Mar 31, 2016 - Sale 2408

Sale 2408 - Lot 205

Price Realized: $ 5,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
UNIQUE COPY (CIVIL RIGHTS.) WELLS, IDA B. The Woman's Forum, Volume I, Number 3. 16 pages. Large 4to (13 x 10 inches); original printed white wrappers; heavy horizontal crease in the middle where this was probably folded for mailing; a few light smudges. Chicago, November 1922

Additional Details

a rare example of ida b. wells' magazine. not noted by danky; no copies known. The feature article of this issue is the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, proposed by Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer in 1918. The bill would have made mob violence and lynching a punishable offense. It was defeated by a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), journalist, newspaper editor, civil rights advocate, and feminist, was born a slave to slave parents in Mississippi, just months before Lincoln issued his Proclamation. Her father, a carpenter, was intelligent and considered to be a "race man," one who sought to educate and elevate the race. Ida attended the Freedmen's School and Shaw University (now Rust College) in Holly Springs, where she was expelled for her "rebellious behavior and temper" after confronting the president of the college. Rebelliousness became her strength. On May 4, 1884, a train conductor on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad ordered Wells to give up her seat and move to the smoking car, which was already crowded with other passengers. The year before, Supreme Court had struck down the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations. Wells however refused to give up her seat--71 years before Rosa Parks showed similar resistance on a bus. The conductor, and two other men, dragged Wells out of the car. When she returned to Memphis, she gained notoriety after writing a newspaper article for The Living Way, a black church weekly, about her treatment on the train. She then hired an African-American attorney to sue the railroad. When her lawyer was paid off by the railroad, she hired a white attorney, and won her case. On December 24, 1884, the local circuit court granted her a $500 settlement. We were unable to determine for how long Wells' "Forum" lasted, there are no records of it.