The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

On Ida B. Wells’s birthday, a decade-long campaign to create a monument in her name met its $300,000 goal

Wells was a legendary journalist and activist who died in 1931

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July 18, 2018 at 4:09 p.m. EDT

Adapted from a story by Taylor Telford for The Washington Post.

For a decade, Michelle Duster, Ida B. Wells’s great-granddaughter, has been trying to raise $300,000 for a monument to commemorate the crusading journalist and activist.

On July 16, Wells’s birthday, Duster’s campaign and its supporters, made one final push. It worked. In one day, people pledged $40,000, fully funding the campaign.

The movement to honor Ida B. Wells is gaining momentum, and it’s ‘long overdue’

The memorial to Wells — who exposed racial injustice and fought for women’s suffrage — is now slated to go up in Chicago sometime in 2019. Wells’s name is well-known in the city. The journalist moved there in the early 1890s after fleeing violence her anti-lynching work elicited in the South, and her grave marker sits resides in Oak Woods Cemetery. Still, knowledge of Wells’s deeds has faded since her death in 1931.

In her day, Wells was considered to be one of the most famous African American women in the country, but her name has been largely lost to history, said Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine writer who counts Wells among her heroes. Hannah-Jones commemorates her by posting on Twitter as Ida Bae Wells, and she co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting.

As a reporter, Wells took on racial injustice and pioneered methods that are still central to modern investigative reporting. She fought against lynching and fought for women’s suffrage and laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She persisted in her work despite frequent death threats, the ransacking of her Memphis newspaper and searing public criticism and racism.

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Hannah-Jones has been active in the crowdfunding campaign. She has flown to Chicago to help raise money and brought attention to the campaign on Twitter. On Wells’s birthday, she spent eight hours on Twitter.

“We don’t learn about black women from that time at all, no matter who they are,” Hannah-Jones said. “She’s important because she was one of the black Americans holding a mirror up to what the country was, but also showing us what this country should be.”

The monument, which will be sculpted in bronze and granite by artist Richard Hunt, will offer biographical information and quotes from Wells and be located in Bronzeville, a neighborhood that was the core of Chicago’s black community during the Great Migration. Throughout the country, there are hundreds of monuments to the Confederacy; there are fewer than 20 monuments to black women, Duster said. She hopes that this will be the start of a movement toward better representation.

“I hope this is the start of African American women being recognized,” Duster said. “We need to tell the story of our country.”