Description
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
— Ida B. Wells
Please note that our remaining inventory of this print consists of APs or “Artist Proofs.” We determine our edition number before printing, but we always print a few more broadsides than we think we’ll need for the edition, in case of mishaps during the process. When the edition is finished, any extra prints that survive outside of the edition are signed and labeled with “AP” in place of a number. Because we wait to sell the APs until the rest of the edition is sold out, and because APs are otherwise identical in quality to the numbered prints, they are priced the same as our numbered prints.
This hand-pulled letterpress print is printed from hand-lettered original typography and hand-drawn illustrations (in fact, everything was done by hand, the hard way!). Our broadside was 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.
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.
Our 30th broadside, 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.
To learn more about the piece and our process behind it, visit the blog.
To help continue Ida B. Wells’s legacy, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, via an Action Grant from the Dead Feminists Fund. The Society is focused on increasing the ranks, retention, and profile of reporters and editors of color in the field of journalism and investigative reporting.
This poster was printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press. Each piece is printed on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper, and individually signed and numbered by both artists. This piece was printed in a limited edition; once the edition sells out, it will not be reprinted. So snag your copy while you can!
Edition size: 193
Paper size: approximately 10 x 18 inches
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. 193 copies were printed by hand at Springtide Press in Tacoma.
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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 print. The buyer is not entitled to reproduction rights.
WA state residents are subject to sales tax.
The print is packaged in a clear poly sleeve and will ship flat in a protective mailer, via USPS Priority Mail.
