Ida: A Sword Among Lions

The best biography always brings its subject to life and simultaneously immerses the reader into the period in which that subject lived. Paula J. Giddings succeeds brilliantly in describing the era in which Ida B. Wells lived and struggled. Gidding's scholarship is prodigious and her mastery of her voluminous sources is nothing less than a tour de force in explaining the social and political conditions that prevailed during the decades following the Civil War.

Ida Wells's story is fascinating, illuminating, and often inspiring. She came of age, matured, and found her "calling" in tandem with the rise of Jim Crow. She worked relentlessly for equality on multiple fronts but it was her decades long focus on the evil phenomenon of lynching that kept her in the forefront of African-American civil rights activism.

The fact that generations of Americans barely acknowledge the extent of the brutality visited upon tens of thousands of African-Americans during the century following emancipation is lamentable, illogical, and ultimately a hindrance in understanding unresolved American racism at the start of the 21st century. Reading this powerful biography may help to remedy the above.

We listen to the stories of people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II. We properly consider those stories to be extraordinarily important. The American history of minority suffering and the pursuit of equality just as important. This is a biography that needs to be read.

HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION

Heralded as a landmark achievement upon publication, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching—a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.

At the center of the national drama is Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). Born to slaves in Mississippi, Wells began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies' car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation's first campaign against lynching. For Wells, the key to the rise in violence was embedded in attitudes not only about black men, but also about women and sexuality. Her independent perspective and percussive personality gained her encomiums as a hero—as well as aspersions on her character and threats of death. Exiled from the South by 1892, Wells subsequently took her campaign across the country and throughout the British Isles before she married and settled in Chicago. There she continued her activism as a journalist, suffragist, and independent candidate in the rough-and-tumble world of the Windy City's politics.

With meticulous research and vivid rendering of her subject, Giddings also provides compelling portraits of twentieth-century progressive luminaries, blacks and whites who worked with Wells during some of the most tumultuous periods in American history. In this groundbreaking work, Paula J. Giddings brings to life the irrepressible personality of Ida B. Wells and gives the visionary reformer her due.

“Ida B. Wells was an inspired journalist, an uncompromising civil libertarian, and a woman far ahead of her patriarchal times—a ‘difficult’ woman. Paula Giddings’s monumental achievement restores this extraordinary contrarian to her place as one of the grand pace-setters of American social justice and female empowerment.”

A sweeping and timely biographical narrative about Ida B. Wells...a paragon of American history.

“A groundbreaking biography gives this warrior her due.”

“A hearty thumbs-up for this powerful retelling of her life.”

“Paula J. Giddings IDA: A SWORD AMONG LIONS (Amistad) is a worthy biography of the vibrant crusader who led the nation’s first campaign against lynching.”

“History at its best—clear, intelligent, moving. Paula Giddings has written a book as priceless as its subject.”

“The best interpretation of black women and race and sex that we have.”

Paula J. Giddings is the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor in Afro-American Studies at Smith College and the author of When and Where I Enter and In Search of Sisterhood.

Distributor: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: 03-03-2009
Pages: 832
Measurements: 8in X 5.3125in X 1.33333in X 23.36oz