“In 1889, Ida B. Wells, a Memphis journalist and a founder of American sociology, lost her friend Thomas Moss, and two other employees at Peoples Grocery, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell, to a white mob. They had been attacked, and they had tried to defend themselves. In trying to defend themselves, they had gotten out of place, and they had been murdered for it. Then when Ida Wells wrote in her paper The Free Speech and Headlight of Memphis that black folks should go west, as Moss’s dying words had reportedly implored black folks to do, white folks got upset. They followed her incessantly, she was watched everywhere she went, and she was threatened. When in 1892 she suggested that white women might be actually having consensual relationships with black men and that the justifications giving for lynching, based on her research, were fallacious, her paper was burned down and a bounty was put on her head.
We do this for Ida and all the ones that have come before us who have written the truth and compelled the nation, against some terrible odds, to reckon with itself. We are still doing it, and we must continue to do it. The fact that any of the statements of people of color–even the cherry-picked, decontextualized ones–are seen as controversial is a testament to the fact that we have not, even after all these years, had the conversations that need to be had or read the things that need to be read. Or perhaps the worst of white folks simply haven’t listened. But we’ll get there. As long as some other folks–and institutions–step up and be brave, too.”
-Dr Zandria F. Robinson, setting the record straight after some recent University of Memphis shadiness.
