Mobile Citizenship: The Journalism of Ida B. Wells

Noted black sociologist and journalist Ida B. Wells travelled to the UK once in 1893 and then again in 1894. There is an intrinsic connection between mobility, performance, and the historical periodization of American racial... [ view full abstract ]

Noted black sociologist and journalist Ida B. Wells travelled to the UK once in 1893 and then again in 1894. There is an intrinsic connection between mobility, performance, and the historical periodization of American racial politics in these travels because her trips were primarily for delivering anti-lynching lectures. The timing of these lectures is significant also because they precede the legalization of racial segregation through the Plessy vs Ferguson decision of 1896, and in exposing the hollowness of freedom for African Americans her journalism prophesied the legal and extralegal structures in the post- Reconstruction era that made black citizenship merely tokenistic. In the articles published in the Chicago based newspaper Chicago Inter-Ocean, she underscored the significance of travel for the assertion of black political subjectivity. In doing this Wells embodied and performed the contradictions of American citizenship as she was at once the informant and the victim in the social phenomenon that she researched. Additionally, I will argue that the mobility afforded to her by her journalistic work subverted the colonial voyage and the epistemological underpinnings of the voyages of the slave ship, as the mobility of the voyager is at once self-aware of this history and of the way this mobility can enable him/her to negotiate the same. Mobility and travel, both of ideas and bodies, are particularly significant in the defining of race. The transatlantic slave trade and later, legalized racial segregation, created the paradoxical condition of either forced and continual dislocation of black bodies or a complete denial of mobility. Travelling was also crucial to her project of garnering national and international attention regarding lynching in the Reconstruction era because these were intertwined with a form of racially homogenous provincialism and resultant vigilantism. Martha A. Ackelsberg in her work Resisting Citizenship reads “challenges to lynching as challenges to privacy” and Wells’ extensive journalistic work as expanding the scope of civic republicanism from the realm of private (in)justice to public discourse (Acklesberg 77).