A tireless champion of her
people, Ida B. Wells was the first of eight children born to Jim and Elizabeth
Wells in Mississippi in 1862, six months before chattel slavery was ended with
the Emancipation Proclamation.
Her parents, who had been
slaves, were able to support their children because Elizabeth was an excellent
cook and Jim a skilled carpenter. But when Ida was only 16, her parents and
youngest sibling died of Yellow Fever during an epidemic. In keeping with the strength and fortitude
she demonstrated throughout her remarkable life, Ida took responsibility for
raising her six younger siblings with her grandmother’s help. Educated at nearby
Rust College, a school run by white missionaries, Ida was forced to drop out; she
got a full-time teaching job by lying about her age, and spent weekends
washing, ironing and cooking for her large family.
Wells eventually moved to
Memphis, Tenn., where she taught school in a small town called Woodstock and
continued her education by attending Fisk University and Lemoyne Institute
during the summers.
Ida’s career as a writer
was sparked by an incident that occurred in 1884, while riding a train back to
her job in Woodstock. Wells was asked by the conductor to move from her seat in
the ladies' car into the smoking car.
"I refused," she
later wrote, describing how the conductor tried to drag her out of the seat:
"the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of
his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the
back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn’t try it again by
himself. He went forward and got the baggage man and another man to help him
and of course they succeeded in dragging me out."
When Wells got back to
Memphis, she brought suit against the Railroad Company. The court ruled in her
favor and awarded her $500 in damages. The judge presiding over the trial
stated the railroad company violated the separate but equal laws by forcing Wells
to ride in a smoking car that was separate but not first class, for which she
had paid.
Even though the Tennessee
Supreme Court reversed the decision three years later, this was the first case
of its kind in the South, and generated tremendous public interest.
Thrilled with her victory
and eager to share her story, Wells wrote an article for The Living Way,
a Black Memphis newspaper, using the pen name "Iola."
Her prolific writing soon
earned her the position of editor for three Memphis newspapers, The Living
Way, The Evening Star and Free Speech, becoming part owner of
the latter.
"All of this,
although gratifying surprised me very much for I had no training except what
the work on The Evening Star had given me, and no literary gifts and
graces. But I had observed and thought much about conditions as I had seen them
in the country schools and churches. I had an instinctive feeling that the
people who had little or no school training should have something coming into
their homes weekly, which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way.
So in weekly letters to The Living Way, I wrote in a plain, common sense
way on the things which concerned our people. Knowing that their education was limited,
I never used a word of two syllables where one would serve the purpose. I
signed these articles "Iola."
On exposing the inferior
facilities of Black schools around Memphis, Wells was fired from her teaching
job, but was then free to devote full time to the fight for justice and
equality. She quickly became a famous writer whose articles appeared in journals
and newspapers throughout the nation.
One reporter noted:
"Miss Ida B. Wells, Iola, has been called the Princess of the Press, and
she has well earned the title. No writer, the male fraternity not excepted, has
been more extensively quoted."
In her autobiography, she
wrote:
"While I was thus
carrying on the work of my newspaper, happy in the thought that our influence
was helpful and that I was doing the work I loved and had proved that I could
make a living out of it, there came the lynching in Memphis which changed the whole
course of my life. I was on one of my trips away from home busily engaged in
Natchez when word came of the lynching of three men in Memphis."
It was during a cold night
in March 1892. Wells' close friends, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry
Stewart, owners of
People's Grocery Co., had
angered white men who considered them "uppity" and sought to
eliminate the competition they posed by an armed attack on their grocery store.
But the brothers fought back,
shooting one of the attackers. Shortly thereafter, all three were arrested. A
mob of cursing, shouting white men broke into the jail at Memphis, dragged them
away from town and brutally murdered them.
Wells responded to this
atrocious act of violence by writing an editorial in the Free Speech: She noted the lynching was really "an
excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus
keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’
“The city of Memphis has demonstrated
that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect
himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do
about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could
help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced
against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left
to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and
property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us
in cold blood when accused by white persons."
Memphis Blacks took Wells'
advice, and in two month's time, six thousand black people left Memphis, many
relocating to the Oklahoma Territory. Those who remained organized boycotts of white
owned businesses in response to the lynchings.
The very night her article
appeared, a mob invaded Wells' offices and destroyed the printing equipment and
all the newspapers they could find. Her very life in danger, Wells moved to
Chicago where she continued her blistering attacks on racist criminality and
Southern injustice.
After the demise of The
Free Speech, a Black newspaper called The New York Age began
printing her articles, and Wells launched a lecturing tour throughout the
northeast to further spread her message on the horrors of lynching.
Later on in 1892, Wells
spoke at a conference of black women's clubs, where she was given $500 to
investigate lynching and publish her findings.
"I then began an
investigation of every lynching I read about. By 1893, over a thousand Black
men, women and children had been hanged, shot and burned to death by white mobs
in America."
During the late 1800's,
violence against blacks increased at alarming rates and mob rule was becoming
the norm. The KuKluxKlan established a "reign of terror," murdering
and lynching innocent blacks, while most southern whites looked the other way.
Ida B. Wells traveled
across the country interviewing eyewitnesses and visiting the scenes of
lynchings. Of the 728 murders she investigated, Wells found that only a third
involved Blacks actually accused of crimes. Not only men, but women and children
were victims of mob violence.
Many blacks were hung, shot
and burned to death for trivial things such as not paying a debt, disrespecting
whites, testifying in court, stealing hogs, and public drunkenness. At least
one third of the charges against black men were for the rape of white women.
The racist violence against Black men was thus "justified" as
protecting "white womanhood."
Wells wrote that in many
of these so-called "rape" cases there was evidence of a consensual
relationship between black men and white women, evoking outrage among whites. Her findings were published in a pamphlet
titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.
Repeating an assertion she
frequently made during her anti-lynching crusade, Wells said that she had but
one life to give, and if she must die by violence, she would take some of her
persecutors with her. She kept a pistol available in the house and dared anyone
to cross her threshold to harm her or any member of her family.
While remaining diligent
in her anti-lynching crusade, Wells spearheaded the development of numerous
African women's organizations in Chicago and Boston. She became a tireless
worker for women’s right to vote, befriending both Susan B. Anthony and Jane
Adams, and becoming a familiar face at suffrage meetings.
She became the first
female representative to a press convention. And in 1889, at a Washington, D.C.
convention, Wells was elected secretary to the National Press Association where
she met for the first time, the great Frederick Douglass.
Later on, Wells
collaborated with Douglass and others, including her future husband, in writing
a pamphlet titled "Reasons Why the Colored American is not in the World's
Colombian Exposition" in response to the exclusion of Blacks in the 1893
Chicago World's Fair. It documented the progress of blacks since their arrival
in America, and was distributed to over 20,000 people.
Wells also became an
activist in the struggle to block the establishment of segregated schools, and
established the first kindergarten in a Black neighborhood.
In 1893, Wells embarked on
a lecture tour of England, Scotland, and Wales, inspiring international
organizations to apply pressure on America to end segregation and lynching.
Two years later, she
published a report titled "A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged
causes of Lynching in the United States,” which argued that the impetus behind
lynching was economic.
That same year, 1895, at
the age of 33, Wells married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer, activist
and editor. Barnett was the owner and founder of The Conservator, the first
black newspaper in Chicago. Together, they had two sons and two daughters.
Although the renowned journalist then took time out to focus on her family, she
remained politically active.
In 1906, she joined with
W.E.B. DuBois and others to further the Niagara Movement.
She helped found the
National Association of Colored Women and the NAACP. In 1910 she formed the
Negro Fellowship League, which she housed in a three-story building on Chicago's
south side. It served as a fellowship home for new settlers from the south and
provided space for religious services, an employment office, and a homeless
shelter for men.
In1913, Wells established
the first Black women's suffrage club. That
same year she marched in a suffrage parade in Washington DC and met with
President William McKinley about a lynching in South Carolina.
In 1916, She became
involved with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. And in
the years following World War I, she covered various race riots in Arkansas,
East St. Louis and Chicago, publishing her reports in pamphlets and newspapers nationwide.
In 1928, Wells began her
autobiography, stating that "the history of this entire period which
reflected glory on the race should be known. Yet most of it is buried in
oblivion... and so, because our youth are entitled to the facts of race history
which only the participants can give, I am thus led to set forth the
facts."
By 1930, her impatience
with politicians and her growing concern for Chicago's Black ghetto led Wells
to run for the Illinois State Senate, which she lost to the incumbent.
Wells continued her
community organizing till the end of her life, determined to change the
conditions of poverty and hopelessness on Chicago's South Side.
On March 25, 1931, at the
age of 69, Ida B. Wells-Barnett joined the ancestors, leaving an incredible
legacy of courage, sacrifice, dedication and activism. Given the harsh,
dangerous conditions of the post Civil-War context in which she struggled, her
accomplishments were truly amazing. She was surely one of the 20th century's
most remarkable women.
In 1941, a Chicago housing
development was named in her honor, and in 1990 the U.S. Postal Service issued
an Ida B. Wells-Barnett postage stamp. Her autobiography, "Crusade for Justice,"
edited by A. Duster, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1970.
Long live the spirit of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
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