Ida B. Wells Was a Revolutionary of Her Time

Ida B. Wells was a revolutionary of her time. She protested lynching and questioned it as way for whites to stay in power. She was the inspiration behind the creation of several womans groups. She was black. Ida B. Wells is also the perfect case study for borderlands because she was a black, a woman and from the South.

Wells represents the borderlands between black and whites very well because she did her best to dissolve that border. In her document in the book, she questions racial punishments such as lynching. She also asserts that black men are made into sexual predators to allow the white men to hold sway over them. These two points demonstrate the borderland between the blacks and the whites in the late 1800s through their reality; whites used their power to keep their power and blacks had very little support from anyone other than themselves.

She showcases the difference between woman and men in her time period through her defiance of her gender, therefore representing the borderland between genders. In the late 1800s, a woman’s place was seen to be in the home, while the men did the work and wrote the newspapers. Wells, however was a journalist, orphaned at age 16 and determined to keep her family together. She defied gender norms and that allows her to portray them clearly. The borderlands Wells was present in was between men and woman; she didn’t work in the home or let the menfolk do all the work and she still kept her last name when she was married. She didn’t follow custom and created her own place in the fuzzy borderland between gender roles.

Being from the South, Wells represents the physical and psychological borders between the North and the South in her time period. She lived in the South until 1893, when she was driven to Chicago by the threats on her life. The psychological border between the North and the South is mainly the idea of racism and how it manifested. In the North, the police protected Wells, she was given