Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells (b. 1862–d. 1931) gained prominence in the 19th century as a journalist and social activist. She began her professional career, however, as a teacher in the rural schools near Holly Springs, Mississippi, where she was born, and then in the Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tennessee. In Memphis, she joined a lyceum, an intellectually vibrant group of African American professionals, and she became editor of the lyceum’s newspaper, the Evening Star. During this time period, racially oppressive Jim Crow practices were taking hold in the South, and Wells fell victim to its effects. She was forcibly evicted from the ladies’ car of the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad Company, and she refused to ride in the segregated smoking car. She won a lawsuit against the company in the circuit court, but lost in the Tennessee Supreme Court (1887). She wrote about the experience in another paper, the Living Way, in which she became a regular contributor, with articles syndicated in periodicals in other cities as well. By 1889 she was a co-owner and editor of The Free Speech, writing bold editorials related to freedom and justice for African Americans. Her editorials that protested educational inequities and that exposed an interracial affair of a school board member factored significantly in her being fired from the public schools. By 1891 she had become a full-time journalist and was building a reputation as an astute businesswoman, an insightful investigator, and a courageous advocate for civil and human rights. Her anti-lynching campaign began with an editorial, written on 21 May 1892, about the lynching of three friends who were store owners in Memphis. She called for an evidence-based recognition of lynching as a lawless act of injustice, economic oppression, and terrorism. This editorial catapulted her to fame as a crusading journalist, public speaker, and leading woman activist. The full scope of her leadership and activism included other reform interests as well (women’s suffrage, the Black Clubwomen’s movement, and the settlement house movement) and the cofounding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After her 1895 marriage to Chicago-based lawyer and fellow journalist Ferdinand L. Barnett, Wells went into “limited retirement” but kept working for justice. Before her death in 1931, she saw that public awareness of her was disappearing and began writing her autobiography. It was left for her daughter, Alfreda M. Duster, to finish the work and get the work published, which happened in 1970.