Ida B. Wells: Journalist, Advocate & Crusader for Justice

Gr 5 Up–More than 70 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, 21-year-old Ida B. Wells, born enslaved in Mississippi, resisted her forced ejection from a segregated train and filed a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad. This was not the last time Wells fought Jim Crow. As a journalist and activist, she dedicated her life to challenging injustice and became an outspoken, courageous crusader against lynching. This book chronicles Wells’s youth, her years as an educator and budding journalist, and the events precipitating her anti-lynching advocacy. Though the authors’ note identifies the book as a biography, Dunbar and Buford acknowledge using “informed speculation” to present a first-person account of Wells’s life. While the main events presented are factual, several concerns limit the book’s usefulness for information-seeking readers. Namely, dialogue is not documented with source notes, materials used in the authors’ research are not referenced, and dates of key events are absent from the account of Wells’s life. Further, the narrative suffers from stiff, unnatural-sounding dialogue, and the authors do not take advantage of the first-person perspective, frequently engaging in telling rather than showing.