Duster, and his four siblings founded in 1988. Wells Memorial Foundation, which our father, Donald L.

Wells monument, and we have been involved with the effort to have Congress Parkway renamed in her honor. Since 2008 I have published two collections of her original writings - “Ida In Her Own Words” and “Ida From Abroad.” I give presentations, speeches and lectures about her work and so does my brother, Dan Duster.ĭan and I belong to a committee that is creating an Ida B. Growing up in Chicago, I met people who had never heard of Wells, only recognized her name from the housing project that bore her name or confused her with someone they thought invented the hot comb.Ĭoncerned that her legacy would fade from public memory, I decided to do what I could to make sure more people would remember the life and work of one of the most famous women of her time. In the early 20th century she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first African-American women’s group that advocated for their right to vote. She also explained in hundreds of speeches how lynching served as a tool to terrorize the African-American community, rather than a form of punishment against alleged crimes against white women.

Wells, was a force to be reckoned with.īorn a slave in Mississippi, she became a leading civil rights activist when she sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad for discrimination in the mid-1880s.Īt the end of the 19th century, as an investigative journalism pioneer, she uncovered and documented in meticulous detail the violence of lynching. I learned at an early age that my great-grandmother, Ida B.

Ida From Abroad by Michelle Duster