Hey, is that young Black actor in HBO’s “The Gilded Age” supposed to be Ida B. Wells?
I’m not the only viewer who has asked that question about the period drama, set in elite New York society in the 1880s, even though as a loyal Chicagoan, I like to think of the Southern-born investigative journalist and anti-lynching crusader as one of our very own.
These have been encouraging times for memorials to Wells, also known by her married name, Ida B. Wells-Barnett. After years of fundraising, a monument titled The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument was unveiled last year on the South Side where she used to live. In 2019, the city renamed the prominent east-west Congress Parkway after her and the Pulitzer Prize board gave her a special posthumous award.
Now British writer Julian Fellowes, also known for the award-winning “Gosford Park” and “Downton Abbey,” says he was at least inspired by Wells in creating the young aspiring Black writer Peggy Scott, played by Denee Benton, in “The Gilded Age.”
Peggy contains multitudes, as Walt Whitman might say. Besides Wells, Fellowes says he borrowed from at least two other Black trailblazers: Julia C. Collins, a Pennsylvania teacher and novelist of the period, and Susan McKinney Steward, New York’s first Black female doctor.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a Rutgers University-New Brunswick historian and series co-executive producer, also advised the production for historical accuracy about the life of African Americans in the period, who too often are reduced to stereotypes, if not overlooked entirely.
That’s why I was delighted when, after tuning in to learn more about the post-Civil War period that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner branded with their satirical 1873 novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” the series, which debuted last month, didn’t leave Black folks out.
The main story centers on two wealthy white families who live in neighboring mansions on Fifth Avenue and represent opposing forces in elite New York society: The old money Van Rhijns, who proudly cling to their pre-Revolutionary roots, and the newly rich Russells, who are determined to use their newly earned railroad fortune to buy and cajole their way into Manhattan’s upper crust.
But, in an intriguing twist, the story also follows the Scotts, a prominent Black family from Brooklyn, which was a separate city until it became a borough of New York City in 1898. Their daughter Peggy is the aspiring writer who works as a secretary to the prickly Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski).
Educated at the prestigious Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, she’s a young woman with dreams. She befriends Agnes’ niece Marian Brook, played by Louisa Jacobson, as she navigates the mostly white mainstream press and its prejudices in pursuit of writing assignments.
She and Marian represent a rising generation trying to shrug off the limits and roadblocks put in their way by their elders in a time of great social change.
Although Peggy is not playing Ida B. Wells, the series includes such real-life notables as journalist-activist T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones), another who hired Wells in real life after a white mob, angered by her anti-lynching editorials, destroyed her Memphis newspaper’s office.
Wells would later marry Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a fellow crusading journalist, lawyer and civil rights activist in Chicago. Among other activities, she campaigned with Frederick Douglass to distribute a pamphlet of essays titled “The Reason Why,” decrying the lack of African American representation exhibits at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
As Wells-Barnett’s great-granddaughter, Chicago author and public historian Michelle Duster, who led the campaign for Wells monument, told me, the grand story of African American perseverance and achievements in the Gilded Age has been “tragically undertold.”
I agree. Maybe the prominence of Black life in “The Gilded Age” is a sign that more people want to know about this hidden history, perhaps in the way that Alex Haley’s “Roots” sent many in my generation scurrying to interview our elders and fill the gaps in our family histories.
We can only hope. At least, “The Gilded Age” offers a decent start. It shows the African American story as it should be considered, as an integral, if too-often overlooked, part of the America story.
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Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at bancodeprofissionais.com/pagespage.
Twitter @cptime
