual observers might think. Under slavery, as long as children did not result from the union, or rather, as long as a child of mixed race was born from a black woman and not a white one, interracial unions did not usually result in public acts of retribution. The legal and social apparatus of slavery served to enforce white manhood as the only example of what it meant to be a man by removing black men from traditionally masculine roles—provider, protector, patriarch. The post-Reconstruction south did not offer those same protections for white manhood, nor were these roles legally denied to black men, and as a result, perceptions of economic, political, or social challenges could result in hypermasculine displays of physical brutality. Wells's expulsion from Memphis led her to New York, where she exposed this side of lynching to a national rather than regional audience, creating a growing crusade against this particularly shameful aspect of American extra-legal violence. |
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While there are certainly more comprehensive studies of Wells, of lynching, and of the era, Davidson's work is outstanding because of its treatment of identity formation with the not so subtle rhetorical usage of "they say." Throughout the book, readers are invited to compare how contemporaries viewed Wells and how "they" viewed issues of race in contrast with how Wells viewed herself and defined the problems confronting white and black America. This makes the book a particularly useful study for undergraduate courses dealing with how racial identities were shaped in the United States in the postbellum period. Additionally, Davidson ends the narrative just as Wells gives her speech at Lyric Hall, the moment where she becomes a national public figure, and also a point in which she had no sense of what her future would hold. This places Wells in the context of other African American leaders, particularly with men like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, as well as founders of the NAACP, all of whom she disagreed with on various issues. The idea of multiple black voices is something that is almost always lost in survey courses or advanced high school classes. In conjunction with either James Allen's Without Sanctuary or the webpage of the same name, 'They Say' could help students understand why the usage of the term or the symbols of lynching continue to produce so much reaction within American culture. |
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| Troy University |
Timothy R. Buckner |
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