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March 25
Ida B. Wells, Tony Cade Bambara, and Viola Liuzzo
David Barnhart
March 25, 2025
Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama, 2018. Own photo.
Today marks the death, in 1931, of Ida B. Wells, a journalist, sociologist, and civil rights leader. She was born under slavery in 1862 and orphaned at the age of 16, becoming the main caretaker of her siblings. She became a school teacher and wrote articles exposing the violence of white supremacy. When she took on journalism full-time, she became an advocate for the rights of women and Black people. In addition to documenting racial terror lynchings, she stood up to white women suffragists when they told her that Black suffrage would have to wait until white women got the vote. When told by leaders that she could not march with white suffragists in Washington in 1913, she and Mary Church Terrell joined in anyway, flanked by their white accomplices who subverted their leaders. There are National Park Service sites dedicated to Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell — you should visit them and read about them before our current white supremacist administration takes them down.
Today also marks the birth of Toni Cade Bambara, in 1939. She was also a powerful Black woman writer whose real-life work around healing and community informed her writing.
Today also marks the death of Viola Liuzzo, a white woman activist who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan for her participation in the Selma marches. She became involved in racial justice activism through her participation in a Unitarian Universalist church in Detroit.
Reflection:
In her novel The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara wrote:
So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.
I have not read Bambara’s work, but she is on my to-read list because this quote resonates so deeply with my work as a pastor and mental health counselor.
Ida B. Wells wrote an open letter to President McKinley which said:
For nearly twenty years lynching crimes, which stand side by side with Armenian and Cuban outrages, have been committed and permitted by this Christian nation. Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 to 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hung or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless. Statistics show that nearly 10,000 American citizens have been lynched in the past 20 years. To our appeals for justice the stereotyped reply has been that the government could not interfere in a state matter. Postmaster Baker’s case was a federal matter, pure and simple. He died at his post of duty in defense of his country’s honor, as truly as did ever a soldier on the field of battle. We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home. Italy and China have been indemnified by this government for the lynching of their citizens. We ask that the government do as much for its own.
One way Wells’ legacy of truth-telling lives on is at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and the organization that sponsored it, the Equal Justice Initiative.
Prayer: Bender of the arc of history, shape our human society with truth-telling and empathy. Let your prophets be heard and cause policy to change, for your glory. Amen.