Ida B. Wells: “Booker T. Washington and His Critics”

Journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells was deeply affected by racism and the violence that whites inflicted upon Blacks in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an attempt to arouse the nation to confront its racial prejudices and barbaric actions, she wrote articles and pamphlets and lectured widely in the United States and in Great Britain. Her vivid depictions of the horrors of lynching and her statistically supported discussion of that practice began the slow, arduous process toward public rejection of those crimes. Pulling no punches in her comments, Wells criticized both Blacks and whites. Black elites, shielded by their wealth from many of the indignities of discrimination, ignored the problems of others in their communities.