| Review |
"Between 1880 and 1930, Southern mobs hanged, burned, and otherwise tortured to death at least 3,300 African Americans. And yet the rest of the nation largely ignored the horror of lynching or took it for granted, until a young schoolteacher from Tennessee raised her voice. Her name was Ida B. Wells." "In They Say, historian James West Davidson recounts the first thirty years of this woman's life - as well as the story of the great struggle over the meaning of race in post-emancipation America. He captures the changes that swept the South as Wells grew up in Holly Springs, Mississippi: the spread of education among the free blacks, the rise of political activism, the bitter struggles for equality in the face of entrenched social custom. Davidson traces the crosscurrents of these cultural conflicts through Ida Wells's forceful personality. When a conductor threw her off a train for not retreating to the segregated car, she sued the railroad - and won. When she protested conditions in the segregated Memphis schools, she was fired - and took up full-time journalism. And in 1892, when an explosive lynching rocked Memphis, she embarked full-blown on the career for which she is not remembered, as an outspoken writer and lecturer against lynching."--Jacket. |
