Radical Advocate: Ida B. Wells and the Road to Race and Gender Justice

Pinpoints the persuasive strategies that typified Wells’s efforts to shape broader cultural conversations concerning the causes of racial, social, and gender inequity

Born into the brutal reality of slavery, Ida B. Wells rose to become an audacious journalist, teacher, and activist for racial and gender justice. In Radical Advocate, Mary E. Triece examines the rhetorical strategies employed by Wells to challenge deeply rooted systems of oppression, strategies that remain powerful and relevant today.

Triece introduces the concept of ＂radical embodied advocacy＂ to give an account of Wells’s unique position as a Black woman whose personal encounters with white violence were palpable, experienced physically and mentally. White men lynched Wells’s friends and threatened her own life, forcing her into exile after destroying the very press on which she wrote and edited. From this perspective, Wells understood lynching as linked to white economic and political control. Through a close analysis of Wells’s speeches, writings, and journalism, Triece reveals how Wells pioneered a form of ＂intersectional journalism＂ that centered the voices of those marginalized by race, gender, and class.

By examining Wells’s work through the lens of philosophy, rhetoric, and Black feminism, Triece underscores the epistemic challenges faced by marginalized advocates and the importance of their perspectives in shaping social change. Radical Advocate ultimately positions Wells as a prophetic figure whose insights into the systemic nature of racism remain profoundly relevant in today’s world.

Mary E. Triece is professor of communication and director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Akron. She is author of Urban Renewal and Resistance: Rhetorics of Race, Space, and the City in the Late Twentieth to the Early Twenty-First Centuries, Tell It Like It Is: Women in the National Welfare Rights Movement, and On the Picket Line: Strategies of Working-Class Women during the Depression.