San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Author carries the legacy of Ida B. Wells
‘Queen' part of Michelle Duster’s effort to celebrate great-grandmother's accomplishments
Ida B. Wells, the pioneering Chicago journalist who walked into towns across the South that did not want her there and reported on the lynchings of Black men, has been pretty busy lately.
She may have died in 1931; she’s buried beside her husband, Ferdinand Barnett, in Oak Woods Cemetery on Chicago’s South Side. And yet, last spring she received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Then last summer, a mosaic portrait of Wells, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s suffrage (for which she had fought), stretched over 1,000 square feet of Union Station in Washington, D.C. In 2018, The New York Times finally wrote her obituary; then the Chicago City Council renamed Congress Parkway as Ida B. Wells Drive; and a couple of years ago, the city placed a large stone bearing Wells’ face at the corner of E. 37th St. and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, to mark the location of the former Ida B. Wells Homes housing project, which for decades had been the only formal recognition of Ida B. Wells found in Chicago, where she had spent half her life.
Michelle Duster stands there now, at that Bronzeville corner, short, serious, wearing a brown overcoat and green mittens, huddled against the cold.
That stone is there because of Duster, Wells’ great-granddaughter.
She pushed for a formal reminder of the housing project; she asked family members to give $100 each to pay for a marker; she worked with 4th Ward Alderwoman Sophia King to get it placed. Part of 37th Street is also an honorary Ida B. Wells Way because of Duster. She gets stuff done. A pretty good chunk of her day — every single day — is dedicated to Ida B. Wells.
You might even argue that without Duster out there advocating for her great-grandmother these past dozen or so years, there might not be quite the continuous groundswell of interest in Wells and her legacy.
“All of these things,” she tells me, “these memorials, markers, they are not like the water coming out of your faucet. They do not just appear.”
She glances past the stone at the large rectangular parcel of land where part of the housing project once stood. It’s an empty lot, its grass coppery and picked at by geese.
“That (marker) took less time than you’d think,” she says, “much less than the statue.”
Meaning, the tall abstract monument being created by Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt, the first traditional large-scale civic memorial to Ida B. Wells. Duster spent the better part of a decade trying to raise the $300,000 to get it completed. Then, on Wells’ birthday a few years ago, journalist Nikole Hannah-jones — herself a Pulitzer winner for The New York Times’ 1619 Project and co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting — along with Chris Hayes of MSNBC, “Orange Is the New Black” author Piper Kerman, Chicago activist Mariame Kaba and others encouraged the project and nudged Duster past her fundraising goal. Duster now expects the memorial to be erected before the end of this year.
First thing, though, there’s this new book, “Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells,” a breezy, accessible and colorful get-to-know of a biography — also written by Duster. Which means weeks of talking about Ida B. Wells with (virtual) audiences and journalists. On a recent Wednesday alone, she had seven interviews scheduled. She sounds tired.
Indeed, reading “Ida B. the Queen,” I stopped at the chapter about Duster herself: With a bit of ennui, she recalls growing up on the South Side and assuming the legacy of Ida B. Wells was her grandmother Alfreda’s work. Alfreda Duster was Wells’ youngest child. But Michelle Duster says she and her brothers “were taught to have our own identities, to not speak much about our relation to Ida B. Wells, because we did not do any of her work — she did.”
Duster, a graduate of Dartmouth College, teaches business writing at Columbia College. She worked on documentaries, and for a couple of years as a program coordinator for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library system. She’s edited books on activism and Michelle Obama; she’s edited a pair of books of her great-grandmother’s writings; she’s written herself for many magazines. Next year alone she has two illustrative books coming from Macmillan, one about “trailblazing black women,” and one about, yes, Ida B. Wells.
Talking to her, you get a sense of someone who is eager to get back to their own writing. In “Four Hundred Souls,” the new anthology of Black history co-edited by the bestselling Ibram X. Kendi (“How to Be an Antiracist”), Duster contributes a compelling essay on the legacy of the 1919 Chicago race riots that morphs into a tidy pocket history of race in Chicago.
“I have written a lot of things that will never be published, and a lot of things that were, but if there’s a focus, it’s on the professional and middle class, educated Black communities. Those are not told enough. The pervasive narrative is Black people live in the ghetto, in crime-ridden neighborhoods, they’re gangsters. No, we live in houses, we work jobs. Obvious as that sounds, more than a century after my great-grandmother’s writings, the kinds of questions people ask me all day long tell me that’s not so obvious.”
The great work continues.