Ida B The Queen: The Life and Legacy of Ida B Wells
Michelle Duster’s Ida B The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B Wells (2021) is at once a powerful, aesthetic biography of Ida B Wells and the Civil Rights Movement generally, and a coffee table book brimming with engaging photos and moving graphics accessible to every member of the family. Out in early February 2021, I gifted this book to my daughters for Black History Month this year. My nine-year-old has scoured the pages, working to unpack their meaning, while my 6-year-old has focused more on the bright images interwoven with historic photographs and newspaper facsimiles. In the time I’ve spent with this nonfiction read, I’ve been impressed with the caliber of writing and information. Duster—Ida’s great-granddaughter—walks her reader through the personal and professional life of Ida B Wells before diving into Ida’s contemporaries and the legacy of 20th-century Civil Rights and 21st-century Black Lives Matter. This is a book that will round-out any family’s collection of books on American history; it is one I encourage everyone to read.
Michelle Duster has spent much of her professional career as an academic, writer, and speaker supporting, unpacking, and exploring the dynamic legacy left by her great-grandmother, Ida B Wells. Wells was, among other things, a suffragette, a journalist, and a Black woman, in a time when any of those identity categories would likely have barred her from a seat at many tables. And yet, as Duster’s lovely book demonstrates, Wells was not silenced or sidelined. In fact, her words and life’s work continues to shape America today even though she passed away nearly one hundred years ago (in 1931).
This book goes beyond biography and history as it explores the lasting legacy that continues to shape our world today. It is fitting, in fact, that the final page of the book is a large portrait of America’s first female Vice President, who also happens to be a person of color. Kamala Harris’s breaking of boundaries is certainly reminiscent of Ida B Wells’s; both these women raise their voices and resolve to act in a time and world where, sadly, many wish they would not. But, thankfully, while we still have a long way to go, we have made great strides over the past century—as indicated by Harris’s position. The very fact that a book as vibrant and inspiring as Ida Be The Queen is available alongside The Book of Morman and Barack Obama’s A Promised Land on the shelves as Costco, nods at the inclusivity to which our society reaches.
For my girls seeing this sort of biography on the shelf at Costco or at the local bookstore isn’t new or different; they see no paradigm shift. They were both born when a Black man lived in the White House and (in my opinion) modeled what it is to be a patriot, a father, a spouse, and a leader in such awe-inspiring terms. My girls love their veiled, refugee friends at school every bit as fiercely as their friends whose family ancestry more closely resembles their own. This and the fact that my daughters will read and celebrate the activism and bravery of women like Ida B Wells and Harriet Tubman alongside women like Susan B Anthony makes me proud of my country. We still have a lot of track ahead on this train we continue to ride as a nation, but we are on the move, and books like this help propel us!
Last year I read She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (2019) by historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar and was awed by its accessibility and its aesthetic presentation. The same is true for Ida Be The Queen. I treasure the prominence and access to these biographies alongside the bios of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony (the only suffragette foremothers with whom I was acquainted before seminar-level Women In America history courses in university). By diversifying our reading and the access our kids have to biographies like this one, we do serious generational work. Bravo to all those out there working to bring more diverse bios—from Hamilton and Ida B Wells—into our collective consciousness. As we all do the antiracist work of reading and discussing more books like Ida Be The Queen, I eagerly anticipate a day when we will all be honored and celebrated for our humanity and our resilience regardless of our skin color.
Bibliography:
Armstrong Dunbar, Erica. She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman. Simon & Schuster: 2019.
Duster, Michelle. Ida Be The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B Wells. One Signal: 2021.
A sneak peak inside the brightly colored pages of Ida Be The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B Wells that introduces new generations to the many powerful voices that people of color have raised over the years in shaping the United States of America.
