Americans are not by nature a backward-looking people.
The past is not a place you can go or a sensation you can experience; it's as fragile as memory, and if you have no memory of an event, it simply does not exist for you. We adopt the first rule of Italian driving, as explained by Raul Julia's character Franco in the not-quite-classic 1976 film "The Gumball Rally:" What's behind me, it's not important.
Until a few years ago, I had only a vague inkling of who Ida B. Wells was: a 19th-century suffragette, some sort of muckraker. Even though she had written extensively about lynching in the South and the Elaine Massacre, I didn't realize Wells was born a slave, that she was Black.
Michelle Duster, the author, journalist and historian who delivered a virtual keynote address for the National Federation of Press Women at its annual conference held in Little Rock this weekend, has known about her great-grandmother all her life. But when she was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, not everyone who referred to "Ida B. Wells" was talking about her; more likely they were talking about the massive housing project named for her.
When it opened in 1941, there were 1,600 residence units in the complex. Nearly 800 were row-house or garden apartments in various two-, three- and four-story buildings arranged around a city park; the others were "spacious and well-lit" high-rise apartments along Cottage Grove Avenue.
More than 18,000 families applied for residence in the Ida B. Wells Homes. The venerable Black-oriented newspaper the Chicago Defender ran a 20-page special section celebrating the opening of the project; the Chicago Herald American ran a photo essay that celebrated one family's move "from hovel to heaven."
In those days, public housing was seen as an engine of upward mobility. The "projects" were designed to be an incubator for a rising middle class, a way to escape tenements and slums. Lots of people who were reared in the Ida B. Wells Homes went on to do great things.
Yet by the time Duster was growing up, the new had rubbed off the Ida B. Wells Homes. They were increasingly seen as an unfortunate, even dangerous place.
"In Chicago, whenever people would hear the name Ida B. Wells, they would think of Black dysfunction," Duster says.
It got worse. In 1994, 5-year-old Eric Morse died after he was dangled and dropped from a vacant 14th-floor apartment in the projects by two preteen boys. It was said they killed him because he refused to steal candy for them. It wasn't long after that the federal government took over the Chicago Housing Authority.
Veteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman focused on the Wells Homes in 1997 with his film "Public Housing," which many consider to be his masterpiece. Over its 200-minute running length, Wiseman used a "fly-on-the-wall" approach to examine the chasm between reality and wishfulness over the course of a single day in the projects.
The result was a film of remarkable empathy that transmitted despair. The projects had become what they were designed to cure--a slum to be escaped.
In 2002, they started knocking down the Ida B. Wells Homes. Which was OK with Duster.
"And I'm like, 'Oh, my God, this is not who she was.' And so when they started to be torn down, I felt very strongly that the city should replace, well, honor her in a different way," she says. "Because she was not a building. She was not a series of buildings; she was a woman."
There have been several books on Ida B. Wells, but maybe the best--and, for modern readers, certainly the most accessible--place to start to know her is Duster's "Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells," published in January. In the book, Duster talks about growing up in a family that valued achievement and was proud of her great-grandmother's work, but not excessively so.
"She wasn't presented as this icon who stood above everybody else," she says. "Because we were always taught that everybody is important. Everybody's contribution to our society is important ... it was presented to me like that was her job, that was her profession."
Duster says she never felt any pressure--internal or external--to follow in anyone's footsteps.
"I knew that if I decided to be a journalist, [the comparisons to Wells] would be never-ending," she says. "It would be, 'Oh, you want to be like your great-grandmother.' And I felt like I would never be able to live up to her accomplishments .... I was still interested in media and stories, but I'm like, I'm not gonna do journalism. I'll do broadcast. I was a DJ on the radio for a few years.
"And then when I graduated from college ... my first job was as a copywriter at an advertiser. What I was interested in doing was creating positive images about Black people ... because what I'd seen on television didn't reflect my reality."
She went to film school because she wanted to learn how to produce images. She worked with legendary filmmaker William Greaves on his 1989 documentary "Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice."
While working on that film, she went to Memphis.
"As a third-generation Chicagoan, I never saw a Confederate flag until I went down," she says. "Just seeing that symbol kind of freaked me out. When I went to Mississippi for the first time, when we crossed the state line and saw 'Welcome to the Magnolia state,' I literally had to make sure I didn't hyperventilate. I was like, 'Oh my God, we're going into this place where so much violence has happened.' You have these pickups with the Confederate flag, and I was freaking out."
It was about that time they started tearing the Ida B. Wells Homes down. Wells' name had "started to be associated with with almost the opposite of what she did."
So the great-granddaughter went to work.
"It's not a given somebody will be remembered and celebrated," she says. "It takes a lot of work to make sure a person and their work is remembered ..."
For the past 13 years, Duster has been working with a committee to erect a monument to Wells on or near the site of the old homes.
"There's going to be a dedication ceremony at the end of June," she says. "I've never worked on a project as long before in my life. It's crazy. A human being could have been born when we started this project. The kid would be entering high school now ... I'm sure every project is unique, but this particular project had a lot more layers of complexity when it came to social issues and social justice dynamics."
She thinks she might write about that experience someday too. Maybe it will make a good comic novel. Maybe something more straightforward.
Anything to collect and contain that fragile memory--to arrest the evaporating past.
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com