The fuck does this make money?: a story about Ida B Wells + Frederick Douglass

How the fuck did people in history make money?

People give them money because they vibed with what they make.

I like stories about money in history, because money is complicated.

(even for rich people).

And stories about money in history get complicated fast.

Especially when someone has a patron.
(Not Patreon. Patron.)

That funding model — or someone gives you money because they like what you’re making — is old.

Lots of people get paid the same way that da Vinci did last millennia.

People with any amount of money have an agenda, conscious or not.

No matter who you are, no matter how much money you have.

(Did you give Bernie 5 bucks for a button? You had an agenda.)

People with money have goals.

Their money is going somewhere — to causes, activism, art — things they believe in.

Even if it’s not very much money, or proportionately quite small in comparison to the amount they spend on rent.

Her activism and writing changed the world.

So when there are large sums of money involved, there’s someone, multiple someones, with an agenda.

This sounds nefarious but it doesn’t have to be.

(Colin Kaepernick has an agenda for his money. Mutual aid funds have agendas for their money.)

Back to history.

This is a story about money, Frederick Douglass, and Ida B Wells.

Ida B Wells is great to talk about in 2021.

Ida B Wells’s work was about putting things together, trying to figure out the resources and support the people needed order for her cause to go further.

What she did all day and how she felt about it is so easily translatable to those of us who spend all of our time on Twitter.

But her writing in black newspapers and her meticulous but sporadic journals also tell us the story of a woman:

Enter Frederick Douglass.

“ who wrote these incredible moving invectives about the state of American racism.

And also in her journal she wrote constantly like, oh fuck? Should I buy these shoes? Am I a bad activist if I buy these shoes? “

(This is paraphrased from here.)

People in history like Ida B Wells — their “work” is defined by the cause they championed, the various tactics they undertook throughout their life to achieve that cause. This is probably why, among many other reasons, why Ida B Wells was in Mariame Kaba’s Twitter handle for many years.

like money.

and money comes from people with agendas.

He eagerly adopted and started to fund Ida when she came up to New York after writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases, the book that transformed not just the south but all of America.

Ida, rabble rousing activist that she was, appreciated the support, the access to resources at a scale unprecedented for her.

In her mind, now the real work could begin.

But there was a problem: the same things that drew Frederick Douglass to Ida — her youth, her passion, her new and inspiring vision?

It totally freaked him out.

He told her as much, repeatedly urging caution, “discretion”.

Ida pretty much ignored him, because…

She was Ida B Wells.

She had shit to do.

Until one day, Douglass cut her off.

This man that I admire more than anything thinks I’m being fucking nuts.

Am I? Or am I just more radical than he can handle?

Stopped responding to her letters and tweets.

Didn’t invite her to mutual aid benefits.

Lost her WhatsApp handle.

Was it the right thing to do?

Ida B Wells freaked.

Not because she lost access to the resources she needed to further her vision.

Something deeper:

That’s what she wrote in her journal, basically.

It wasn’t about the money.

It was about deviating from his agenda, the one he funded, to pursue her own.

Or, as Douglass has said “was she too incautious?”

In spite of her doubt, she kept doing what she was doing.

Being Ida B Wells.

Creating a pamphlet on the worlds fair that over 20,000 people saw, all about its messed up conditions and racism.

Stirring shit up in the segregated women’s clubs of Chicago.

Trying to stop segregated education in its tracks.

Making Jane Addams leave the house.

Ida B Wells pursued her own agenda, found her own resources to do it.

And spite of everything, before he died, Douglass wrote to Wells:

“ You have done your people and mine a service. …What a revelation of existing conditions your writing has been for me.”[

Their agendas diverged, but their vision didn’t.

* this story is paraphrased from Paula J Giddings’ book “ Ida,” an incredible biography.

Originally published at https://notesonfeednet.substack.com.