The announcement of one award today by @PulitzerPrizes moved my heart. It's a special citation from the Pulitzer Board for Ida B. Wells. "For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."
Many of us celebrate her now, the crusading African-American journalist who reported on lynchings around the country. But she received little applause from the media establishment when she was risking her life to expose the truth.
In 1894, the New York Times -- which I love and where I've spent most of my career -- described Ida B. Wells as a "slanderous and nasty minded mulatress." Why? For daring to say that white women who accused black men of rape were often involved in consensual relationships.
The NYT objected to the notion that white women willingly consorted with "black brutes," even though Ida B. Wells exposed that truth through painstaking reporting. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare old lie that Negro men rape white women,” she wrote.
I learned about Ida B. Wells in high school when a black magazine editor shared her copy of Paula Giddings' book, "When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America." I was a teenager who dreamed of becoming a writer. Her story knocked me off my feet.
I have more than two decades in the journalism business now. I'm a professor and an author. And Ida B. Wells still knocks me off my feet. I teach her book to my @nyu_journalism students every year. To learn that she was honored by the @PulitzerPrizes? Moved me to tears.
NYT reporting on Ida B. Wells in 1894, when the paper called her a "slanderous and nasty-minded mulatress" nytimes.com/1894/08/02/arc…
NYT reporting on Ida B. Wells in 2018, when @itscaitlinhd wrote her obituary for the Overlooked series and hailed her for for pioneering "reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism." nyti.ms/3a6EMJt
