Guest Post: Writing in Ida’s Footsteps by Anastasia Magloire Williams

Thanks to SLJ’s Day of Dialog, I had the privilege of being on a nonfiction panel with Anastasia Magloire Williams, whose text for the It’s Her Story series title on Ida B. Wells from Sunbird Books marks her debut as a graphic format writer. I invited Ana to write a guest post about writing this book. What follows is the account of a writer engaging with her subject with humility, integrity, and a loving heart.

Writing in Ida’s Footsteps 

by Anastasia Magloire Williams

It was less than two years ago, while illustrating portraits for a Black history book, that I encountered the name Ida B. Wells for the first time. 

Photo courtesy of the author

Reading more about her, Ida’s name stood out as the most under-spoken, under-taught, and under-appreciated from that list of fifty. This woman was a suffragist who faced Jim Crow head on, owned a newspaper press, collaborated with Frederick Douglass, and helped found the NAACP! Her total absence from my education was criminal and baffling. 

With current events regarding Critical Race Theory in the classroom, and school board discussions on banning the very books I write and illustrate on Black history, it’s sadly not hard to deduce how and why Ida has been so overlooked in American curriculums. Still, I was thankful that I had the opportunity to learn about her. Her name stuck with me long after the project concluded.

But Ida was not yet done with me. 

Fast forward a few months, and another opportunity came across my inbox through the incredible team that represents me at Bright Agency; Sunbird Books was seeking budding writers to work with on a series of graphic novels about impactful women in history. They wanted to know if I was interested in writing one about Ida B. Wells’s life and legacy (with guidance of course). 

I relished the chance to flex my writing muscles and work with the pros. But more than that, it felt like fate to encounter Ida again so soon after a lifetime of not knowing her. I couldn’t say no.  

And so, my research began. 

I felt a strange kinship with Ida’s life story as I read about her upbringing, her education, her focuses and concerns as she gazed upon her community struggling to persist within the chokehold of Antebellum racism. Many Black Americans seek a collective ancestry and kinship with the civil rights leaders of our past because, for most, that is all we will ever have or know of our lineages. As I wrote Ida’s words, I felt fiercely protective of her personhood. I pursued references with starvation and awe. She was no longer this shadowed figure of the past, but someone I knew; she was my neighbor, my aunt, my friend. In her face and in her monologues, I saw the faces and heard the words of my peers, my family members, my friends. Her story was our story. 

And it was powerful and painful all at once to recognize the similarities between them. 

In true Millennial fashion, I’m quite vocal on social media. I am passionate about racial injustice, misogynoir, colorism and the intersectionality therein as it affects the Black American community. The level of connection I felt to Ida as I learned about her studiousness, her love of writing and storytelling, the intensity with which she stood up to corruption, made my heart sting with an emotion that’s hard to name. I am no stranger to folks wishing that I wasn’t so loud or so angry or so relentless in my discussions of how racism and otherness have permeated my life. Ida was not only Black, but a woman, so she experienced pushback from her own community for her bluntness and quickness to speak. She was threatened with death, driven away from her home and business, viewed as a threat to southern, white society, white female suffrage, and also to the male-dominated, Black intellectual class of the north. 

Was it empowering or frustrating that I related so much to Ida’s emotions and experiences 150 years later? Well...it certainly has a heaviness to it. I think to answer that fully, I’d need to write another book! 

Graphic Novels &  Historical Non-fiction 

That I would be writing for a graphic novel (GN) format thrilled me—I have a great affection for this often-trivialized method of storytelling. I minored in Sequential Arts in college and to this day, I read many comics and manga in my free time. I believe that GNs are the ultimate marriage of image and text—an untapped medium for learning that can engage younger readers and bring events to life in a lasting way. Plus, I have always enjoyed writing, particularly poetry and for young readers. 

All of that is to say, this element felt like another sign that this project was plucked out of the pile just for me and me alone to pursue. It was not a dissonance for my visual arts mind (because I am so familiar with it), but instead a unique opportunity to tell a story in a way that I have always wanted, but never expected. This would not be a standard, didactic recount of historic events—I would, alongside the illustrator, bring Ida B. Wells-Barnett to life for anyone who chose to turn the page and learn about her.  

Because I have illustrated in this format before, I did my best to visualize scenes as I wrote the dialogue, thinking about speech bubbles and paneling as I went. I paired all of my dialogue with caption, narrative text and brief illustration descriptions for the artist to use. It is certainly not your standard writing process, especially in non-fiction. The editor from Sunbird, Kathy, was my guardian angel throughout the process. She and I also spoke at length about how explicit we should be as to the more graphic elements of Ida’s story—the lynching of her friends and others that inspired her to purse a lifelong mission of activism and justice. Lynchings were Ida’s catalyst point, so we refused to omit them. 

My concern was two-fold—I wanted readers to know the truth of Ida’s life, of the life of many Black Americans under Jim Crow, but I also didn’t want to inflict unnecessary trauma on Black children. It was not my desire to write in such a way where young Black students would see mutilated Black bodies on display. We sadly get enough of that in current media and the psychological repercussions are as grave as they are evident. So, the key with that was truth, not shock value; history, not horror. If after our carefulness, the truth is still shocking, if the history is horrifying, well, that is for educators and parents to discuss when those questions arise. That means we did our job. So, we mention the lynchings, but we do not show the lynchings. We show hate, we show apathy and abuse, but we do not go beyond that because the message of Ida’s life is above it all. We preferred to focus on resilience, courage, and hope. I refuse for the overall theme of Black history to be pain and bondage. The focus should always be on how Black Americans persisted in spite of that. How they thrived, how we still thrive, no matter what obstacles we face. 

Writing in Ida’s voice reminded me how important it was to use mine. I hope it does the same for anyone who reads this book!