"The broadest and most comprehensive collection of writings available by an early civil and women's rights pioneer . Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks's courageous act of resistance, police dragged a young Black journalist named Ida B. Wells off a train for refusing to give up her seat. The experience shaped Wells's career, and--when hate crimes touched her life personally--she mounted what was to become her life's work: an anti-lynching crusade that captured international attention. This volume covers the entire scope of Wells's remarkable career, collecting her early writings, articles exposing the horrors of lynching, essays from her travels abroad, and her later journalism. The Light of Truth is both an invaluable resource for study and a testament to Wells' long career as a civil rights activist"--
Item details
ISBN:9780143106821
ISBN:0143106821
Physical Description:print xxxvi, 581 pages ; 20 cm.
Publisher:New York : Penguin Books, 2014.
Contents / Notes
Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references.
Formatted Contents Note:
What is an African American classic? / Henry Louis Gates Jr. -- Introduction / Mia Bay -- The light of truth -- I. "Iola, the Princess of the Press" : Wells's Early Writings -- Stick to the race (1885) -- Functions of leadership 1885) -- Freedom of political action (1885) -- Woman's mission (1885) -- A story of 1900 (1886) -- Our women (1887) -- "Iola" on discrimination (1887) -- The model woman (1888) -- All things considered (1891) -- The Jim Crow car (1891) -- The lynchers wince (1891) -- The requisites of true leadership (1892) -- II. To call a thing by its true name : Wells's crusade against lynching -- Afro-Americans and Africa (1892) -- Bishop Tanner's "ray of light" (1892) -- Southern horrors : Lynch Law in all its phases (1892) -- Iola's southern field (1892) -- The requirements of Southern journalism (1893) -- Lynch Law in all its phases (1893) -- The reign of mob law (1893) -- Lynch Law and the color line (1893) -- To tole with watermelons (1893) -- Selections from The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the world's Columbian Exposition (1893) -- III. Ida B. Wells Abroad -- Two Christmas days : a holiday story (1894) -- Liverpool slave traditions and present practices (1894) -- The bitter cry of Black America : a new "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1894) -- Ida B. Wells abroad (1864) -- The English speak (1894) -- The scoundrel (1894) -- IV. The Crusade Continues -- She pleads for her race : Miss Ida B. Wells talks about her anti-lynching campaign (1894) -- A red record -- Lynch Law in Georgia (1899) -- V. Twentieth-Century Journalism and Letters -- Mob rule in New Orleans : Robert Charles and his fight to the death (1900) -- Lynch Law in America (1900) -- The Negro's case in equity (1900) -- Lynching and the excuse for it (1901) -- Booker T. Washington and his critics (1904) -- How enfranchisement stops lynchings (1940) -- The Northern Negro woman's social and moral condition (1910) -- Slayer, in grip of law, fights return to South (1910) -- Mrs. Ida Wells Barnett on Why Mrs. Jack Johnson Suicided (1912) -- Our country's lynching record (1913) -- The ordeal of the "solitary" (1915) -- The East St. Louis massacre : the greatest outrage of the century (1917) -- The Arkansas Race Riot (1920) -- Articles on the Mississippi flood (1927).