The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century

(In Progress)
Lydia Moland (ed.), Alison Stone (ed.)

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197558898.001.0001
Published: 18 July 2023 Online ISBN: 9780197558928 Print ISBN: 9780197558898

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CHAPTER

Ida B. Wells: Philosopher, Ethicist, War Resister 

Joy James

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197558898.013.52
Published: 23 October 2023

Abstract
This chapter explores anti-lynching journalist, organizer, and theorist Ida B. Wells-Barnett through
the lens of the Captive Maternal, a self-identi ed female, male, trans, or ungendered person feminized
and socialized into caretaking functions within the legacy and structure of anti-Black violence and
dishonor within US democracy. Before she married Ferdinand Barnett, Wells emerged in 1892 as a
erce political analyst and journalist, an opponent to the lynching of Black people and theft of their
lands and property by white civilians and o cials of the state. Analyzing Wells’s political ethics reveals
the relevance of theorists such as Bernard Lonergan, Seylah Benhabib, and the Chinese philosopher of
war Sun Tzu in struggles against predatory violence within Western democracies.

Keywords: Ida B. Wells, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Captive Maternal, antiblack racism, lynching, WEB Du Bois,
Seylah Benhabib, Bernard Lonergan, Sun Tzu
Subject: History of Western Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Although the race was wild over the outrage [of lynching], the mockery of law and justice which
disarmed men and locked them up in jails where they could be easily and safely reached by the mob
—the Afro-American ministers, newspapers and leaders counselled obedience to the law which did
not protect them.

—Wells, Southern Horrors

It is a well-established principle of law that every wrong has a remedy. Herein rests our respect for
law. The Negro does not claim that all of the one thousand black men, women and children …
hanged, shot and burned alive during the past ten years, were innocent of the charges made
against them … But we do insist that the punishment is not the same for both classes of criminals.
 —Wells, The Red Record

DEAR MISS WELLS : Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now
generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in
convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know
and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking
deliberations, and let those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.

—Honorable Frederick Douglass, preface to Southern Horrors

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1. Introduction: A Captive Maternal Philosopher

Philosophers who “philosophize” or “theorize”—the emphasis here is on the verb (see Christian 1988) as
function, not the noun as identity—depict the distinction between the Captive Maternal (James 2016)
1
formed by function and Black feminism forming identity. In other words, we can di erentiate between the
Captive Maternal as “self-identi ed female, male, trans or ungendered persons feminized and socialized
into caretaking within the legacy of racism and US democracy” and Black feminisms that seek identity
markers structured by women’s rights or equalities to propertied men wielding citizenship (James 2016).
Under siege of racial terror—shaped by antiblackness, misogynoir/misopedia, capitalism, and imperialism
—supremacist wars do not end until antiblackness ends, and that would mean the end of our worlds —
private, communal, social, national, global—as we know them. If anti-Black terrorisms were met with mass
resistance, the structures of interlocking worlds, stabilized by capitalism and imperialism, would more
clearly show ssures and the possibilities of cracks that could crash the dominant social, political and
economic orders. The nineteenth-century anti-lynching crusader, journalist, and community builder Ida B.
Wells (1862–1931) (sometimes known as Ida B. Wells-Barnett after her marriage) created public discourse
in print and oratory to demystify the postbellum anti-Black violence and terrorism. Black delity to the law
is an oxymoron when Africans/Blacks are not viewed as fully human in the legal codes or their enforcement.
Wells understood the duplicity of the law’s protections for life and property which failed to protect Blacks,
formerly designated as chattel under slavery in the antebellum era and then as captive laborers during
postbellum “freedom.” For example, the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment that emancipated Blacks from chattel
slavery was actually crafted as a Trojan Horse; slavery was legalized by the amendment for those duly
convicted of a crime. In the postbellum era, Blacks were arrested on charges that included not stepping o
sidewalks to let whites pass; once returned to enslaved labor, they were worked to death through the joint
“ownership” of the state and the corporation, and so died in mass numbers under the convict prison lease
system. Wells’s abolitionist theories and agitations were heralded as anti-lynching crusades but they were
also conceptual paradigms and strategic campaigns against varied social-state engineering that deployed
violence and terror to (re)capture Black labor and consume blackness through sadistic pleasures (rape
parties and lynch parties). Such violence was spurred by psychological desires and material gains as anti-
Black violence provided commodities (theft of land, property, homes, children) to white society and state.

Decades after Wells’s death in 1931, civil rights movements fostered organized resistance to Black precarity
and disposability, and underscored the necessity of political action and theory. The possibility of the Black-
as-human in the global order, though, remained elusive. Hence, de jure and de facto expressions of civil and
human rights could not be codi ed or implemented in US legal codes, because such rights did not exist for
Blacks in a universal fashion within and beyond US democracy. Human and civil rights would be constructed
through the United Nations, for example, in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide, which was o cially entered into force in 1951, the year the Civil Rights Congress, a
Black-led formation in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), published and disseminated throughout the
globe a document that catalogued US anti-Black terror: We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against
 2
the Negro People. The authors of the document, edited by William Patterson, catalogued the violence of
whites/European Americans structured by the state. The o cials and leaders (largely clustered within the
[petite] bourgeoisie) maintain an obedience that allows continued harm and devastation. For the radical
philosopher focused on liberation, the objective is to end terror by disregarding law in order to dismantle
the networks of white supremacy/nationalism, predatory capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, and
misopedia. Violence arrayed against blackness manifests as warfare. Yet, Blacks had to accept containment
by law, despite its predations, and to respect and remain faithful to law to extend their survival into
longevity and increase their possibilities of accumulation in status, employment, and property ownership.

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Some, however, rebelled. Wells’s writings reveal that resistance against genocide.

The rst epigraph above notes Ida B. Wells’s recognition of betrayal from within Black communities and
institutions in their limited response to white supremacist violence and Black dispossession. Ida B. Wells, as
a Captive Maternal, delivered care and o ered protections not just in the early stages of coerced deference or
complicity in respectability and responsibility politics. Wells wrote incendiary editorials and pamphlets
denouncing white supremacist terror. She crafted a language that transitioned from respectable politics
deferential to the racial social order to that of protest; from protest, she transitioned to the movement stage
of anti-lynching crusades. She believed in armed self-defense and promised to sell her life “dearly” to any
potential lyncher. Developing economic boycotts of white businesses and state economies, she understood
and practiced warfare. Her movements through the stages of the Captive Maternal re ected an evolution, in
theory and action, that responded to the collective dissonance and trauma experienced and witnessed
through lynching, rape, and theft of land, homes, and honor. Terrorized communities that responded to
anti-Black violence through passivity or acquiescence must have been damning or shameful to Wells’s
emergent consciousness as, not just a victim, but a critical theorist. Wells labored strategically to denounce
if not defeat militarized violence against Black communities. Yet most often, Black masses pragmatically
refused to physically march forward into battle, and toward their deaths, to foment the destruction of their
violators. The abusers were not mere vigilantes but the state itself, a relatively new nation seeking to
become an empire built upon mass enslavement and genocide against (Black) indigeneity. Within a
cataclysmic confrontation, the spirit to quell anti-Black dishonor and death led to Wells’s 1892 anti-
lynching publication Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Today, some raise the similar queries
about rebellion for freedom. They ask: why would the vulnerable take the risks embodied in Wells’s anti-
lynching crusades in order to achieve a modicum of freedom from police and vigilante violence?

The Captive Maternal in rebellion is one of the latter stages in the development of this political gure
because this is the stage of the war resister. Previous stages are shaped by cooperation, complicity, co-
optation, assimilation, and departure from those most likely to become and remain dispossessed: the Black
working class, poor and unhoused. Born in Mississippi in 1862, Ida B. Wells went through every stage of
political transformation until she arrived at rebellion and war resistance. Her militancy showed a “pro le in
courage” and multiple contradictory paths, littered with disappointments. She was betrayed by the Black
(petite) bourgeoisie icons W. E. B. DuBois and Mary Church Terrell. She was admired and feared by her Black
neighbors in Memphis and Chicago. Historian John Bracey noted, in a 1992 University of Massachusetts–
Amherst forum on Ida B. Wells (which included this author), that the fear and betrayal embedded in the
Black community at times rendered it risk-averse, and so such communities shied away from publicly
embracing the militant Wells. Blacks could admire the courageous stance Wells took against lynching in the
Deep South, according to Bracey, but Chicagoans did not want her living in their neighborhood in case a
bullet or house bomb designed for the theorist-activist led to community collateral damage. Proximity to
Wells created vulnerabilities. Yet she, too, was con icted, seeking recognition as a loyal American. A
principled abolitionist, Wells o ered crucial insight into transformative political capacities as a liberatory
3
theorist. A revolutionary persona with no (male) peer, her pulpit candor decried the lethal manipulation of
“rape” of white females by Black males as often a false allegation to fuel a rallying cry for white supremacy.
Wells’s journalism satirized white society for de ning voluntary associations between Black men and white
women as “rape” while ignoring forced and violent associations between white men/boys and Black
women/girls (also Black males were raped with impunity by whites). Associated with the anti-lynching
movement, Wells is not generally recognized as the architect of antiracist, pro-feminist organizations.

Wells was maneuvered out of the founding leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) which was formed in 1909. Luminaries such as DuBois, Terrell, and the white
philanthropist Mary White Ovington found her political thought and practice to be too militant and focused
on security and defense (James 1997, 50). Wells’s memoir, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B.
Wells, records regret that she was unable to in uence the civil rights organization to better address the

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concerns of the working-class and poor Blacks most vulnerable to racist atrocities and exploitation.

During her lifetime, Wells publicly asserts that African Americans must mobilize for protections against
white society and governance that hinders Black equality and safety. She focuses on “terror” rather than on
“inequality” to attack the horrors and fragility of lives and kinship destabilized or destroyed by torture,
rape, and murder. Wells courageously confronts the taboo of her era: sexual terror as a weapon of racial
subjugation. Wells’s (1892) Southern Horrors and (1895) The Red Record document that, despite the charges
of Black sexual savagery against white females, most interracial rape linked to lynching materialized when
Black women and children were raped without recourse to protections from police or courts. During the
barbaric ritual of lynching, Black women, children, and men were routinely sexually assaulted. Black males
who assisted Black family members or community in resisting or avenging rape by white males were likely
to be murdered. Interracial rape was a constant nightmare for Black females (used as “breeders” in the
antebellum era) yet rare for white females. Most of the interracial rapists of that era would be white males. A
correlation between interracial sex crimes and extrajudicial executions would have rendered the majority of
the lynched white. Punishment was actually a racial inverse. Wells describes one case:

In Nashville … a white man, Pat Hanifan, … outraged a little Afro-American girl, and, from the
physical injuries received, she has been ruined for life. He was jailed for six months, discharged,
and is now a detective in that city. In the same city, last May, a white man outraged an Afro-
American girl in a drug store. He was arrested, and released on bail at the trial. It was rumored that
ve hundred Afro-Americans had organized to lynch him. Two hundred and fty white citizens
armed themselves with Winchesters and guarded him. A cannon was placed in front of his home,
and the Buchanan Ri es (State Militia) ordered to the scene for his protection. The Afro-American
mob did not materialize.

(Wells [1892] 1997, 58–59)

The specious rationalizations for white terror included: Negro domination of whites through the vote;
Negro race riots; Black male sexual assaults of white females. Today, one can add “white replacement”
genocidal doctrines. These historical and contemporary grievances by white nationalists fueled
psychological, economic, and material warfare through anti-Black lynching. “Chivalry,” writes Wells,
garners “little respect from the civilized world, when it con nes itself entirely to the women who happen to
be white” ([1895] 1997, 80). Yet the terrorist and the chivalrous were intertwined, and Wells, as the
philosopher, had to disentangle them:

To justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry
respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the
million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very
chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood
which circumstances placed in his power.

([1895] 1997, 80)

White Americans de ned consensual sexual relationships between white women and Black men as assaults
punishable by the death of the Black male lover. Wells rede nes them as voluntary and represents white
male sexual relationships with Black females, en mass, as rape. White men were the least likely to be
prosecuted and censured for sex crimes by the moral and legal prosecutors of sexual violence. In her post
from Liverpool on August 4, 1895, as a special correspondent for the anti-lynching Chicago newspaper
Inter-Ocean, Wells writes: “The machinery of law and politics is in the hands of those who commit the
lynching … it is only wealthy white men whom the law fails to reach” (Wells 1894, 9). Of the contrast
between white and Black justice, Wells notes the virtual immunity for elite white males and the charges of

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“assault” for adulteries between Black men and white women: “Hundreds of Negroes including women and
children are lynched for trivial o enses on suspicion and in many cases when known to be guiltless of any
crime … the law refused to punish the murderers because it is not considered a crime to kill a Negro” (Wells
1970, 157).

Locating sovereign powers—the right to decide who lives or who dies—within racial- sexual animus as the
driving engine for economic and libidinal accumulation, Wells dethrones the sovereignty of white manhood,
contesting its right to rule by identifying it as the rule of rapists and terrorists. She argues that the United
States essentially has no binding social contract with Black Americans, and so Black Americans have no
binding contract with the United States. Wells inverts the white nationalist script: it is a governance so
violent and pernicious that it has abdicated its right to rule (1970, 70).

Wells’s evolution into a philosopher of resistance had its roots during her childhood during the rise of the
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as a symbol of anti-Black terrorism. Racially-fashioned wars against people of African
descent would persist—despite a civil war that militarily defeated the Confederacy in order to preserve the
Union. Interregional and intergenerational white supremacists organized to work with northern industries
seeking cheap Black labor. States and corporations permitted and protected lynching, the convict prison
lease system, Jim Crow segregation, and later, mass incarceration with rampant violence from police and
prison guards, and medical neglect of detainees. The US interregional alliances to protect whiteness as
property and white-owned property are captured in the lm The Birth of a Nation (1915), D. W. Gri th’s
cinematic saga that championed white supremacy and the rise of the KKK. The lm features southern
aristocrats mourning President Abraham Lincoln’s death and bonding with and marrying their northern
peers who had defeated them in battle. In her extended anti-lynching publications, Wells ips the script.
Her etymology inverts the speech and meanings of racial sovereigns: “lynchings,” understood as a “law-
and-order” interventions, become “racist murders” by white rapists. The emperor’s undress requires
African Americans to ght through a willingness to engage in migration or armed self-defense.

For Wells, racism and lynching mystify and romanticize rape. This legacy continues to derail adequate
prohibition and prevention of sexual violence. For example, when mob lynching gave way to legal
prosecutions, Black males were disproportionately imprisoned and executed for interracial rape based on
unsubstantiated charges. Wells tramples the twin myths of white supremacy; she critiques that whiteness is
neither sexually pure nor racially civilized.

Wells’s status as a post-Reconstruction, independent, and radical young woman helps explain why she was
coolly received by her more cautious, connected, and less militant Black peers. DuBois earned his PhD at
Harvard; Terrel took her degree at Oberlin. Rather than attend a prestigious white institution outside the
South, where the majority of Blacks lived and labored, Wells attended a historically Black college/university
(HBCU), Rust College, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. DuBois’s and Terrell’s training and in uential networks
eluded Wells, who was orphaned at fteen and largely self-taught as a journalist. DuBois, Terrell, and other
Black elites bene ted from the excitement and mass agitation that surrounded Wells’s incendiary critiques.
Her data collection on lynching was subversive and immersive and daring: Wells would disguise herself as a
Black sharecropper and enter prison cells to take the testimonies of Black men and boys facing lynch mobs.
Both Black elites sought to supplant her political persona from public memory, perhaps due to competitive
proprietary politics. Whites sought to disappear or ban her due to her praxis of radical autonomy and self-
defense.

The production of icons from Wells’s radical interventions were inevitable. The National Park Registry
granted landmark status of Wells’s Chicago home. In 1990, her image was printed upon a US postage stamp
(issued several years before the Malik El-Shabazz [Malcolm X] stamp). Progressive or liberal society desires
to show Ida B. Wells as belonging to, or an extension of, US democracy built upon racism and genocide yet in
theory capable of redemption without Black revolutionary struggle. The appearance of Wells’s image on the
mundane or historical marker suggests “progress.” Endorsing American democracy was much more

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complicated for Wells during her era; she had no expectation of seeing the possibility of the rst Black male
president or the rst Black female vice president of the United States of America. Hence, she also would not
have to theorize about their refusal to seriously grapple with (inter)national anti-Black violence and
exploitation.

Wells grieved murdered kin and sought justice by risking her life in order to pass through fear into
resistance. One lynching out of thousands created a catalyst for Wells when she was still an editor, providing
rebellion through journalism. The 1892 lynching of Thomas Moss, the father of Wells’s two-year-old
goddaughter, Maureen, created a crusader; grief at the destruction of her surrogate family and rage at
democracy’s betrayals were Wells’s rite of passage into revolutionary struggle. She recalls that the Black
men lynched in Memphis had focused on hard work and economic wealth as a resolution to racial
repression; “eschewing politics,” they built the People’s Grocery, which economically threatened a local
white grocer, Barrett, who in turn physically threatened the Black businessmen and led armed, unidenti ed
white plainclothes o cers—who later claimed they were trying to serve a warrant—at night through the
back alley toward the People’s Grocery. Thinking they were under attack by Barrett, the men shot at the
intruders, wounding several; realizing they were police, they ceased ring. Thirty-one businessmen were
jailed as “conspirators,” according to Wells, and a mob removed the president, manager, and clerk of the
People’s Grocery from jail to o er a “lesson of subordination” by lynching them (Wells [1892] 1997, 65).

After authorities failed to act against the lynching of propertied Blacks considered to be model citizens,
Black Memphis communities organized economic boycotts and mass migration to cripple the city’s
economy. Over a century later, following the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, a New York
Black pastor interviewed on WBAI radio station stated “If you kill us, we will kill your economy.” Similar
strategies were deployed in 1892. Seeking to undermine Black resistance, white city leaders called upon the
Memphis Black-owned newspaper Free Speech to urge Black patronage to return to white businesses. When
the editors refused, white citizens passed resolutions condemning the lynching but did not prosecute the
killers. African American communities were divided. Using language Malcolm X would later codify into the
eld slave versus house slave con ict, Wells distinguished between the compromises of willing “slaves”
and enslaved rebels.

Wells writes that when o cial Black leadership urged Blacks to remain law-abiding, their “counsel was
heeded and not a hand was uplifted to resent the outrage” (Wells [1892] 1997, 65). The Free Speech
responded di erently. Following its editorials, Memphis’s African American community left for Oklahoma
and elsewhere in droves. The white press began a campaign of character assassination of both those killed
by lynching and those protesting it. Wells denounced southern whites in their passivity or acquiescence to
lynching as accomplices, just as guilty as the lynch mob. Wells’s controversial 1892 Free Speech editorial
prompted white city leaders to meet at the Cotton Exchange Building to plan their counterattack. In that
speech, Wells reported as follows:

Eight negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech one at Little Rock, Ark., last Saturday
morning where the citizens broke into the penitentiary and got their man; three near Anniston,
Ala., one near New Orleans; and three at Clarksville, Ga., the last three for killing a white man, and
 ve on the same old racket—the new alarm about raping white women. The same programme of
hanging, then shooting bullets into the lifeless bodies was carried out to the letter. Nobody in this
section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If
Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have
a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation
of their women.

(Wells [1892] 1997, 51–52)

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On May 25, Memphis’s white-owned newspaper the Daily Commercial quoted the last two sentences of her
editorial and issued a threat: “Those negroes who are attempting to make the lynching of individuals of
their race a means for arousing the worst passions of their kind are playing with a dangerous sentiment”
(52). The Memphis Evening Scimitar reprinted the Commercial editorial, adding commentary that suggested
the castration of the editorial author whom they presumed to be male:

If the negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom
he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main
and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical
operation with a pair of tailor’s shears. (52)

After the Cotton Exchange Center meeting, creditors took over the Free Speech and sold it, ending
Memphis’s in uential organ of Black radicalism. Wells, nonetheless, revealed the stains on white “virtue”:

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they
leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man
who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the
o ending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the
smiles of white women. (53–54)

In Southern Horrors, under the category “self-help,” Wells’s philosophy allows Black autonomy and
uncompromised resistance in self-defense to evolve: “The Afro-American can do for himself what no one
else can do for him. The world looks on with wonder that we have conceded so much and remain law-
abiding under such great outrage and provocation” (68). Advocating economic disruption, Wells argues that
Black labor rehabilitated the South that had been devastated by war, and calls for strikes:

If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South.
A thorough knowledge and judicious exercise of this power in lynching localities could many times
erect a bloodless revolution. The white man’s dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop
outrages in many localities. (68)

Viewing lynching as an extension of slavery, Wells bridges eras and insurrections through antebellum slave
rebellions, fugitivity, and labor strikes. Nearly 200,000 Blacks served as combatants or spies for the union
during the Civil War. Her words have clear echoes in later calls for resistance. A century later, the armed
southern civil-rights self-defense corps Deacons for Defense and Justice provided protections for Martin
Luther King Jr., who had removed all of the guns from his home (which was rebombed) based on his
theological and philosophical views. The Black Panther Party (for Self Defense) formed in 1966 in Oakland,
California, after white police shot and killed one youth too many. Wells’s analysis is stark:

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and
used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder
well, is that a Winchester ri e should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be
 used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the
aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does,
he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. (70)

For Ida B. Wells, US democracy’s subjugation of Black lives is revealed in its triumvirate: sex, money, and
domination through violence. Thus, rebellions must focus on rape, economic exploitation, and lynching or
police murder.

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2. The Captive Maternal: Theory, Comparison, and Examples

Theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) provides an epistemology sheltered from the
experiential racial terrors that Ida B. Wells battled, not in the formal wars on foreign shores in World I or
World War II, but within the United States. Lonergan’s (1953) Insight: A Study of Human Understanding posits
a three-part sequence of experience, re ection, and judgment to explain human knowledge. There is a
fourth stage embodied in Ida B. Wells’s resistance to racist terror: action. It was action as a political
intervention, not in the mundaneness of reproducing everyday life or longevity, writing as an expression of
art, edi cation, or journalistic exposes, but action as resistance to white supremacy that created the war
correspondent Ida B. Wells. The existential crisis of living in a war zone shaped not by international
boundaries but by anti-Black animus and consumption produced new experiences. This experiential “data,”
which included emotional intelligence and psychological stress, constituted a zone of re ections. Before
individual and collective judgments could initiate or shape new acts, individuals and communities needed to
come to terms with crises that could not be undone under white supremacist regimes. That is, this would be
perpetual war against blackness until the disappearance of Black agency; i.e., this would be a genocidal war
against autonomous Black communities. Hence, precarity and necessity to act—out-migrate, ee, defend,
submit—shaped or in uenced cognitive capacity. In a constant cycle of evolving thought under the
stressors of constant vulnerability to police and legally sanctioned violence, the “ethical” act would not
purely be about personal morality. For a subjugated and dishonored people, ethics would be strategic and
focused on surviving a war that one could not collectively win. This marks a rupture from Lonergan’s
epistemology. The stage of action is critical because without the right action, protection, strategy or “luck”
while acting, thinkers (in the collective or community) do not survive to re ne thought processes unfolding
within a war zone.

In her (1988) article “The Race for Theory,” Black feminist Barbara Christian (1943–2000) argues that
“theorizing” as a verb should be dedicated to the service of community. Christian observes that people of
color theorize in narratives and prefer dynamic ideas that encourage the spirited resistance to attacks on
4
their humanity. The action of theory is key for the literary theorist Christian. To engage in philosophy that
is committed to intellectual life and ethics, one must be disciplined by the communal need to not only live
but thrive. Yet Christian says little to nothing about the environment of war that shapes or alters thought or
theorizing.

Wells faced antidemocratic norms as well as the fact that the valorization of a racist commons had not
shamed or deterred white supremacists. Lonergan’s insight, which lacks this transition to action, is not an
epistemology that leads out of an authoritarian wilderness. For Wells, the vice and violence that shape white
supremacist incursions into Black lives and communities inspired and triggered a reaction: Black
philosophy, epistemology, ethics, and political will (Agape). These intellectual endeavors crystalized into
high-risk political action for a greater common good, and so became the new experience upon which to
re ect in order for philosophy to branch and bloom. Philosophy and theorizing emerge from distinct and at
times divergent zones: elite academic sites and streets roiling with protests or bloodletting administered by
hunters and lynch mobs. The dichotomies are masked over when those recognized as “real” philosophers
tend to be acknowledged only if their form and content replicate the convention of elites.

Wells became a historical icon as a “crusader.” Yet, while she was, together with her communities,
theorizing and (re)shaping political trajectories, charting paths beyond the reach of lynch mobs, Wells was
re-engineering epistemology so that its capacity to comprehend the violence of an anti-Black world could
encompass existential crises and war resistance. One can contrast Wells with Seylah Benhabib’s (1995) “The
Pariah and Her Shadow,” which discusses Hannah Arendt’s biography of the eighteenth-century Jewish
intellectual Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833). Born Rahel Levin, Varnhagen converted to Christianity in 1814.

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Arendt nished writing her biography (which she apparently began in 1929 when she was a graduate
student writing her dissertation) of Varnhagen in 1938; it was published in 1957. A pivotal point of Arendt’s
analysis of Varnhagen’s life concerned her involvement in salons as a female-dominated public sphere in
elite private settings. For Benhabib: “Salons such as Varnhagen’s revealed the presence within modern
society of an alternative form of public sphere, one that is more egalitarian, uid, experimental, and in
which lines between intimacy and sociability, the public and the private are renegotiated and resigni ed”
(2003, xii).

Benhabib asserts that Arendt presents an alternative genealogy of modernity and a public sphere that resists
the hierarchical male-controlled spaces of the Greek polis. For Benhabib, Arendt never fully rejected the
possibilities of democracy. By contrast, Wells’s repression is not about the world of ideas, the lineage of the
polis to the twentieth century, or the strictures of patriarchal powers wielded by the elite and the leisured.
Ida B. Wells represents Black communities that are compelled for their own safety to ee democracy. Arendt
ed Nazi Germany for her new home in the United States in 1941, after working to help Jewish refugee
children ee Europe. Yet her precarity had a time stamp: the defeat of Nazi Germany and the victory of the
Allied powers. Wells’s precarity for her communities did not have a time stamp of collective victory over
fascism and terror. Well’s individual and collectively shared positions were distinct from Arendt’s
accumulated status. Despite its setting a quota for Jews eeing Europe, Arendt found that she could
assimilate into a version or variation of “whiteness” in the United States. Arendt would publish The Origins
of Totalitarianism ten years after immigrating into the United States and working as a journalist, author and
professor. Wells also worked as a journalist and author and educator. Yet the complete subservience to the
state that was demanded of Black communities was not seen through the lens of the anti-Black and anti-
indigeneity “totalitarianism” shaping US democracy. Wells battled anti-Black violence that Arendt could or
would not comprehend within or attribute to her adopted country.

Ida B. Wells warred against the predatory democracy in part because, unlike Arendt, she could not be
assimilated within it. Arendt re ects on the meaning and contradictions of Varnhagen’s appearance in the
world and the brief power that she wielded as an outsider in European salons for elites. The contradictions
embodied in the choices to acquiesce or resist are not just personal choices. They have an impact on and
re ect community; there is a distinct di erence from being a social pariah, or, a persecuted gure or
political prisoner designated for disappearance or elimination. According to Benhabib, Varnhagen was given
the choice, in other words, to be either a “parvenu” (an interloper) or a “pariah” who remains ostracized
from intellectual/philosophical elites. This choice was never o ered to Ida B. Wells because she was neither
parvenu nor pariah. She was, to the greater social order, a deviant from the norm of humanity, and thus
intellectual thought. The salon as a space of female power for privileged, albeit stigmatized, European
women, and Jewish women, allowed the parvenu and pariah to coexist in the same intellectual or
philosophical space. Someone, laborer or enslaved, would have brought them tea and cakes. The captive
anchored their relationship or alliances as aggrieved parvenu and pariah. Yet neither the parvenu nor the
pariah is a “slave.”

Consider the laborer or domestic worker cleaning the table and its dishes after the salon guests depart. Wells
does not come from a community of workers, although of course, Blacks in her communities labored and
worked. A conventional Marxist analysis cannot encompass the material and theoretical manifestations of
the “Black,” because the symbol for slave works but is not adequately represented by the category of
“worker.” Scholar Frank Wilderson (2003) contrasts the worker with the slave in “Gramsci’s Black Marx:
Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” arguing that an analysis of “worker” should indicate that the worker
can own a slave; hence the devastation of Black life ampli es all levels of violent accumulation and
extraction. Yet, more signi cant in regard to Ida B. Wells are not merely her disposability or exploitation
and dishonor through predatory violence and her antagonists’ refusal to recognize Black Americans as
human, let alone citizens. Ida B. Wells was a harbinger of rebellion and war resistance as a guerrilla

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intellectual in a nation that would co-lead the Allies in their defeat of the Third Reich. (Hitler studied the US
reservation system, its anti-Black violence, and eugenics programs to craft literary tracts for the Nazi
party.) Wells did not need to transition toward Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. She was not
seeking to reach the “revolutionary” stage of the transformation of consciousness or the political will to
further, as V. I. Lenin did, the process for overthrowing a ruling class of capitalists and imperialists.

The life and gifts of Black women philosophers, who operate outside the structures of the academy or
schooling, are estranged, not just from the canon of philosophy (worldwide), but from personhood itself.
That is, the contemplative life is not a mainstay of Captive Maternal philosophers. Cerebral gifts rooted in
war-resister logics appear more often in the streets, elds, or jail cells, as well as on travels to Europe to
organize against lynching through international economic boycotts. Ida B. Wells’s “life of the mind” (the
title of Arendt’s posthumous text) is dependent on intimate engagement with communities under siege.
Subjugated as feminized, racialized, and queered (to some degree all Black sexuality is viewed as
nonnormative), the Captive Maternal can pass through stages, from servile and opportunistic to rebel
opponent, with each stage contributing to and re ning Lonergan’s multistage epistemology. Parvenu or
pariah wo/men can seek sovereign powers by aligning themselves with patriarchal or predatory white
supremacy and Eurocentric philosophies catering to the (petit) bourgeoisie. Neither the parvenu nor the
pariah re ects how the communities of the enslaved think and structure ethics. The thought, action, and
epistemology of the enslaved and their lineage manifest in the Captive Maternal.

The struggles of the Captive Maternal are also revealed in their often tense relations with allies. Wells, for
instance, aligned herself with white abolitionist icon Susan B. Anthony, who faulted Wells for marrying and
having children when Wells married journalist and publisher Ferdinand Barnett when she was thirty-three
(an event reported on the New York Times’s rst page). The alliance with white su ragettes was strategic,
not fueled by agape. Su ragettes’ ght for the franchise led to the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment, which granted most white women the right to vote. Some su ragettes, such as Anthony,
upheld white supremacy and argued in their campaign that if white women were given the vote they could
align with white men to counter the vote of emancipated Black men. In a white supremacist democracy, the
theory, philosophy, and praxis surrounding democratic virtues steadies itself through insularity from the
practices Wells confronted that were structured for state and corporate accumulations and the “whiteness
as property” of which legal theorist Cheryl Harris writes in 1993.

Frederick Douglass’s praise introduced Wells to a greater public and protected her from her more cautious
and anti-rebel Black detractors. Wells’s confrontations with white domination shaped her advocacy of
armed self-defense as a necessity and a practicality. Elite contemporaries sought to dilute her radicalism.
Her popularity grew after her death because she had understood that she needed to write her autobiography
to tell her own story, because no one else would (her daughter Alfreda Duster nished the memoir for
publication by the University of Chicago Press). Wells denounced rape and lynching; she critiqued interracial
sex as a power practiced by white women and punished by whites writ large. The charge that Black males are
overly sexed and bestial predated Shakespeare’s Othello. Still, some twentieth-century Black feminist
academics and authors would depict Wells as an apologist for rape (James 1997). An antiracist antagonist of
white rapists, Wells noted that all women were not victims and all men were not perpetrators if racial
warfare shaped social environments. As a colleague of Susan B. Anthony and a su ragist like her anti-
lynching contemporary Mary Church Terrell, Wells’s militancy is caught in the crosshairs of divergent
camps. In her preface to Southern Horrors, Wells takes on her detractors, asserting that her writing is “not a
shield for the despoiler of virtue, nor altogether a defense for the poor, blind Afro-American Sampsons who
su er themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs. It is a contribution to truth, an array of facts, the perusal
of which it is hoped will stimulate this great American Republic to demand that justice be done though the
heavens fall” (Wells 1892, 50).

Wells’s activism is rooted in strategic militancy, and passion. Her ideology infuses coalitions and informs

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interracial alliances with white elites. The red record of lynching is gendered, but anti-Black violence is not
always gender-speci c. Murdered males outnumber murdered females. Reported rapes of Black females and
nonbinary Blacks exceed the reported rapes of Black (cisgendered) males. Across di erences of gender,
class, and nationality, the uni er would be Black resistance.

3. Wells in the Art of War for Black Self-Defense

Ida B. Wells’s charge for Black collective self-defense is multifaceted and forms her epistemology that
works to develop a philosophy of war for self-defense for a racially subjugated people. Wells did not need to read
the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to intellectualize or theorize how to counter a lethal
predator and expand security and advocacy for protective rights. There is no de facto right to Black self-
defense as Frank Wilderson and Selamawit Terrefe argue in the November 15, 2022 online discussion, with J.
James, “The Ontology of Betrayal.” If a white supremacist state does not acknowledge that right to the
Captive Maternal, still, it is recognized by the Black captives themselves (e.g., the increase of armed ushers
in Black churches after white supremacist neo-Nazi Dylan Roof murdered nine Black members of a prayer
group at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015). Wells’s
relationship to the ancient philosophy of war is cemented in the contemporary moment that requires war
resisters. In a zone of extreme violence upheld by the state, Wells faced anti-Black predators and the legacy
and “afterlife” of chattel slavery.

Representing an embattled people, Ida B. Wells wrote and spoke the language of war resisters seeking Black
communal self-preservation and community stabilization. Carl von Clausewitz’s (1780–1831) assertion in
On War, published in 1918, describes war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to ful l our
will.” The wars of antiblackness were embodied in slavery, where those designated as “black” were
compelled to ful ll the wishes and demands of a master race. Wells fought a defensive war, not a war of
aggression or accumulation (which de ned the wars of imperialism and colonialism). Sun Tzu spoke the
language of militarism and war as not merely a defensive endeavor. Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War
presumably during the fth century BC . The rise of antiblackness is marked by some scholars at AD 711,
when the Arab/African Moors who were Muslim invaded Spain and Portugal. After civilizing parts of Europe,
they were defeated in January 1492; in August of that year the Spanish monarchs would hire Columbus to
“explore” and invade and terrorize the Americas. To defeat the “Black,” the “Moor” would transport a
“holy war” in Europe to another (un)holy war in the Americas, one extended through the transatlantic
human tra cking that created the “Black Americans” recognizable to Wells.

In The Art of War, the philosopher writes: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the
result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also
su er a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This Chinese
treatise on strategy—distilled by “politics as warfare without bloodshed, war is politics with bloodshed”—
The Art of War is presumably the world’s oldest known written military text. Thus the Chinese ancestral
artifact becomes one of the engineers of political leadership in the Western world.
According to Sun Tzu (n.d.), victory requires ve essential forms of knowledge: (1) knowing when to ght
and when not to ght; (2) comprehending how to best “handle both superior and inferior forces”; (3)
inspiring pervasive high spirits throughout all ranks and among all activists; (4) garnering the patience to
prepare oneself and wait, or outwait, the opposition, which overreacts in its violent spectacles; (e)
maintaining high spirits in order to move forward toward sovereignty. Tactician and theorist, theorizing
and reconstructing the stages of epistemology, Ida B. Wells mastered all levels of struggle and self-defense.

Sun Tzu (n.d.) asserts that ve dangerous faults diminish a leader: “(1) Recklessness, which leads to
destruction; (2) cowardice, which leads to capture; (3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults; (4)

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a delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame; (5) over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry
and trouble.” Sun Tzu provides the corrective to these faults—a leader’s ability to possess the ve essentials
for victory: knowing when and when not to ght; handling superior (funded and militarized) forces and
inferior forces; maintaining an animated spirit in the ranks; being prepared and waiting for the opposition’s
unpreparedness (Sun Tzu uses the word “enemy,” while I use “opposition”); having military capacity and
autonomy from state interference. Defensive tactics are useful, but the ability to defeat the
enemy/opposition requires an o ensive strategy. Relying purely on defensive strategies is an indication of
weakness, according to Sun Tzu. The Captive Maternal philosopher, if evolving and changing, travels into
the later stages of resistance shaped by rebellion and war resistance. The language of analyzing philosophy
faces anti-Black violence that extends into the text and corpus of European or Western philosophy, which,
like the Thirteenth Amendment, might also function as a Trojan Horse.

The past reappears in the present. The long siege continues. Wells’s (1900) critique of corrupt policing in
Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, … resonates with contemporary police killings
of Black non/citizens. In her adopted hometown of Chicago, predawn on December 4, 1969, a joint FBI-
Chicago police task force engineered a raid to assassinate Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton and his
fellow Panther Mark Clark while they slept; the US government later settled with survivors and families for
$1.8 million (Rockefeller et al. 2006, at minute 29:10). In 2007, Chicago’s Cook County paid $19.7 million to
survivors falsely imprisoned through a police torture ring largely targeting Black men. In 2020, millions of
people globally protested police terror after the murder of George Floyd. The 1951 petition to the United
Nations written by the Black communist Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide, focused on anti-Black
terror and lynching, re ecting phenomena documented in Wells’s (1892) canonical Southern Horrors.

4. Conclusion

Ida B. Wells embodies the agender Captive Maternal, whose labor for family and community passes through
multiple stages before arriving at self-defense, not as violence but as force. Before marriage and children,
Wells appeared in a long line of maternal or caretaking women who used sacri ce to fuel political activism.
Progressives and (Black) feminists claim Ida B. Wells as ancestor and avatar. Historically, Black leadership
was professionalized to create loyalists to the state and its civil society. The epistemology of indoctrination
and conformity would not have recognized the stage of active rebellion as essential for the life of the mind.
The state, built on empire and white supremacy, cisgender-heteropatriarchy, and femicide, licide, and
genocide can only professionalize “leadership” that opposes resistance. The Talented Tenth is not a
freedom formation. The maroon philosophers, though, are always in ight into community, seeking or
constructing mental and material pathways out of capture. Sometimes such thinkers survive. Sometimes
they are prodded or pushed overboard to drown.

Supporting, as well as walking, the plank, the Captive Maternal, as a fulcrum, balances contradictions, and
confronts con icts and antagonisms. Agape shapes perspectives and tethers philosophy to theology and
emotional intelligence. War resistance, the most advanced stage of the Captive Maternal is a high-stake
Rubik cube. For Wells and those who embody her philosophical inspirations, the tasks were simple and
daunting: one, all, needed to align their movements in a cohesive ght for freedoms that feed families,
protected marronage and cultural and civil society, and defended honor and life. Wells excelled at
confrontations not because she was combative. She excelled because she faced the stressors and anxieties
that shaped precarity fueled by state and predatory accumulation. Rooted in philosophical endeavors based
in analytical ethics and epistemology, she persisted, not so much to interpret the world, but to change it,
and with the action of change, she would reinterpret it as more than a battle eld for conquest.

She rejected the discourse of Black deference as a form of civility, viewing the mandate to forgive atrocities

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as rendering African Americans more vulnerable to racist aggression. As the terror became normative, she
warned that the cognitive abilities to comprehend, speak of, and resist it would diminish. Wells’s
revolutionary rhetoric and strategies linked to non-elite Blackness grew, as did her vulnerability to attack
and misrepresentation. She endeared herself to the working class and poor, who bene ted directly from her
militancy. Wells speaks with their voice and grief, and channels their outrage that, as the targets of
terrorism, they are criminalized by their assailants and the state.

Without the historicity of Ida B. Wells, it is easy to lose sight of ontology or the meanings emanating from
Blacks being stripped of virtue and honor to make them more suitable as prey as the humiliated,
criminalized, and hunted. Remembering the meaning of battling for honor and risking life to gain life, Wells
foments rebellions, disturbing the equilibrium of conventional political alliances and decorum. She rejects
apolitical respectability. She battles compradors. She manifests as a Captive Maternal war resister not
collaborator. Her legacy of militancy is distorted by pronouncements of the “end of lynching” through legal
decree. In June 2005, the US Senate passed Resolution 39, marking the o cial closure to the era of lynching.
In 2005, the descendants of lynching victims, as survivors, viewed the proceedings in the Senate gallery,
lunched with Congressional representatives and posed for photos and/or spoke with the press. The
Washington Post quoted a denunciation of lynching by Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu: “There may be no
other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility.” It also quoted
Virginia Senator George Allen: “[Lynching is] the brutal atrocity that plagued our great nation.” Georgia
Congressman and former SNCC activist John Lewis, echoing Ida B. Wells in his description of lynching as an
extension of slavery, demanded an apology for slavery (Avis Thomas-Lester, “A Senate Apology for History
on Lynching,” Washington Post, June 14, 2005). Two years after the police murder of George Floyd—after
two hundred attempts and one hundred years of waiting—the US Senate passed an antilynching law named
after Emmett Till in 2022. In 2023, the media reported that police killings of civilians had exceeded the
numbers killed in 2020 at the height of civil rights protests and marches against the murder of Floyd.

Ida B. Wells had the cognition, political will through Agape, to commingle Black su ering and rebellion, not
in iconography for a public persona, but in theorizing for strategies and narratives to fuel intellect and
action as self-defense. Wells’s political power in radical agency manifests over generations. The fugitive
anti-lynching crusader o ers a template to confront fear, build de ance and discipline shaped by Agape. An
ancestral Captive Maternal, Ida B. Wells (1892) cautioned that “the gods help those who help themselves.”
Her call for embodied action shapes an epistemology that animates militant philosophers.
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Notes
1 Sections of this chapter first appeared in James (2017) and in James (2019), “Do Something Ethical”; (2022) “In Pursuit of
Revolutionary Love”; and (2023) “New Bones Abolition.”

2 Civil Rights Movement Archive (n.d.).

3 The Negro Womenʼs Club movement raised funds to publish Ida B. Wellsʼs political pamphlets Southern Horrors: Lynch Law
in All Its Phases, The Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans. Her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, was posthumously
edited by her daughter Alfreda M. Duster. See Wells (1970). Also see William Greaves (1989). Greaveʼs documentary Ida B.
Wells: A Passion for Justice features Toni Morrisonʼs skillful reading of Wellsʼs autobiography.

4 See also James (2019).