Archive for May 2018

Roseanne Barr woke up with a million-dollar job and by lunchtime in LA it was gone. She got her big show chopped down like an old Civil War statue. Her show was indeed a monument to white privilege, a place where supporters could celebrate President Donald Trump and dismiss ABC shows like Black*ish and Fresh Off the Boat with the back of…

A civil rights champion in her day, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was known for many things. She was an African-American journalist who worked to expose lynchings. She pushed for women’s right to vote. She started numerous organizations to help African-Americans gain economic and political power in Chicago and the country. She created the first kindergarten for…

Last Wednesday, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. On the same day, we witnessed the killing of Saheed Vassell, another unarmed black man, this time by New York City cops. This week marks 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which bars housing discrimination on the basis…

During her many years in politics, Hillary Clinton has found herself both supportive and at odds with the Black community. In Chicago, this week, she was supportive. The former first lady and presidential candidate attended the Ida B. Wells Legacy Luncheon on Thursday to receive an award and help raise funds for a political action…

Ida B. Wells-Barnett is getting a ton of overdue recognition these days. The famous journalist and anti-lynching crusader was among the influential women given a belated obituary last month by The New York Times as part of its “Overlooked” series of stories. On April 12, former first lady and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker at…

From her base on the South Side, Ida B. Wells-Barnett crusaded against the racist lynching of black men, pushed for women’s right to vote and started numerous organizations to help African-Americans gain economic and political power in Chicago and the country. She’s known for having created the first kindergarten for black children and she worked…

Abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett spent more than half of her life in Chicago. But though she was one of the most prominent black leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries, there’s no monument to her anywhere in the city. Wells’s great-granddaughter and a dedicated group of community members have…

Michelle Duster is a woman on a mission. And it runs in her family. In Duster’s case, that mission involves a campaign to erect a memorial to her great-grandmother— journalist and civil rights crusader Ida B. Wells, whose own missions included a successful campaign to expose the horrors of lynching in 19th century America. “She…

For decades, Chicagoans have pondered how to reverse the poverty and disenfranchisement that contribute heavily to the cycle of violence in African-American neighborhoods. Perhaps we have had the answer all along. Ida B. Wells, the Chicago journalist and anti-lynching crusader, left a blueprint for empowering black people to make positive changes in their own communities…

“A Woman Lynched” read a headline in The New York Times on Aug. 20, 1886. A mob had taken “Eliza Woods, colored” from a jail in Jackson, Tenn., and hanged her for supposedly poisoning her employer. The journalist Ida B. Wells protested the lynching in an editorial for The Gate City Press, a black newspaper in Kansas…