To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells

North Carolina State University history professor McMurry manages to make the attractive and dynamic figure of Ida B. Wells sound dull. Born in Mississippi at the height of the Civil War, Wells attained a level of success remarkable for black women of her time. When her parents died during a yellow fever epidemic in 1878, the 16-year-old Wells took over the rearing of her six younger siblings, supporting them by teaching elementary school. She attended Rust College, where her father, politically active during Reconstruction, had been a member of the board, and burst on the public scene with her 1883 court challenge to racial segregation on trains. Spurred by a post-Reconstruction increase in violence against blacks, Wells had already begun to submit editorials for publication in black newspapers when a close friend was lynched in 1889. She then transformed her outrage into a fierce determination to articulate the oppression of African Americans and became a speaker much in demand at black churches, journalists' conferences and feminist gatherings in the U.S. and England. Feminists such as Susan B. Anthony urged Wells not to marry and to concentrate instead on ""real"" work. She ignored their advice, but neither marriage nor motherhood slowed her down as she continued to campaign for federal legislation against lynching until her death in 1931. Unfortunately, McMurray offers little to a reader that isn't available--in better prose--in Wells's autobiography, Crusade for Justice. Additionally, McMurray muddles her portrait by judging the past by the standards of the present and by succumbing to the temptation to psychoanalyze Wells. (Jan.)