SOURCE: Braxton, Joanne M. “Crusader for Justice: Ida B. Wells.” In Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition, pp. 102-138. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

In the following chapter from her full-length study of a number of autobiographical narratives written by African-American women, Braxton analyzes Wells-Barnett's Crusade for Justice both as an historical memoir and a confessional.

Who shall say that such a work accomplished by one woman exiled and maligned by that community among whom she had so long and so valiantly labored, bending every effort to the upbuilding of the manhood and womanhood of all races, shall not place her in the front rank of philanthropists, not only of the womanhood of this race, but among those laborers of all ages and all climes?

—G. B. Mossell (1894)

The importance of black autobiography as literature and history is well documented. The historian John Blassingame views black...