16 JULY 1862 is a very important day you might not know about 16JUL20

ROCK THE VOTE & U.S. VOTE FOUNDATION

IDA BELL WELLS. It is no wonder I never heard of this lady born into slavery who struggled against hate and racism and for civil rights and human rights in America. American history lessons on slavery and civil rights when I was in school (I graduated high school in 1976) were minimal and made socially acceptable and there was no mention of the thousands on lynchings of Black men, women and children. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr received "honorable mention" in one or two pages of my American History books. So I share this revelation of Ida Bell Wells' birthday, courtesy of Mother Jones, in honor of the good life she lived to improve the lives of all Americans. THANK YOU IDA BELL WELLS....

On this day 158 years ago, Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She would go on to help found the NAACP, fight for women's right to vote despite the racism endemic to the suffrage movement, and, in 2020, be awarded a Pulitzer Prize special citation for her fearless documentation of lynchings in the late 1800s.

I was reminded of Wells' birthday recently when reading an essay by Hanif Abdurraqib, in his book They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, about the death in police custody of Sandra Bland. Abdurraqib writes:

It took three men to remove Ida B. Wells from a train car in 1884, and for his trouble, one of them got her teeth marks in his arm. She should have never been asked to move from her seat to the smoking car of the train and she knew this. She measured the fight and took it on.

This is my favorite story about Ida B. Wells' life. It's the one that will show up when you click on a Google doodle, and I tell it to someone every year on the day of her birth. It makes sense to tell the story every July 16th. I like to think that Ida B. Wells always knew what we see so clearly now. When black men die, they live on, almost forever. When black women vanish, they often simply vanish.

This is interesting to think about, when the police officer who killed George Floyd has been charged with second-degree murder while Breonna Taylor's killers still walk free. Posthumously awarding Ida B. Wells a Pulitzer is nice, but how do we begin to undo the racial and gender inequalities she dedicated her life to exposing?

I don't know the answer, but appreciating her life on the day of her birth isn't a bad way to start.

—Abigail Weinberg