Historian: Akiko Ochiai

 

In Akiko Ochiai 's “Ida B. Wells and Her Crusade for Justice” argues that the testimonial autobiography of Ida B. Wells and its effectiveness as an objective historical account as Wells documents her life from early childhood, revealing her inner world and domestic life. Crusade for Justice, written by Wells in the late 1920’s, is aptly named as Wells can be considered as the Joan of Arc of her time and likened the anti-lynching to a “holy war” (page 370). Wells recounts her life as a “recreation of history through one particular person” and “tries to show her life not as a mere response to conditions at the run of the century but as an active career that changed and reshaped American society” (page 380). Wells writes that, “[Crusade for Justice] is for the young people who have so little of our race’s history recorded that I am for the first time in my life writing about myself” (page 369). Akiko contends that the testimonial autobiography was one of the first to bring African American history into the public eye by making the experience one of “personal history felt with revolutionary impact upon the present and future” (page 369).