IDA B. WELLS’ CRUSADE FOR JUSTICE: TRANSGRESSIVE AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMANHOOD ANDRE-TELLING OF PERIPHERAL EXPERIENTIAL HISTORY

Abstract

Ida B. Wells’s autobiography Crusade for Justice is a radical revision of notions of autobiography by an African American woman in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. It articulated a “politics of location”, simultaneously anchored in a collectivity and exceptional individualism, pioneering a novel rhetorical strategy of an autobiographical manifesto. Consigned to oblivion after her death in 1931, her autobiography Crusade for Justice could be published in 1970 only through the initiative of the African American historian John Hope Franklin by the University of Chicago’s book series project on Negro American Biographies and Autobiographies. Writing her life narrative in the late 1920s, she articulated a first- of- its- kind modern African American female subjectivity, a subjectivity based on social activism and community building. Her text is a unique blend of individualism and representation of communal consciousness marked by struggles around race, gender and social positionality where race did not always connote class.