Ida B. Wells: Education, Career, and Crusade for Justice
Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a remarkable figure in American history, an African American civil rights advocate, journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. Born into slavery, she rose to become a prominent voice against racial injustice and a champion for equality. Her life was marked by a relentless pursuit of truth and justice, leaving an enduring legacy that continues to inspire.
Early Life and Education
Ida B. Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the Civil War. She was the first of eight children born to James Madison Wells and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Warrenton, both of whom were enslaved to architect Spires Boling. The Bolling-Gatewood House, where her parents lived and worked, later became the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum.
The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freed Ida and her family. Her parents married and became active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction. Her father, a carpenter, was involved with the Freedman's Aid Society and helped start Shaw University (now Rust College). Ida attended Rust College to receive her early education. Even her mother attended the school to learn to read the Bible. She was surrounded by political activists and grew up during Reconstruction with a sense of hope about the possibilities of former slaves within the American society.
Tragedy and Responsibility
In 1878, tragedy struck when a yellow fever epidemic claimed the lives of her parents and infant brother. At the young age of 16, Ida assumed the responsibility of rearing her five surviving younger brothers and sisters. Determined to keep her family together, she found work as a teacher in a rural Black elementary school outside Holly Springs. To get the job, she had to lie about her age and pass a teaching exam, which she did, despite never graduating from school herself.
Moving to Memphis and Facing Discrimination
After two years, she moved with her sisters to Memphis, Tennessee, to live with their aunt. Her brothers found work as carpentry apprentices. In Woodstock, she was hired by the Shelby County school system. During her summer vacations, she attended summer sessions at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee. She also attended LeMoyne-Owen College, a historically Black college in Memphis.
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In May 1884, while on a train ride from Memphis to Nashville, Wells reached a turning point. She had bought a first-class ticket, but the train crew forced her to move to the car for African Americans. Wells refused on principle, before being forcibly removed from the train. As she was being removed, she bit one of the crew members. Wells sued the railroad for discrimination, and won a $500 settlement in a circuit case court. The decision was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which concluded that "the purpose of the defendant in error was to harass with a view to this suit, and that her persistence was not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for the short ride." Wells was ordered to pay court costs. Her reaction to the higher court's decision revealed her strong convictions on civil rights and religious faith, as she responded: "I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people. … O God, is there no …"
Journalism Career and Activism
Following this incident, Wells began writing about issues of race and politics in the South. Using the name "Iola", Wells had a number of her articles published in black newspapers and periodicals. She accepted an editorial position for a small Memphis journal, the Evening Star, and she began writing weekly articles for The Living Way newspaper under the pen name "Iola". Articles she wrote under her pen name attacked racist Jim Crow policies. In 1889, she became editor and co-owner with J. L. Fleming of two newspapers: The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and Free Speech.
In 1887, Wells was elected secretary of the Black-run National Press Association. Wells became known as the "Princess of the Press" by her mostly male editorial colleagues.
Anti-Lynching Crusade
In 1891, Wells was dismissed from her teaching post by the Memphis Board of Education due to her articles criticizing conditions in the Black schools of the region.
In 1892, Wells found a focus for her militancy following a triple lynching in Memphis. Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart started a grocery store, which drew customers away from a white-owned store in the neighborhood. The white store owner and his supporters clashed with Moss, McDowell, and Stewart on multiple occasions. One night they had to guard their store against an attack, and ended up shooting several of the white men. They were arrested, and taken to jail. A lynch mob took them from their cells and murdered them. This event led Wells to begin investigating lynchings.
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Wells wrote articles decrying the lynching and risked her own life traveling the south to gather information on other lynchings. She began to interview people associated with lynchings, including a lynching in Tunica, Mississippi, in 1892 where she concluded that the father of a young white woman had implored a lynch mob to kill a Black man with whom his daughter was having a sexual relationship, under a pretense "to save the reputation of his daughter".
Wells's anti-lynching commentaries in the Free Speech had been building, particularly with respect to lynchings and imprisonment of Black men suspected of raping White women. A story was published on January 16, 1892, in the Cleveland Gazette, describing a wrongful conviction for a sexual affair between a married White woman, Julia Underwood (née Julie Caroline Wells), and a single Black man, William Offet (1854-1914) of Elyria, Ohio.
On May 21, 1892, Wells published an editorial in the Free Speech refuting what she called "that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. As a result of her outspokenness, a mob stormed her newspaper office and destroyed all of her equipment. Wells was in New York at the time of the incident, which likely saved her life. She stayed in the North after her life was threatened and wrote an in-depth report on lynching in America for the New York Age, a newspaper run by T. Thomas Fortune, a former slave. According to Kenneth W. Goings, no copy of the Memphis Free Speech survives.
On October 26, 1892, Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Having examined many accounts of lynchings due to the alleged "rape of white women", she concluded that Southerners accused Black men of rape to hide their real reasons for lynchings: Black economic progress, which white Southerners saw as a threat to their own economic progress, and white ideas of enforcing Black second-class status in the society. Wells, in Southern Horrors, adopted the phrase "poor, blind Afro-American Sampsons" to denote Black men as victims of "white Delilahs".
After conducting further research, Wells published A Red Record, in 1895. This 100-page pamphlet was a sociological investigation of lynching in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It also covered Black people's struggles in the South since the Civil War. A Red Record explored the alarmingly high rates of lynching in the United States (which was at a peak from 1880 to 1930). Wells said that during Reconstruction, most Americans outside the South did not realize the growing rate of violence against Black people in the South. She believed that during slavery, white people had not committed as many attacks because of the economic labor value of slaves. Once the Civil War ended, white people feared Black people, who were in the majority in many areas. During the Reconstruction Era white people murdered Black people as part of mob efforts to suppress Black political activity and re-establish white supremacy after the war. They feared so-called "Negro Domination" through voting and taking office.
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Wells collected 14 pages of statistics related to lynching cases committed from 1892 to 1895; she also included pages of graphic accounts detailing specific lynchings. She wrote that her data was taken from articles by white correspondents, white press bureaus, and white newspapers. Her delivery of these statistics did not simply reduce the murders to numbers, Wells strategically paired the data with descriptive accounts in a way that helped her audience conceptualize the scale of the injustice.
Wells travelled twice to Britain in her campaign against lynching, the first time in 1893 and the second in 1894 in effort to gain the support of a powerfu.
Marriage and Family
In 1895, Wells married Ferdinand Barnett, a widower and a fellow crusader who was a well-known attorney as well as the founder of The Conservator newspaper. Barnett had two children from his previous marriage, the couple had four children together in eight years. Even with this added responsibility, Wells continued in her relentless fight for social justice.
Ida was one of the earliest American women to hyphenate her last name with her husband’s. The family settled in Chicago.
Continued Activism and Advocacy
Even after Wells married Barnett in 1895, she continued her activism. Assuming the editorship of her husband's newspaper, the Chicago Conservator, Wells-Barnett remained a militant voice, giving speeches, investigating lynchings, criticizing Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach to racial equality.
She brought her anti-lynching campaign to the White House in 1898 and called for President McKinley to make reforms.
She was involved with many clubs and organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Though she is considered a founder of the NAACP, Wells cut ties with the organization because she felt it that in its infancy it lacked action-based initiatives.
Wells was an active fighter for woman suffrage, particularly for Black women. On January 30, 1913 Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. The club organized women in the city to elect candidates who would best serve the Black community. As president of the club, Wells was invited to march in the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC along with dozens of other club members. Organizers, afraid of offending Southern white suffragists, asked women of color to march at the back of the parade. Wells refused, and stood on the parade sidelines until the Chicago contingent of white women passed, at which point she joined the march. The rest of the Suffrage Club contingent marched at the back of the parade. Work done by Wells and the Alpha Suffrage Club played a crucial role in the victory of woman suffrage in Illinois on June 25, 1913 with the passage of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Act.
She created one of the first kindergartens for Black children in Chicago. For ten years, from 1910 - 1920, she and her husband started and ran a rooming house and social center called the Negro Fellowship League.
In her final year of life, Ida ran for Illinois state senate.
Legacy and Recognition
Ida B. Wells-Barnett died on March 25, 1931, in Chicago, leaving a formidable legacy of undaunted courage and tenacity in the fight against racism and sexism in America. She and her husband are interred at Oak Wood Cemetery in Chicago.
Her legacy continues to inspire in the form of scholarships, awards, buildings, streets names, historical markers, books, movies and more.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett never gave up. A remarkable journalist, speaker, activist, and lifelong fighter for truth and justice, there’s a good chance you’ve heard her name before but don’t know the full details of her accomplishments. And some details of her extraordinary life may even surprise the most knowledgeable history students.
On May 4, 2020, Ida B. Wells was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize "for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."
Ida B. Wells is associated with the Ida B. Wells-Barnett House. It is located at 3624 S. Martin Luther King Dr. in Chicago-- it is a private residence and not open to the public.
On March 29, 2022, Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime. “Lynching” is defined as, “executing-usually by a mob-without a trial,” a brutal act that is often an act of racial violence. But many people do not know that Ida B. Wells-Barnett took some of the first steps in the long crusade against lynching over a century ago. The effects of her work are still playing out today.
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