Strange Fruit: The Ida B. Wells Project

Abstract

Ida B. Wells was a Black 19th century investigative reporter who launched an anti-lynching campaign, culminating in three pamphlets, Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans, revealing and demonstrating the injustice and violence of lynching culture. “The Ida B. Wells Project” seeks to transform Wells’s investigations into a digital humanities project with easy-to-navigate website with interactive components. The goal of this project is to highlight the barrier-breaking and courageous journalistic activism of Ida B. Wells by providing a tool to be used by students, researchers and teachers to shed light on this period of domestic terrorism in United States history. The project does not seek to merely digitize her works or provide a portal to her works but rather to interpret and represent her research in a 21st century format with the digitized facsimiles of her three pamphlets providing further context. “The Ida B. Wells Project” will have to overcome several challenges. One is the accessibility and availability of the three pamphlets. The other major challenge is the geocoding of places associated with lynchings described in Wells’s work.

The project has already made progress by text-encoding A Red Record, geocoding and mapping the lynchings in The Red Record, and gaining access to these two pamphlets, with a travel and research materials grant funded by the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute to view a first edition copy of Southern Horrors held by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This poster will illustrate the challenges the project faces, the work that has already been completed, and what are the next steps for the project.