Collage image includes: Handwritten chapter of Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells; campaign card for Wells-Barnett, candidate for delegate to the 1928 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri; teacup-shaped invitation for Ida B. Wells Woman’s Club breakfast; title page of Wells-Barnett’s Lynch Law; Wells-Barnett’s 1920 letter to daughters Ida and Alfreda; Wells-Barnett’s calling card as national organizer for Illinois Colored Women; Wells-Barnett and Ferdinand Barnett’s 1895 wedding invitation. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
- Mahoghany Jordan, “Senior Year, Be Good to Me!,” Facebook, September 17, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/mj.jordaa/posts/1318523671615495. Meek’s post has since been removed, but news outlets circulated screenshots. For example, see Shante Sumpter, “Ole Miss Students Speak Out about Ed Meek Post,” WTVA, updated September 24, 2018, https://www.wtva.com/content/video/493920181.html.
- Barbara Harris Combs, “Black (and Brown) Bodies Out of Place: Towards a Theoretical Understanding of Systematic Voter Suppression in the United States,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 4/5 (2016): 535–549; Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (London: Berg, 2004). For the racial demographics of the University of Mississippi and Oxford, see the University of Mississippi, “2018–2019 Mini Fact Book,” The University of Mississippi Institutional Research, Effectiveness, and Planning, accessed April 14, 2020, https://irep.olemiss.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/98/2019/03/Mini-Fact-Book_2018-2019.pdf; and “QuickFacts Oxford City, Mississippi,” United States Census Bureau, accessed April 14, 2020, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/oxfordcitymississippi.
- Quote in Dean Will Norton Jr.’s video statement, “Dr. Norton Response,” Daily Journal, September 20, 2018, https://www.djournal.com/dr-norton-response/video_e3f0227e-0b90-5eaf-a278-5c341c60fcf5.html; Emily Wagster Pettus, “Facebook Post Sparks Call to Rename Ole Miss Journalism School for Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” Chicago Tribune, October 6, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-ole-miss-journalism-school-ida-b-wells-20181006-story.html; Shennette Garrett-Scott, “#UpWithIda Campaign Challenges the University of Mississippi to Celebrate a True Rebel,” Association of Black Women Historians, April 4, 2019, http://abwh.org/2019/04/04/upwithida-campaign-challenges-the-university-of-mississippi-to-celebrate-a-true-rebel/; James West Davidson, “They Say”: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race (Oxford University Press, 2007); Mia Bay, “‘If Iola Were a Man’: Gender, Jim Crow and Public Protest in the Work of Ida B. Wells,” in Becoming Visible: Women’s Presence in Late Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Janet Floyd, Alison Easton, R. J. Ellis, and Lindsey Traub (Leiden, NLD: Brill, 2010), 105–128.
- Keisha N. Blain, “Ida B. Wells Offered the Solution to Police Violence More than 100 Years Ago,” Washington Post, July 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/11/ida-b-wells-offered-the-solution-to-police-violence-more-than-100-years-ago/; William Calathes, “Racial Capitalism and Punishment Philosophy and Practices: What Really Stands in the Way of Prison Abolition,” Contemporary Justice Review 20, no. 4 (2017): 442–455; Ida’s Legacy, Ida B. Wells Legacy Committee, accessed April 17, 2020, https://idaslegacy.com/.
- Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions; Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). For a quick but insightful overview of the linkages between historical memory, collective memory, and the politics of memory, see Katherine Hite, “Historical Memory,” in International Encyclopedia of Political Science, ed. Bertrand Badie, Dirk Berg-Schlosser, and Leonardo Morlino (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2011), 1079–1082. Wells-Barnett sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwest Railroad in 1884. The train conductor, baggageman, and two white male passengers forcibly removed her from her seat in the ladies car and threw her onto the pavement. She prevailed in her lawsuit, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned her $500 lawsuit on appeal.
- Brandon H. Beck, Holly Springs: Van Dorn, the CSS Arkansas and the Raid that Saved Vicksburg (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011), quote on 62 and demographic figures on 54; Jodi Skipper, “Community Development through Reconciliation Tourism: The Behind the Big House Program in Holly Springs, Mississippi,” Community Development 47, no. 4 (2016): 519–520; “Marshall County, Mississippi: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census,” transcribed by Tom Blake, RootsWeb, February 2002, https://sites.rootsweb.com/~ajac/msmarshall.htm; “Table I. Owners of Slaves and Numbers Owned in 1860” in Ruth Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, vol. 12, 1910–1911, ed. Franklin L. Riley ([Oxford?]: University of Mississippi, 1912), 208; Reports, John Powers to Merritt Barber, November 14, 1867, in Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Office Records, 1865–1872, Holly Springs (Subassistant Commissioner) (hereafter cited as Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Office Records), roll 19 [Letters Sent, September 1867–December 1868], frame 6; “General Superintendent of Contrabands in the Department of the Tennessee to the Headquarters of the Department, April 29, 1863,” in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 3: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, ed. René Hayden, Anthony E. Kaye, Kate Masur, Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O’Donovan, Leslie S. Rowland, and Stephen A. West (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 690–695.
- The works invoking theories of political culture are vast and extend across disciplines. Here, we are most influenced by Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963; repr., Princeton University Press, 2016); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford University Press, 1995); and Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997). Examples of work on southern Black women’s political culture during the mid to late nineteenth century include Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (1994): 107–146; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), esp. part 2, “A State of Mobilization: Politics in Arkansas, 1865–1868”; and Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
- Wells-Barnett’s daughter and editor of her mother’s autobiography Alfreda M. Duster writes that A. J. Wells, Wells-Barnett’s brother, stated that Lizzie’s maiden name is Warrenton. Biographer Paula Giddings believes Lizzie’s maiden name is Arrington, taken from her first enslaver William Arrington of Appomattox County, Virginia. On the Arrington surname, see Giddings, Sword Among Lions, 16. For details about Wells-Barnett’s life in Holly Springs, see Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (University of Chicago Press, 1970), xiv–xvi, 1–20, 7n3; Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–17; Giddings, Sword Among Lions, 15–39; Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 15–39; and Davidson, “They Say,” 1, 13–17, 46.
- On taking up, sweethearting, and other relationships enslaved and freedpeople pursued outside of legal marriages, see Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861–1875 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).
- The civil rights of Blacks in the North had been steadily eroded through the nineteenth century, with many municipalities and states disenfranchising African American voters. After the Civil War and after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the numbers of Black voters in the South, of course, increased exponentially as formerly enslaved men cast votes, but the numbers of Black male voters also swelled in the North. See Jeffrey A. Mullins, “Race, Place and African-American Disenfranchisement in the Early Nineteenth-Century American North,” Citizenship Studies 10, no. 1 (2006): 77–91. Population figures from Appendix B, “Table 2. [Marshall County] Population Statistics, 1860–1880” in Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 208.
- Duster, Crusade for Justice, 8; McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 9; Giddings, Sword Among Lions, 26; Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely, 20; Davidson, “They Say,” 24.
- Megan Ming Francis, “Ida B. Wells and the Economics of Racial Violence,” Social Science Research Council, January 24, 2017, https://items.ssrc.org/reading-racial-conflict/ida-b-wells-and-the-economics-of-racial-violence/; Bay, “‘If Iola Were a Man.’”
- By 1863, more than four thousand leagues claimed a membership of seven hundred thousand. The numbers increased exponentially after the war. Leagues formed throughout Marshall County in Holly Springs, Red Banks, Byhalia, Tallaloosa, and Chulahoma. McDonald helped organize one of the first formal churches for Blacks and became the first president of Rust College. Gill served as the Holly Springs postmaster and led the regional Freedman’s Bureau office headquartered in downtown Holly Springs. Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 165, 171; Michael W. Fitzgerald, The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989), 25, 56, 59; Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 177–189; “To the Colored Voters of Jackson Precinct,” Daily Clarion (Jackson, MS), June 26, 1868.
- Reprinted in “Mississippi,” Appletons’ Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events […], vol. 8 (1868) (New York: D. Appleton, 1869), 513; “The Address to Freedmen: Read and Circulate,” Daily Clarion (Jackson, MS), June 13, 1868, 2, emphasis in original.
- Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 185, 202, 227; Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 110.
- John Powers to S. C. Green, July 8, 1868, Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Office Records, roll 20, Miscellaneous Records, Sep 1867–Dec 1868, frames 12–13; 1870 U.S. Census, Bed Brunson Record, Dwelling Number 777, Township 5 Range 4, Marshall, Mississippi, page 459B, https://familyse-arch.org; Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 228; Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 110.
- Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 227, 229–230; Herald (Vicksburg, MS), November 3, 1875, quoted in Wharton Vernon Lane, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947; repr., New York: Harper Torchlight, 1965), 195; Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 110; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 224, 225. House’s enslaver James J. House made a fortune during the war as a Confederate blockade runner. House may have shrewdly calculated the economic benefits of aligning with his former master’s interest. Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 165. On James House, see Phillip Knecht, “Grey Gables (1848),” Hill Country History, accessed May 18, 2020, https://hillcountryhistory.org/2015/12/03/holly-springs-grey-gables-1848/.
- Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 214; “Out of Darkness Cometh Light,” Weekly Louisianan (New Orleans, LA), August 17, 1871, 2; Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 218–219; Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 189.
- Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 110.
- Descriptions of the parades in Holly Springs from Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 177, 185–187; Lane, The Negro in Mississippi, 166.
- Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 186. Watkins does not state what year the parade took place. For references to Blacks’ political parades, especially with Loyal Leagues in other Mississippi towns, see “Testimony of M. H. Whitaker, June 29, 1871,” 171 (Meridian); “Testimony of John R. Taliaferro, July 15, 1871,” 234 (Brooksville); “Testimony of James H. Rives, November 7, 1871,” 569 (Macon), all in US Congress, Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Mississippi vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872).
- Quotes from “Columbus, Mississippi. Terrible Negro Riots […],” Daily Appeal (Memphis, TN), October 26, 1871, 1; “Mississippi […],” Daily Appeal (Memphis, TN), October 6, 1875, 1. On violence at Black parades in Mississippi, see “Testimony of M. H. Whitaker”; “Testimony of John R. Taliaferro”; and “Testimony of James H. Rives.” One working definition of civic geography is a space that compels inhabitants to think and act collectively, imparting “an obligation to be civic, to make and to defend connections in such a way that transcends narrow self-interest.” Chris Philo, Kye Askins, and Ian Cook, “Civic Geographies: Pictures and Other Things at an Exhibition,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 2 (January 2015): 360. The meaning and boundaries of that geography, as well as who constitutes its legitimate inhabitants, inform our discussion. Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 109; Mary P. Ryan, “Gender and Public Sphere: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 259–278, esp. 252–273; Jones, All Bound Up Together; Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). While Ryan effectively argues how women spun a distinctly private sphere apart from the democratic public sphere, others have shown how women helped mesh the two supposedly separate spheres together.
- Michelle A. Krowl, “‘Her Just Dues’: Civil War Pensions of African American Women in Virginia,” in Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood: Dealing with the Powers that Be, ed. Janet L. Coryell, Thomas H. Appleton Jr., Anastatia Sims, and Sandra Gioia Treadway (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 52–74; Brandi C. Brimmer, “Black Women’s Politics, Narratives of Sexual Immorality, and Pension Bureaucracy in Mary Lee’s North Carolina Neighborhood,” Journal of Southern History 80, no. 4 (November, 2014): 827–858; Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms; Frankel, Freedom’s Women.
- Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau, 113; John Powers to Wesley Ward, September 21, 1867 (frame 4) and Powers to J. C. Davis, November 13, 1867 (frame 5), roll 19, Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Office Records.
- Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau, 141; Powers to Wm. Lankers [?], November 8, 1867 (frame 5) and “Report of Complaints for Month Ending Dec 31, 1867” (frames 20–22) in roll 19, and Powers to Benj. O. Johnson, August 4, 1868, frame 15, roll 20, Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Office Records.
- See rolls 19 and 20, Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Office Records.
- Duster, Crusade for Justice, 9; Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 177; Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms, 162–163, 170–171; Lane, The Negro in Mississippi, 194–195, 198–202; Fitzgerald, Union League Movement, 59.
- The attacks on Gill’s life did not end. Locals raised five hundred dollars to hire a man from Texas to kill Gill, but they reneged at the last minute. Future Memphis political boss Edward Hull Crump headed a KKK den in his hometown of Holly Springs. Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 169, 172, 178–179, 179n60; Lane, The Negro in Mississippi, 164–166, 165n34.
- Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 218–219; Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 227; “Mississippi,” Weekly Clarion (Jackson, MS), August 25, 1870, 1; “The Starkville Riot,” Weekly Clarion (Jackson, MS), December 14, 1871, 2; “The Tunica War!!!,” Weekly Clarion (Jackson, MS), August 27, 1874, 1; George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (1984; repr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 147. Also see “The Trouble Between the Plundering Officials and the Warren County Tax-Payers,” Weekly Clarion (Jackson, MS), December 17, 1874, 3.
- Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 186–187, 189; Lane, The Negro in Mississippi, 145, 166; “Hazelhurst, June 28, 1868,” Daily Clarion (Jackson, MS), July 1, 1868, 2; Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 109. For testimonies about violence in Mississippi, see US Congress, Joint Select Committee on the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, part 3: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas (Washington, DC: General Printing Office, 1866).
- Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 224; Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” 169; Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms, 133. On gendered racial violence, see Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom; and Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me.
- Skipper, “Community Development”; Barbara H. Combs, Kirsten Dellinger, Jeffrey T. Jackson, Kirk A. Johnson, Willa M. Johnson, Jodi Skipper, John Sonnett, James M. Thomas, and Critical Race Studies Group, “The Symbolic Lynching of James Meredith: A Visual Analysis and Collective Counter Narrative to Racial Domination,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2, no. 3 (2016): 338–353.
- In addition to the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum, a local post office in Holly Springs is named in her honor. In July 2019, the Jewish-American Society for Historic Preservation donated a historical marker for Wells-Barnett in the Holly Springs Square. In November 2019, a Mississippi Writers Trail marker was added to the Rust College campus in her honor.
- Combs, “Black (and Brown) Bodies Out of Place,” 536; Skipper, “Community Development,” 514, 515. Also see Behind the Big House, accessed April 18, 2020, https://behindthebighouse.org/.