TV REVIEW : Ex-Slave’s Battle With Racism, Sexism and Poverty

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Those words were written in 1927 by a brilliant American journalist whose long, controversial career as the nation’s conscience began in 1884.

Tonight, PBS’ “The American Experience” series, at 9 on channels 15 and 28, offers a keenly realized profile of Ida B. Wells, an African-American who used her potent skills as writer and orator to fight racism and sexism.

Wells was born into slavery in 1862 Mississippi. She matured during the ferment of Reconstruction and its demise. She saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the emergence of a black middle class and the apathy of the North.

In 1892, in Memphis, where half the population was black, three of Wells’ friends were lynched. She wrote scathing anti-lynching editorials in the black press, incurring extra wrath by connecting lynchings with sexism.

She shrewdly urged a boycott of white businesses and encouraged thousands of blacks to leave Memphis. They did; Wells fled the South with a price on her head.

She then took her painstakingly researched anti-lynching campaign to Britain where indignant public reaction embarrassed the United States into a belated moral outrage of its own. Lynchings decreased.

Wells was the first black journalist inducted into the Tennessee Press Assn.’s Hall of Fame and was co-founder of the NAACP and other civil rights groups.

Through interviews with historians, writers and sociologists, through powerful images from period photographs, paintings and films and excerpts from Wells’ memoir “Crusade for Justice,” film maker William Greaves reveals this heroic, passionate woman.