(The epidemic of lynching that gripped the American South ...)
The epidemic of lynching that gripped the American South in the decades after the Civil War and the end of slavery has been glossed over and understated in many history books. Activist Ida B. Wells took it upon herself to document this shameful practice and its prevalence throughout the region and, to a lesser extent, the entire country in a series of seminal volumes, including Southern Horrors.
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, feminist, Georgist, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement.
Background
Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, several months before United States President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in Confederate-held territory. Her parents, James Wells, a carpenter, and Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Warrenton) Wells, a cook, were both enslaved by Spires Bolling, an architect. She was one of eight children. Wells was a hardworking, opinionated man who was actively interested in politics and in helping to provide educational opportunities for the liberated slaves and for his own eight children.
Tragedy struck the Wells family when she was about 16 years old. Her parents and some of her brothers and sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic while Wells was in another town visiting relatives. With a small legacy left by her parents, she was determined to assume the role of mothering her younger brothers and sisters. A few years later, after placing the older children as apprentices in the local school, she moved to Memphis with some of the younger children to live with a relative.
Education
Her dad, who had filled in as a woodworker for his slave expert, was included with the Freedmen's Aid Society into the board of trustees of Shaw University, a school for the recently liberated slaves. Shaw University got to be Rust College, which still exists in Holly Springs today. Ida went to this school and was a brilliant understudy, however she was ousted for insubordinate conduct in the wake of standing up to the school president. Then she kept on educating herself, moving to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1884 and went to Fisk University in Nashville amid a few summer sessions.
Career
In 1884, while she was travelling by train from school, Wells was forcibly thrown out of a first-class car by the conductor because she refused to ride in the car set aside for African Americans which was nicknamed the "Jim Crow" car. She had purchased a first-class ticket and was determined not to move from her seat, but she was not able to defend herself against the conductor, who literally dragged her from her seat while some of the white passengers applauded. However, Wells, who was determined to fight for justice, sued the railroad and won her case. When the decision was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, Wells just became more determined to fight against racial injustice wherever she found it.
When Wells joined a literary society in Memphis, she discovered that one of their primary activities was to write essays on various subjects and read them before the members. Wells' essays on social conditions for African Americans were so well received that the society members began to encourage her to write for church publications. When she was offered a regular reporting position and part ownership of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1887 she eagerly accepted. The name of the newspaper was later shortened to the Free Press, and Wells eventually became its sole owner. She was not afraid to speak out against what she perceived to be injustices against African Americans, especially in the school system where she worked. As a consequence of her editorials about the schools, Wells lost her teaching position in 1891.
One year later, in 1892, three of Wells' friends, who were successful businessmen in Memphis, were killed and their businesses destroyed by whites who Wells accused of being jealous of their success. The Free Speech ran a scathing editorial about the murders in which Wells harshly rebuked the white community. It was probably not coincidental that she was out of town by the time local whites read her paper. An angry mob of whites broke into her newspaper office, broke up her presses, and vowed to kill her if she returned to Tennessee.
Wells became a journalist "in exile," writing under the pen name "Iola" for the New York Age and other weekly newspapers serving the African American population. She systematically attacked lynching and other violent crimes perpetrated against African Americans. She went on speaking tours in the northeastern states and England to encourage people to speak out against lynching. She wrote well-documented pamphlets with titles such as On Lynchings, Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans.
In 1909 she attended the organizational meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and continued to work with the organization's founders during its formative years, although her association with the organization was not always peaceful. Wells did agree with one of the major thrusts of the organization, however, and that was their desire to see the enactment of federal anti-lynching legislation.
She remained active after she was married and carried nursing children with her during her crusades. Wells and her husband owned a newspaper for a while, and she continued to write articles for other journals. She actively participated in efforts to gain the vote for women and simultaneously campaigned against racial bigotry within the women's movement. She founded a settlement house in Chicago for young African American men and women, regularly taught a Bible class at the house, and also worked as a probation officer there. After her death on March 25, 1931 her contributions to the city of Chicago were acknowledged when a public housing project was named after her.
Achievements
Wells is best remembered as one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. She arguably became the most famous black woman in America, during a life that was centered on combating prejudice and violence.
Since Wells' death and with the rise of the mid-century civil rights activism, interest in her life and legacy has grown. Awards have been established in Wells’s name by the National Association of Black Journalists, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, the Investigative Fund, the University of Louisville, and the New York County Lawyers Association, among many others.
The Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation and the Ida B. Wells Museum has been established to protect, preserve and promote Wells’s legacy. In her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi, there is an Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum in her honor that acts as a cultural center of African American history.
In 2002, Molefi Kete Asante listed Wells on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
Wells supervised her children's religious training by escorting them to church services and by insisting that the only book that they could read on Sunday was the Bible. As a youth, she was an avid reader and stated that as a result of this rule she had read through the Bible many times.
Views
Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician and traveled internationally on lecture tours. She believed that the facilities and supplies available to African-American children were always inferior to those offered to whites.
Quotations:
Wells-Barnett recommended that black people use arms to defend against lynching:
"The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honour in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched."
Membership
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
,
United States
1909
Personality
Ida Wells was a lady comparatively radical - brave, free, emphatic, and candid.
Connections
In 1895 Wells moved to Chicago, where she married a widower attorney named Frederick Barnett. She was one of the first married American women to keep her own last name as well as taking her husband's. The couple had four children.
