“To Tell the Truth Freely”: Ida B. Wells on Sacrificial Death and Political Resistance

A courageous agitator, Ida B. Wells is known for her principled commitment to racial justice and reluctance to consider concessions in her anti-lynching advocacy. Yet this article argues that Wells negotiates her political principles, specifically her commitment to sacrificial death in political resistance, given the constraints she faces as a Black woman advocating for racial justice in Jim Crow America. Wells links Black leadership with sacrificial death, but she qualifies this view of resistance when confronted with threats against her own life and the Black community in Memphis, Tennessee. Wells is committed to racial justice and willing to make unimaginable sacrifices to try to awaken the conscience of white Americans to the injustice of lynching, but she also engages in political resistance that centers care for the Black community. By examining Wells’s theory of political resistance and Black leadership in her political writings alongside her reflections on her anti-lynching advocacy in her autobiographical writings, this article recovers Wells’s commitment to care and community in her political resistance and reflects on how Black actors negotiate competing principles in practice under oppressive conditions.