Prominent Black journalist, educator, writer and early civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett used her writing, research, and unrelenting commitment to become one of the most important anti-lynching advocates in American history. Wells was a groundbreaking journalist, an activist, a co-founder of the NAACP. She has been called by some, "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement". She was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, during the Civil War, just six months prior to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Once the war ended Wells-Barnett’s parents became politically active in Reconstruction Era politics. Her father was known as a "race man" for his involvement in politics and his commitment to the Republican Party.
Her parents instilled into her the importance of education. The Wells family lived near Shaw University (now Rust College). Ida B. Wells was one of their eight children, and she enrolled in Shaw University. Life was not smooth sailing. She was ousted from Rust over a dispute with the university president. Then, at the age of sixteen she lost both parents and her baby brother to an outbreak of yellow fever. She became primary caregiver to her six brothers and sisters, when both of her parents succumbed to yellow fever. Wells had been visiting her grandmother's farm near Holly Springs at the time and was spared. Friends and family wanted to split the children up, but young Ida took on the responsibility of becoming the new head of her family to keep her siblings together.
She managed to continue her education. After completing her studies at Rust College, Wells divided her time between caring for her siblings and teaching school. It was a very challenging time in Ida’s life. In 1881 Ida’s grandmother and one of her sisters died, so Ida and her two youngest sisters moved to Memphis, Tennessee, about 56 miles from Holly Springs, where they had an aunt who could help her. Her brothers found work as carpentry apprentices, and for a time Wells continued her education at Fisk University in Nashville, travelling between the two cities. While teaching in Memphis and started writing articles for local newspapers. She began writing a column for "The Living Way", a weekly newspaper, under the pen name “Iola”. Her writings for the newspaper under her pen name attacked racist Jim Crow policies, and racial injustices. She held strong political opinions and provoked many people with her views on women's rights.
Ida was a strong-willed and spirited woman. Wells first began protesting the treatment of Black Southerners on a train ride between Memphis and her job at a rural school. In 1884, she purchased a first class train ticket from Memphis to Nashville. When the conductor found out she was African American, she was asked to move to the “Colored” train car, which was already crowded with other passengers. She absolutely refused, arguing that she had purchased a first-class ticket. The conductor and other passengers then physically removed her from the train. She returned to Memphis and filed a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southeastern Railroad, citing racial discrimination, claiming it had violated the 1875 Civil Rights Act. The court decided in her favor, awarding Wells $500 in damages. The railroad company appealed, and in 1887, the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed the lower court's decision and ordered Wells to pay court fees. This verdict supported railroad companies that chose to racially segregate their passengers.
In 1889, at age 25, Wells became a part owner of "The Memphis Free Speech" and "Headlight and Free Speech" newspaper, where she continued to write columns against racism. In addition to working as a journalist and publisher, Eventually, her investigative journalism was carried nationally in Black-owned newspapers. Wells worked as a teacher in a segregated public school in Memphis. She was a vocal critic of the condition of segregated schools in the city, and in 1891 was fired by the Memphis Board of Education due to her articles criticizing conditions in the Black schools of the region. Being a woman only compounded the obstacles Wells faced. She was constantly at odds with an early civil rights movement that privileged the rights and concerns of men. A movement that often expected activists to choose between racial equality and gender equality, rather than champion both, Wells refused to do so. She was devastated but undaunted, and concentrated her energy on writing articles for "The Living Way" and the "Headlight and Free Speech".
In 1892, Wells turned her attention to anti-lynching after a friend and two of his business associates were murdered. Her friends and the business associate started a grocery store, which drew customers away from the White-owned store in the neighborhood. Thomas Moss Sr., opened People's Grocery, which he co-owned. Moss's store did well and competed with a White-owned grocery store across the street, Barrett's Grocery, owned by William Russell Barrett. On March 2, 1892, a young Black male youth and a young White male youth got into a fight. The father of the White male intervened and began to "thrash" the Black male. The People's Grocery employees William Stewart and Calvin R. McDowell saw the fight and Stewart rushed outside to defend the Black male. Barrett returned the following day, to the People's Grocery with a Shelby County Sheriff's Deputy, looking for William Stewart. Calvin McDowell said that Stewart wasn't present. Barrett was dissatisfied with the response as he was frustrated that the People's Grocery was competing with his store.
A week later on March 9th, a group of six White men including a sheriff's deputy gathered to confront McDowell, Moss, and Stewart at the Peoples Grocery. The group of White men were met by a barrage of bullets. Hundreds of Whites were deputized almost immediately to help out. Authorities arrested the three Black business owners. A White mob subsequently broke into the jail, took McDowell, Moss, and Stewart, and shot them dead, and then they lynched them. Wells wrote articles decrying the lynching and risked her own life traveling the south to gather information on other lynchings. After the lynching of her friends, Wells wrote in Headlight and Free Speech urging Blacks to leave Memphis altogether. Ida was devastated by this violent death. She bought a pistol for self-defense.
On May 21, 1892, one of her editorials pushed some of the city's Whites over the edge. In that editorial, she refuted what she called "that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women." On May 25, The Daily Commercial wrote: "The fact that a Black scoundrel [Ida B. Wells] is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern Whites. But we've had enough of it". A White mob stormed the Free Speech office and destroyed all of her equipment. Wells was in New York at the time of the incident, which likely saved her life. They threatened to hang her should she ever return to Memphis. She traveled to New York and subsequently accepted a job with The New York Age and continued her anti-lynching campaign.
On October 26, Wells re-published her research in a pamphlet titled "Southern Horrors. Lynch Law in all Its Phases". In it she showed that one-third of charges against Black men were for the rape of White women, which therefore “justified” the violence in the name of protecting White women. Skeptical about the reasons Black men were lynched, she set out to investigate several cases. 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. Black economic progress was a contemporary issue in the South, and in many states Whites worked to suppress Black progress.
Exiled, Wells left Tennessee in 1892, joining the 6,000 African Americans who had already listened to her call to flee the racism pervasive in their southern city. Wells settled in amongst the Black elite in Chicago. She published an exposé on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, The Reason Why: The Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, criticizing the event for the refusal to allow participation by African Americans, despite being a global event. Her work gained Wells an ally in Frederick Douglass. To make her antilynching crusade international, Wells lectured in Great Britain in 1893 and 1894, and established the British Anti-Lynching Society in 1894. She and her supporters in America saw these tours as an opportunity for her to reach larger, White audiences with her anti-lynching campaign. Rallying a moral crusade among the British, she found sympathetic audiences in Britain, shocked by the photographs and reports of lynching in America, when she showed her pamphlet Southern Horrors. Frederick Douglass was to make the trip, but he declined, citing his age and health. He then suggested Wells, who enthusiastically accepted the invitation.
Upon returning from her tour in 1895, Wells moved to Chicago, Illinois. During that year, Wells married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, another prominent journalist, civil rights activist and anti-lynching activist, whom she had met at the Columbian Exposition, and embraced a new challenge of balancing motherhood with her activist pursuits. Like Wells, he spoke widely against lynchings and in support of the civil rights of African Americans. Ferdinand supported Ida’s career at a time when most women were expected to give up working outside the home when they got married. Both shared a commitment to civil rights. Wells and Barnett had met in 1893 at the aforementioned World's Columbian Exposition. As an outward sign of her continued commitment to her own identity, she hyphenated her last name, an uncommon practice in the nineteenth century. Ida B. Wells-Barnett continued investigating lynchings around the country.
Furthermore, Wells-Barnett challenged a fundamental assumption regarding lynching by providing evidence that African-American men were not the exclusive victims of mob violence, but rather that African-American women, too, had been subjected to lynchings. For example, on August 20, 1886, a mob took Eliza Woods from a jail in Jackson, Tennessee, and hanged her for allegedly poisoning her employer. In an editorial for The Gate City Press, Wells-Barnett stated that Eliza Woods “was taken from the county jail and stripped naked and hung up in the courthouse yard and her body riddled with bullets and left exposed to view!" Between 1880 and 1930, at least one hundred and thirty African-American women were murdered by lynch mobs. Her increased exposure also subjected Wells-Barnett to criticism, with one activist describing her as “a bull in a China shop” in reference to her blunt approach to sensitive subjects.
In 1895 she published a pamphlet, the Red Record, the first statistical record of the history of American lynchings, Wells visited places where people had been hanged, shot, beaten, burned alive, drowned or mutilated. She examined photos of victims hanging from trees as mobs looked on, pored over local newspaper accounts, took sworn statements from eyewitnesses and, on occasion, even hired private investigators. It was astoundingly courageous work in an era of Jim Crow segregation and in which women did not have the vote. Wells, however, was a force of nature who once said, “One had better die fighting injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.” On another occasion, she wrote: “I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. If I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.” The Red Record's documentation of lynchings captured the attention of Northerners who knew little about these mob murders or accepted the common explanation that Black men deserved this fate. Wells was putting names to stories and names to statistics.
When she relocated to Chicago, Wells-Barnett and feminist social reformer, Jane Addams collaborated, as well as sometimes challenged one another, in their effort to create a more just world. They collaborated, as well as sometimes challenged one another, in their effort to create a more just world. Wells was outraged when the Chicago Tribune published a series of articles suggesting adoption of a system of racial segregation in public schools and wrote denouncing the articles. She sought the help of Addams in her cause. The two reformers were successful in their struggle to block the establishment of segregated public schools in Chicago. Wells openly confronted White women in the suffrage movement who ignored lynching. Because of her stance, she was often ridiculed and ostracized by women’s suffrage organizations in the United States. Nevertheless, Wells-Barnett remained active the women’s rights movement.
Wells-Barnett formed and served in several civil rights organizations. In 1896, she along with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Church Terrell and others founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in Washington, D.C. Mary Church Terrell became the first president of the NACW. They advocated for women’s rights as well as to “uplift” and improve the status of African Americans. From 1898 to 1902 Wells-Barnett served as secretary of the National Afro-American Council. She brought her anti-lynching campaign to the White House in 1898 and called for President McKinley to make reforms. In 1908, Wells, her husband, and some members of their Bible study group found the Negro Fellowship League. They served as a reading room, library, activity center, and shelter for young Black men in the local community at a time when the local Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) did not allow Black men to become members. With the help of Ferdinand Barnett, Wells’ husband and lawyer, the center also provided legal aid for young men accused of crimes.
In 1906, Well-Barnett took part in the Niagara Movement. In the wake of a major race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in August 1908 Wells-Barnett and other prominent Black leaders helped formed an organization that would later become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Shortly after the founding of the NAACP, she withdrew because of opposition to her membership and because she felt the other members were too cautious in their approach to fighting racial injustice. In particular, the new leading voices, Booker T. Washington, his rival, W.E.B Du Bois. In her writing and lectures, Wells-Barnett often criticized middle-class Black people, including ministers, for not being active enough in helping the poor in the Black community. She insisted on airing, in full detail, the atrocities taking place in the South, while others thought doing so would be counterproductive to negotiations with White politicians.
Wells-Barnett was an active fighter for woman suffrage, particularly for Black women. She focused her work on Black women's suffrage in the city following the enactment of a new state law enabling partial women's suffrage. The Illinois Presidential and Municipal Suffrage Bill of 1913 gave women in the state the right to vote for presidential electors, mayor, aldermen and most other local offices; but not for governor, state representatives or members of Congress. Illinois was the first state east of the Mississippi to grant women these voting rights. Wells, also published “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynching” in Original Rights Magazine in 1910, showing that when Black voters in Illinois elected a Black state legislator in 1904, he worked to pass a law against mob violence.
On January 30th, 1913 Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. The Alpha Suffrage Club was founded as a way to further voting rights for all women, to teach Black women how to engage in civic matters. The club also organized women in the city to elect candidates who would best serve the Black community. As president of the club, Wells-Barnett 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-Barnett 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. She visibly linked arms with her White suffragist colleagues, for the rest of the parade.
Work done by Wells and the Alpha Suffrage Club played a crucial role in the victory of woman suffrage in Illinois with the passage of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Act. Through her leadership, the Suffrage Club became actively involved in the election of Oscar DePriest, the first African American alderman of Chicago. Her interest in politics eventually led to Wells-Barnett’s unsuccessful campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1930. During World War I, the U.S. government placed Wells under surveillance, labeling her a dangerous "race agitator". She defied this threat by continuing civil rights work during this period with such figures as Marcus Garvey, and William Monroe Trotter. In 1917, Wells wrote a series of investigative reports for the Chicago Defender on the East St. Louis Race Riots. Four years later, she returned to the South for the first time in thirty years to investigate the indictment for murder of twelve innocent farmers in Elaine, Arkansas. She raised money to publish and distribute one thousand copies of The Arkansas Race Riot (1922), in which she recorded the results of her investigation.
In 1918, with pressure from Wells-Barnett, Congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri first introduced his anti-lynching bill—known as the Dyer Bill —into Congress. The NAACP supported the passage of this bill from 1919 onward. The Dyer Bill was passed by the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922. Because of Democratic opposition, the bill failed in the senate as did all federal efforts to end lynching, White supremacy’s weapon of terror. During the 1920s, she participated in the struggle for African-American workers' rights, urging Black women's organizations to support the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, as it tried to gain legitimacy. She used her political clubs, specifically the Ida B. Wells Club and the Negro Fellowship League, as venues to discuss and organize support for Pullman unionization. She sought the presidency of the NACW in 1924, but lost to the more diplomatic Mary McLeod Bethune.
In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment legalized women’s suffrage and Wells-Barnett, eager to encourage newly enfranchised African American women to challenge social injustices, founded several political organizations, including the Third Ward Women’s Political Club. Wells-Barnett continued to write throughout her final decade. Her goal in establishing this group was to train Black women to run for political office. She acted on this conviction herself, running for an Illinois senate seat in 1930. She lost in the primary, but felt the campaign was a valuable experience that would benefit other Black women. In 1928 she began an autobiography, "Crusade for Justice", which was published posthumously. After a brief illness, Ida B. Wells-Barnett died on March 25, 1931, at the age of sixty-nine. She was ahead of her time. For more than four decades, Wells-Barnett's militant voice brought worldwide attention to the evil of lynching and influenced the course of American reform. As a journalist, educator, and anti-lynching activist, Wells addressed the challenges Black women faced at the convergence of racism and sexism. She was militant in her demand for justice for Black Americans and dedicated in her insistence that it was to be won by their own efforts.
She was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, educator, suffragist, public speaker and women’s club leader. Black journalist and civil rights activist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett improved the African American experience by confronting sexism, racism and exposing the truth.
“One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”
“There must always be a remedy for wrong and injustice if we only know how to find it.”
“The appetite grows for what it feeds on.”
“Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense.”
“Virtue knows no color line.”
“The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.”
“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.”
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
“Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.”