Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and the Jim Crow Public

Abstract

This article brings into conversation the democratic thought of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black feminists Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. I discuss how Cooper and Wells approached the challenge of shaping a turn-of-the-century white public constituted in part through Black women’s subjection and exclusion. Prominent accounts have at times contrasted their political efforts. However, I read differences in their democratic thought as a question of aesthetic politics rather than ideology. The contrasting strategies they employed in writing point to distinct but complementary means of shaping the publics in which their words would be received in the future. Reading Cooper’s and Wells’s works to represent two facets of the broader Black feminist intellectual and political milieu of which they were a part invites consideration of the ways hoped-for democratic solidarity can rely on, and be shaped by, more agonistic efforts in the present.