Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi several months before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The oldest of eight children, at 16 years of age Ida B. Wells was forced to take care of her siblings after both her parents passed away from Yellow Fever. Despite such responsibilities, Wells was able to complete her studies at Rust College and in 1888 became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee.
Wells first became acquainted with political activity in 1884 after an incident on a passenger train. The twenty-one year old boarded a train and took her seat in the first class ladies coach. But the recent Black codes forbidded blacks such positions. When a conductor asked her to move, Wells refused stating that she had bought paid for a first-class coach seat and intended to remain. When two guards forcibly tried to remove Wells, she left the train angrily vowing to see this matter through. The young Wells hired a lawyer and sued the railroad
To the surprise of the local White community, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad was ordered by a Minnesota Judge to pay Wells $500. The small town was in an uproar. "DARKY DAMSEL GETS DAMAGES" was
the headline plastered across the Memphis Appeal, the local newspaper. The railroad however appealed the case which was overturned. In the end it was Wells who was forced to pay $200 in court feees.
But the experience served to Wells benefit for it led her to publish an editorial article in a Church newspaper. In the article she not only voiced her dissatisfaction with the case, but urged blacks to fight the recently erected Black Codes. Her article increased the paper's circulation and stimulated conversations among Black people throughout the South. A small Black newspaper in Memphis offered Wells a part-time position as an editor. Wells wrote articles on various subjects dealing with the black condition. One of her editorials criticized the condition of Memphis' Black schools due to the "separate but equal" policies of Jim Crow Laws. Memphis' Board of Education dismissed Wells from her teaching position because of the article, which allowed her to take on full-time responsibilities at the newspaper. Within a year, Wells fiery articles had tripled the newspaper's circulation. Black newspapers throughout the United States had reprinted her articles and Ida B. Wells soon became a name of some note. But it was a tragic event in 1892 which changed her life forever.
Three men, friends of Wells, were prominent Black businessmen in Memphis.When angry whites, envious of the prosperous black business, attacked the store the men defended themselves. For this they were jailed. Before they could be tried in a court of law, a white mob took the three men from their prison and beat and lynched them. A shocked and angry Wells immediately wrote an editorial article describing the truth of the events and chastising the city of Memphis for the mens' deaths. The article sparked such an outrage, the newspaper office was destroyed by a mob of whites and several of the city's newspapers even printed written death threats aimed at Wells.
While attending an editor's convention in New York, Wells received word not to return to Memphis because her life would be in danger. While in New York, Wells worked as a regular correspondent for several Black newspapers where she continued her attack on lynchings. She
sought regularly not only to publicize lynching incidents but to dispell the myths and lies that White society used by whites to legitimize the muderous acts. She attacked the notion that black men were lynched because of attacks on white women by showing the numerous reasons most black men were lynched. These included everything from unpopularity to slapping a white child. She contended that the underlying reasons whites resorted to lynching blacks was because they saw it as a terrorist tactic which would keep blacks "in their place." Wells later took her cause to England to gain support and hopefully to shame America in the international community. In 1895 Wells published a book titled, A Red Record which documented a history of lynchings and their reasons since the post Civil War period.
A leader of women's rights as well, Ida B. Wells founded the Women's Era Club, the first civic organization for African-American women. The name was later changed to the Ida B. Wells Club in honor of its founder. In 1909, Barnett was asked to be a member of the "Committe of 40" which helped establish some of the groundwork for the founding of the NAACP. Ida B. Wells passed away in 1931 but is remembered as one of the most powerful activists and most famous anti-lynching crusader of her day.(Photo and Information courtesy of Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells by Alfreda Duster, A Red Record by Ida B.w Wells.)
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Electronic Version of Lynch Law in Georgia by Ida B. Wells-Barnett