Woman with a Mission

destination freedom destination freedom dramatizations of the great democratic heritage of the Negro people is brought to you by station WMAQ as a part of the pageant of history and of America's own destination freedom on the south side of Chicago there stands a public housing project one of the largest in the Midwest named for a female pioneer in the fight for the freedom of the press and for

women suffrage she was either B Wells and in a chapter entitled woman with a mission, we tell her story. My story started in the post Civil War days of Holly Springs, Mississippi, when the chaos and confusion of the war came to an end, and where I grew up quietly curious about the world

around me and got a rare education and a school for freedmen. We did not let you waste that education, Eddie. My mother was always saying this. She was a deeply religious woman who had raised eight children, and to me the eldest she would say, I want you to do something with your education, besides scrunded.

Your father and I have decided you leave early springs, and stay on the farm with your grandfooks. You stay there till the yellow fever stops, striking down those of us who trapped here in the slums.

You hear that? I heard it in the days. fellow fever was filling the graves with men and women, white and black, around holly springs. A great plague had come down on us. Out on the farm, the air is clean and fresh, and the folks will need help with the cotton.

Then you have a chance to live through the epidemic. What about you and father and the children? Never mind about us, child. We get low, all right. And if we don't go, it's a comfort to know we left a piece of us who's got her bearings, who can stand up for itself in the world against evil