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Miriam DeCosta-Willis, ed. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Boston: Beacon, 1995. 238 pp. $24.00.
To know Ida B. Wells, more than a hundred years after she launched her journalistic career, is to love her. We admire the courageous newspaper editor who in the same year her friend Thomas Moss was lynched in Memphis published an editorial that declared: "Nobody in this section believes that old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women." Those of us who know of Ida B. Wells tend to think of a woman of almost mythic proportions, an unflinching anti-lynching activist who challenged new railway segregation laws in the 1880s and won (though the case was soon overturned), who in 1892, the year she began her crusade and published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases, almost single-handedly turned back the flow of lynchings in the U.S. When we think of Wells we imagine a founding member of the NAACP who also insisted that every African American family should own a Winchester, a fiery woman who vowed that in the face of white violence she would "sell her life dearly."
Miriam DeCosta-Willis's The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells: An Intimate Portrait of the Activist as a Young Woman sets out to introduce the private side of Ida B. Wells to those already acquainted with her public persona. Flanked by a foreword and afterward by prominent scholars of African American women's literature and history, Mary Helen Washington and Dorothy Sterling, DeCostaWillis presents three separate sets of Wells's journals: the 1885-87 diary written when the to-be activist, only twenty-four, launched her career as the prominent journalist "Iola"; a short and humorous 1893 travel log drafted as the activist set out to England to rally public support and direct international pressure against lynching; and a 1930 diary, composed from the vantage point of an elder Wells, just...