Description
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
— Ida B. Wells
This oversized postcard is a reproduction (offset printed, NOT letterpress) of “Truth or Consequences,” part of the ongoing Dead Feminists poster series. This piece is a collaboration between Chandler O’Leary of Anagram Press and Jessica Spring of Springtide Press, initially intended to mark the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. As 2020 unfolds, it has also come to represent the twin crises of the COVID-19 global pandemic and worldwide protests in response to police brutality and extrajudicial murders perpetrated against Black citizens. These crises have highlighted and exacerbated the systemic racial inequality already present in American society, and the responsibility of white women to use our rights and privileges against this injustice.
The large letterpress poster won’t be reprinted—but this postcard faithfully reproduces the hand-lettered typography and hand-drawn illustrations of the original.
Civil rights activist, investigative journalist, suffragist, and community organizer Ida B. Wells is heralded as one of the mothers of intersectional feminism — referring to a term coined in 1989 by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, gender, and class often overlap to complicate issues of inequality. Wells devoted her entire life’s work to this intersection, fighting for women’s rights and racial justice along multiple fronts.
Truth or Consequences is designed in red, white, and blue, symbolizing the rights of all Americans. Wells’s portrait sits in a ring of light, shining in rays from the center outward, while celestial symbols like stars, moons, and wings represent the light of truth. Her quote is presented in purple, the traditional color of the women’s suffrage movement — yet our broadside is only printed in red and blue. The text emerges where the two colors overlap to create purple: without this intersection of colors, the words are unreadable.
Colophon reads:
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (1862 – 1931) was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents and infant brother died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, leaving her to care for five siblings. At 21 she moved to Memphis, commuting by train to teach at a rural school. After refusing to give up her purchased seat in a first class car, she was forced off the train. Wells filed and won a lawsuit in 1884, but the state Supreme Court reversed the decision. The experience launched her writing career, and she bought into a small newspaper, the Free Speech and Headlight. She began investigating the practice of lynching, calling it “a national crime [requiring] a national remedy.” By 1950 more than 4,400 people — most of them Black men, most in the South — were murdered, sometimes witnessed by crowds for entertainment. Wells published pamphlets filled with firsthand accounts and statistics, revealing a relentless regime of terror and oppression. In response, white mobs sent death threats and destroyed her printing press, forcing her to flee Memphis.
Moving north to Chicago, she also became a tireless worker for civil rights and women’s suffrage. In 1893 she founded the Women’s Era Club, a first-of-its-kind civic club for Black women in Chicago. She also co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club to focus on expanding voting rights for all women, and co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC, she and other Black suffragists refused to march in the rear, instead joining white marchers up front. Wells spent the rest of her life advocating for civil rights, equality, and universal suffrage for people of every race, class, and sex. She was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2020, in recognition of her “outstanding and courageous” investigative journalism on lynching.
Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, in honor of women who stand at the intersection of feminism and racial justice, interrogating inequality.
Postcard size: 5 x 8 inches
PLEASE NOTE: these oversized postcards require extra postage for mailing. They mail at the regular letter rate within the U.S., NOT the postcard rate.
PAPER FINISH: this postcard is made from paper with a smooth, eggshell finish. If you write on it, we recommend using either a ballpoint pen or some form of permanent, smear-proof ink.
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This original artwork is copyright Chandler O’Leary and Jessica Spring 2020. Copyright is not transferable with the sale of this piece. The buyer is not entitled to reproduction rights.
WA state residents are subject to sales tax.
This postcard will ship flat in a protective mailer, via the United States Postal Service.
