The new Barbie Ida B. Wells: journalist, suffragette and activist for the rights of African Americans

    The new Barbie Ida B. Wells: journalist, suffragette and activist for the rights of African Americans

    Mattel has decided to include this iconic figure in the "inspiring woman" series dedicated to the girls of today and the women of tomorrow

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    The Barbie line dedicated to women, sources of inspiration for the younger generations, has announced that it has added a new and iconic character, that of Ida B. Wells, investigative journalist, suffragette and activist for the rights of African Americans in America in the late ' 800 and early 900s. Her activity helped lift the veil of silence on lynchings to the detriment of African Americans and paved the way for African American women's voting rights.





    Ida B. Wells was born in slavery on July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the eldest of eight children; six months later they are free from this condition. When her parents and one of her brothers died of yellow fever, she moved to Tennessee where, in 1884, she was the protagonist of an episode that history will tell us not to be isolated. While she was traveling by train with a regular ticket, she is told to change seats and go to another car: she yanked her and she was made to get off. She takes the transportation company to court and gets $ 500 in compensation.

    The denunciation of the condition of African Americans, the search for information to document the lynchings suffered by many, urge her to become an activist and investigative journalist: her articles and pamphlets help to be the glue among the oppressed, to give voice to the abuses perpetrated by whites for reasons of social control attributing to former slaves of not having paid debts up to acts of rape. Numerous studies conducted during the 40s and even more recently will confirm the data collected by the brave Wells.

     

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    A powerful voice was that of Ida, so much so that between 1893 and 1897 anti-lynching laws were approved in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky and Texas; she then manages to bring the campaign against lynching to the White House.

    Women, African American and beyond, owe much to her battles: she denounced forms of racism in the suffragette movement, founded the first organization in favor of the suffrage of African American women; she ran in 1930 for the position of senator from Illinois, challenging preconceptions and difficulties of all sorts. She died a year later, in Chicago, on March 15, 1931 of kidney disease. She was a fundamental figure and for the time decidedly uncomfortable, capable of raising her head and voice in a complex country, at the turn of the industrial and moral revolution, which indelibly marked the course of the history of civil rights and women.

    A first tribute was paid to her in 2020 on the occasion of the celebrations for the centenary of the vote for American women: in the Union Station in Washington a mosaic was created that reproduces the face of Ida. Each piece in turn portrays the face of each suffragette who took part in a historic battle.

    Barbie Wells is thus the last important tribute, over time, to the legacy of this woman. An example, as for all the others included in this series which, according to Mattel, "have paved the way for generations of girls to dream big and make a difference".

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    Fonte: The University of Chicago Library

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