Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) was a well-known activist and journalist whose efforts were directed primarily at combating racial and gender injustice faced by African Americans. Her writings specifically addressed issues such as lynching in the South, civil rights, mob violence, and women’s rights. Her carefully researched publications served the purpose of publicizing the truth of these issues.

As Hartman recounts in Chapter 3 of Wayward Lives, Wells was forcibly removed from a first-class train car in Tennessee in 1883. The following year she sued the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad Company, and her case was successful in the local court. However, the verdict was later overturned at the federal level.

In Wayward Lives, Wells serves as a subtle foil to the various women Hartman writes about in the book. Where Wells is scholarly, higher class, and organized, the other women are uneducated, poor, and wayward. Wells provides balance to Hartman’s narrative in that she demonstrates other ways Black women fought for their rights, yet her neat activism helps the reader see an equally powerful parallel in the practices of free love, queerness, and enjoyment.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was an African American sociologist, writer, civil rights activist, and socialist. He earned his PhD from Harvard University, the first Black American to do so. As a prominent intellectual in the 19th and 20th centuries, he helped found the NAACP, served as the editor of The Crisis, and wrote both fiction and nonfiction on the question of race and blackness in the United States and elsewhere.

The inclusion of Du Bois offers Hartman an opportunity to examine his studies of the very same population featured in Wayward Lives. His graphs and tables are significant for understanding the 20th-century panic over the “Negro problem” and the various ways that Black and white society responded to it. The figure of Du Bois also invites a consideration of class within the Black community. Du Bois’s judgmental attitude toward the Black lower class and his anxieties around sexuality represent the Black middle class’s larger misgivings toward the subjects of Hartman’s book. His presence reminds the reader that not all Black people felt the same way then, as is the case even today.