Ida B. Wells, Jim Crow, and Women's Rights | Teacher Seminars Online

This seminar explores the history of African Americans between 1865 and the 1930s by taking a close look at the life of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells. A member of emancipation’s first generation, Wells was born to enslaved parents during the Civil War, and survived a rough childhood to become a teacher, journalist, and trenchant social critic. Most known for her crusade against lynching, she was a social justice warrior whose long career as a civil rights activist illustrates the many challenges faced by African Americans during her lifetime. This seminar uses Wells’s life as a focal point for understanding not only anti-lynching, but also the rise of Jim Crow, the history of early Black civil rights organizations and women’s clubs, the Great Migration, the African American experience during the World War I era, and the emergence of New Negro leadership.

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Mia Bay, Lead Scholar

Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history whose recent interests include Black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation.

Bay’s most recent book is the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021), which also received a PROSE Award for Excellence in American History, the OAH’s Liberty Legacy Award, the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Order of the Coif Book Award and the  David J, Langum Prize in Legal History. Her other works include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009); and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader (Penguin Books, 2014). She is also the co-author, with Waldo Martin and Deborah Gray White, of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins 2012,1st Edition, 2016, 2nd Edition), and the editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Farah Jasmin Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Ann Fabian.  

CherylAnne Amendola, Master Teacher

CherylAnne Amendola has been teaching American and world history for the last sixteen years. She graduated from Montclair State University with a BA in Political Science and from Teachers College, Columbia University with an MA in Social Studies Education. She recently completed her MA in American History from Pace University in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute. She was named 2017 New Jersey History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute and is an ambassador for the New-York Historical Society’s Women and the American Story program. CherylAnne published her first book in November 2019, entitled On the Backs of the Enslaved, and is the host of the Teaching History Her Way podcast.