Up With Ida: A Monumental Teach-In for Ida B. Wells at the University of Mississippi

04/03/19 • 56 min

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Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, an educator, a suffragist, a truth teller. She was born in Holly Spring, Mississippi in 1862. As an African American woman, she moved to Memphis and then Chicago, as she built a national reputation for her civil rights work. She reported and revealed the horrors of lynching in pamphlets and publications including Southern Horrors and The Red Record. Today, her great-granddaughter, author Michelle Duster, carries on her legacy. She has retraced Wells’ footsteps in the pursuit of justice, including leading efforts in the city of Chicago to dedicate the new Ida B. Wells Drive and to fundraise for a monument to her late great-grandmother in the city’s Bronzeville section.

This week, Duster travels to the University of Mississippi, where scholars and students have organized the Ida B Wells Teach In: A Monument to Justice. We speak with Duster, and two of the organizers, History Professor Garrett Felber and graduate student Beth Kruse. The event was planned in response to an effort to rename the University’s journalism school after Ida B. Wells. It also occurs in the face of a struggle to remove a confederate monument from the heart of campus, all a part of ongoing efforts to seek what they highlight as “reparative justice” for the campus, sparked by Wells’ memory.

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In Pursuit of the Confederate Truce Flag with Artist Sonya Clark

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The Confederate Truce Flag is a little known piece of Americana. It was flown as a white flag of surrender and delivered to the Appomattox Court House, Virginia in April 1865. A piece of it is owned by Smithsonian. It is not as iconic as the Confederate Battle Flag. Artist Sonya Clark wants to change that through her new exhibition Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum.

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The New Gatekeepers: Will Google decide how we remember Syria’s Civil War?

On Monument Lab’s bulletin, we recently published “The New Gatekeepers: Will Google Decide How We Remember Syria's Civil War.” Written by Global Voices Advocacy Director Ellery Roberts Biddle, “The New Gatekeepers” examines how big tech companies like Google and Facebook are shaping our view of the historical record of war atrocities and other traumatic events. These companies increasingly use artificial intelligence to handle and sometimes censor shared content on social media posted from the frontlines of conflict zones, impacting how we learn about and will remember historical events.

In her roles at Global Voices and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Roberts Biddle reports on and defends the rights of journalists around the world. For Monument Lab, Roberts Biddle looked specifically at a counter example, the case of the Syrian Archive, a Syrian-led group of technologists based in Berlin, seeking to organize and backup more than five million images and video files shared online from the war, including devastating images of violence and chemical attacks on civilians. This archive can be used by journalists and perhaps one day in a war crimes trials, if the regime ever faces charges.

For this episode, we are also joined by Jacke Zammuto of Witness, where she is a program manager focused on video and media to defend human rights. Zammuto works with community organizations on documenting police accountability, immigrant rights, and indigenous rights.