Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her mother Lizzie Warrenton Wells had been enslaved in Virginia and sold south. Her father James Wells had been apprenticed out as a carpenter by the man who owned him. The Union Army occupied Mississippi during her infancy, and the Emancipation Proclamation reached the state in 1863. She was the oldest of eight children.

James Wells became a trustee of Rust College, the Methodist-founded school for formerly enslaved students in Holly Springs. Ida attended as a girl. In 1878 a yellow fever epidemic swept the lower Mississippi Valley. Her parents and her nine-month-old brother Stanley died within days of one another. She was sixteen. The relatives who came to divide the children up were told by Ida that the family would not be separated. She put up her hair, lengthened her skirt, and passed the county teacher's examination the next week. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse six miles from home and came back on weekends.

She moved to Memphis in 1883 to live with an aunt and teach in the county schools. On May 4 of that year she boarded the ladies' car of a Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern train and refused to move to the smoking car when the conductor ordered her. He attempted to drag her out. She bit his hand, braced her feet against the seat in front of her, and was removed only when two other men lifted her bodily while passengers applauded. She sued and won $500 from the circuit court. On retrial the award was raised to $2,500. In April 1887 the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed, writing that her purpose in boarding the ladies' car had been to harass the railroad. The decision was one of the first in a line that culminated in Plessy v. Ferguson nine years later.

She had begun writing. A letter she published in the Baptist weekly Living Way was picked up across the Black press. By 1889 she had bought a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and was editing the paper alongside Reverend Taylor Nightingale and J.L. Fleming. She still taught in the Memphis schools until 1891, when the Board of Education fired her after she wrote about the condition of the Black school buildings.

On March 9, 1892, three of her close friends were dragged from a Memphis jail and shot by a white mob. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart had opened a grocery store, the People's Grocery, that was drawing customers away from a white-owned store across the road. A confrontation escalated. The three men defended the store, were arrested, and were murdered before trial. Moss, a Pullman porter and Wells's close friend, left a pregnant wife and a young daughter whom Wells had christened.

Wells investigated. She traveled to lynching sites across Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. She collected coroners' reports and newspaper clippings. She read the files at the offices of the Chicago Tribune. The pattern she found broke the public story: lynchings were not responses to assaults on white women but answers to Black economic success and political organizing. She published her findings in the Free Speech on May 21, 1892.

She was in Philadelphia attending a convention when the Memphis Commercial and the Evening Scimitar called for her castration, assumed she was a man, and incited a mob. A crowd burned the Free Speech offices and stood watch at the train station for her return. Her partner J.L. Fleming fled by back roads. Wells did not return to Memphis for the rest of her life. She bought a share of T. Thomas Fortune's New York Age and kept publishing.

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases appeared in October 1892 with a preface by Frederick Douglass. She compiled three years of lynching statistics drawn from the white press itself, arguing that the record in the lynchers' own newspapers refuted the rape narrative. She spoke to audiences in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In 1893 and 1894 she toured Britain and Scotland, speaking in over a hundred cities and helping found the London Anti-Lynching Committee. The tours forced American newspapers to cover the campaign they had otherwise ignored.

The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 appeared in 1895. She counted 160 documented lynchings in 1892 alone and organized them by state, county, date, name of the victim, and the pretext given. It remains one of the earliest works of investigative data journalism published in the United States.

She married Ferdinand L. Barnett in Chicago on June 27, 1895. Barnett was a Howard-trained attorney and the founder of the Conservator, Chicago's first Black newspaper, which she took over editing while raising four children. She added Barnett to her byline and signed her work Ida B. Wells-Barnett for the rest of her life. She did not stop reporting. She investigated the 1898 Wilmington coup, the 1908 Springfield riot, the 1917 East St. Louis massacre, and the 1919 Elaine massacre in Arkansas, interviewing the condemned men in prison and publishing The Arkansas Race Riot in 1920.

In February 1909 she signed the call that founded the NAACP. Her name was listed among the founders at the time and was later omitted from the official founders' roster. Modern historians restored it. She broke publicly with W.E.B. Du Bois over the direction of the Chicago branch and with Mary White Ovington over strategy. She founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913, the first Black women's suffrage organization in the city. When the National American Woman Suffrage Association asked her to march at the back of the March 3, 1913 Washington parade so as not to offend Southern white women, she stepped off the curb and joined the Illinois delegation as the march began. Photographs of the parade show her walking with the white Chicago delegates she knew.

She ran for the Illinois State Senate in 1930 as an independent and finished third. She died of kidney failure on March 25, 1931, at sixty-eight. She had finished most of an autobiography. Her daughter Alfreda Duster edited the manuscript and, after decades of searching for a publisher, brought Crusade for Justice to print with the University of Chicago Press in 1970.