Ida: A Sword Among Lions
Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
Chapter One
Holly Springs
I often compare [my mother's] work in training her children to that of other women who had not her handicaps.
—Ida B. Wells
There was no need to kill here [Holly Springs], only to deprive . . .
—Hodding Carter
Ida Wells remembered being told as a child that her mother, Elizabeth, called Liza or Lizzie by friends, was born somewhere in Virginia, was one of ten children, and that her father was part Native American and her grandfather a "full-blooded" one. The only other detail she recalled about her mother's early life was that Lizzie was taken from her family when quite young and, with two of her sisters, was sold by a slave trader into Mississippi, and sold a second time before she was purchased by Spires Boling, an architect and contractor in Holly Springs. One of her mother's masters had "seared her flesh and her mind with torturous beatings," and by contrast Boling, who never u ... read full excerpt from Ida: A Sword Among Lions ebook
