Reviews for Inside Black America

The average rating for Inside Black America based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-26 00:00:00 Alejandro Rosales Know who Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Alice Paul are? How about Ida B. Wells? Long before Rosa Parks, Ida B. Wells refused to give up her seat. She took her case to the courts but the outcome was far from the impact on society we saw with Rosa Parks. Undeterred, Ida. B. Wells kept on fighting and she fought hard! If you are fuzzy about what she has contributed to women's rights, especially the right to vote, then you should pick up a book about her incredibly, and often lonely, pursuits to better the lives of all women. I would like to say that other suffrage leaders, all of whom I have greatly admired, were also trying to secure rights for all women. But, quite simply they were not. Most of them tried to secure equal rights for white women. You could argue that trying to lump it all together would have resulted in delaying rights for white women and for black people altogether, and some have argued this. No matter how it's justified in history, the fact remains that suffrage leaders like Ida. B. Wells had to work harder than any of the white leader so many us grow up idolizing. I am thinking back to so many of my classes and so many of my books and realizing how little I learned about Ida. B. Wells.  Wells was born into slavery and freed during the civil war. At 16, she lost her parents and had to work to take care of her family. At this point in her story, I could not help thinking about the type of white women involved in civil rights. They were, by and large, women from incredible privilege. It was only from this privilege that they could build a platform to fight the current power structure. And then there was Ida B. Wells, a women born into slavery, a woman who had to work every day, even after being freed, in order to help her family survive. Working a job was definitely not something her white female activists had to worry about. She could have easily just drown in the hardship of working each day to keep her family fed. Instead, she started teaching, going to college herself in the summers,  and started a newspaper that tried to bring awareness of what it was like for "free" black people. They were still subject to all sorts of severe inequalities and Wells was not going to remain silent about it.  I cannot say how many times I heard the expression, "She had to dance backwards and in high heels," referring to how women have to make incredible adjustments and work harder to make it in a man's world. The original phrase came from the on screen partnership of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire because she had to do everything her partner did but mirrored / backwards and in high heels. Forget "backwards in high heels"! The struggle for Wells and the black women she fought to represent was so much harder than that.  One of the many things that makes Wells a true hero is that she laid waste to the lie that black people were lynched because they were criminals (what so many people on my Facebook feed would call 'thugs"). Rather, White people who lynched were the actual thugs who targeted black people who were doing well financially. Sadly, so many white people have had a terrible track record with sharing the wealth. Those who owned slaves allowed black people to do all the work while they collected the profits. Those who didn't own slaves benefitted from that overall wealth (the wealth that built our great nation on the backs of slaves!) that was largely used to continue to allow white people and their descendants  to live in good neighborhoods with *good schools*, which set them up to succeed in the world. Meanwhile, the descendants of slaves, who worked from morning to night (and suffered all that goes along with being stripped of American freedoms) were marginalized to live in neighborhoods that had schools that failed black children (and thanks to the tax system, are still largely segregated and failing black children today).  Wells cut through the lies being created by white racists and called it what it was. Lynching was not in fact solely or even largely about punishing black criminals but was actually about white people seeking out black people who were earning money and lynching them to keep them from sharing in the American Dream. She called out Jim Crow laws for what they were, slavery disguised as law (for more on that, I highly recommend David Oshinsky's, "Worse Thank Slavery"). Wells also challenged the lie that black men were a threat to the innocence of white womanhood. Black men were seen as animals with animal sexual instincts and white women were used to generate hate against black men who obviously only existed in the world to try to rape them. (This unfortunate narrative lasted long after Wells life was over. Just think about Polly Klaas, the poor white child who was brutally murdered by a black man but used by white people to make society think black men in general were a threat to our children. Even Polly Klaas' dad was upset she was being used for this purpose, but it didn't matter. The damage was done to all.) It is a hard narrative to challenge if you can find one black man who was a pedophile or who did rape someone. It's funny how many white men are pedophiles and rapists; and yet, we don't think all white men are a threat. Worse yet, as Wells pointed out, because of the difference in power, white men were far more likely to rape black women. Yet, society was far more concerned with black men raping white women.  White people who engaged in lynching bypassed the justice system and murdered black people they wanted to get rid of. Those white people did not face charges for their murders. Yet, black people remained "the threat" in the eyes of society.  Since Wells didn't find a lot of help from white people in the U.S.A, she traveled to England and found some allies. This helped in both the US and abroad. Sadly though, she came up against opposition from both black and white people, including far too many black leaders and white suffrage leaders.  Especially upsetting was the fact that she helped found the NAACP but was excluded from the list of founders.   When trying to find a free book on Wells, I was shocked at how many books were available about the authors I mentioned in the first line of this review, but it was hard to find a free copy of a book about Wells. This book is available from hoopla but only in ebook format. Thank you Patricia Schectner for choosing to tell the story of Ida B. Well's life.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-05 00:00:00 Rene Soto Ida B. Wells-Barnett is a very interesting woman with an important role in history. This book does not convey that! It felt that I was reading a boring dissertation. If you are interested in learning about Wells-Barnett, skip this book and get her autobiography.