Ida B. Wells Barnett

Ida B. Wells
Born	July 16 1862(1862-07-16) Holly Springs, Mississippi
Died	March 25 1931 (aged 68) Chicago, Illinois
Education	Fisk University
Occupation	Civil rights & Women's rights activist
Spouse(s)	Ferdinand L. Barnett
Parents	James Wells Elizabeth "Lizzie Bell" Warrenton

Ida Bell Wells (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) was an African American journalist, civil rights leader and women's rights leader active in the Women's suffrage movement. At age 14 her parents died and she left school to take a teaching job to keep her family together. She became famous (like Rosa Parks) for refusing to move to the over-crowded "Jim Crow" smoking car on a train.

An articulate and outspoken proponent of equal rights, she became co-owner and editor of Free Speech and Headlight, an anti-segregationist newspaper based in Memphis. She is best known for her opposition to lynchings, Wells documented hundreds of these atrocities in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. This pamphlet, along with her 1895 A Red Record, documented her research on and campaign against lynching. She spoke in numerous places in the United States and made two trips to England to bring awareness to the unrighteous reasons behind and the injustice of lynchings. She had to move to Chicago for her safety.

She helped develop numerous African American women's and reform organizations in Chicago, married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a lawyer, and they had two boys and two girls. One her greatest accomplishments was (with Jane Adams) to block the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago. She was a member of the Niagara Movement, and she was one of only two African American women who helped found the NAACP. Her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928), was written after her retirement. She ran for the state legislature in Illinois the year before she died, of uremia, in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68.

Biography

Early life

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born just before the end of slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862 to James and Elizabeth "Lizzie Bell" Warrenton Wells, both of whom were slaves until freed at the end of the Civil War. At 14, her parents and nine month old brother died of yellow fever during an epidemic that swept through the South. At a meeting following the funeral, friends and relatives decided to farm out the six remaining Wells children to various aunts and uncles. Ida was devastated by the idea and, to keep the family together, dropped out of high school and found employment as a teacher in a black country school. Despite difficulties, she was able to continue her education by working her way through Rust College in Holly Springs.

In 1880, Wells moved to Memphis with all of her siblings except for her 15-year-old brother, January. There she again found work and, when possible, attended summer sessions at Fisk University in Nashville.

Wells held strong political opinions, and she upset many people with her views on women's rights. When she was 24, she wrote, "I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge."

Resisting segregation and racism

Wells became a public figure in Memphis when, in 1884, she led a campaign against racial segregation on the local railway. A conductor of the Chesapeake, Ohio & South Western Railroad Company told her to give up her seat on the train to a white man and ordered her into the "Jim Crow" car, which allowed smoking and was already crowded with other passengers. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1875—which banned discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color in theaters, hotels, transport, and other public accommodations—had just been declared unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, and several railroad companies were able to continue racial segregation of their passengers. Wells found the policy unconscionable and refused to comply. In her autobiography she explains:

I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay... [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.

White passengers applauded as she was dragged out. When she returned to Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad. She won her case in the local circuit court, but the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, which reversed the lower court's ruling in 1887.

During her participation in women's suffrage parades, her refusal to stand in the back because she was black resulted in more of her media publicity. Many people wanted to hear from the 25-year-old schoolteacher who had stood up to racism. This moved her to begin to tell her story as a journalist.

Career as a journalist

In 1889, Wells became co-owner and editor of Free Speech and Headlight, an anti-segregationist newspaper based in Memphis on Beale Street, co-owned by Rev. R. Nightingale, pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church.

In 1892, three black men named Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—owners of a Memphis grocery store which had been taking business away from competing white businesses—were lynched. An angry group of white men had tried to eliminate the competition by attacking the grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. The grocery owners were arrested, but before a trial could take place, they were lynched by a mob after being dragged away from the jail. Wells wrote strongly about the injustice of the case in The Free Speech.

In one of her articles she encouraged blacks to leave Memphis, saying, "There is... only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons." Many African-Americans did leave, and others organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. As a result of this and other investigative reporting, Wells' newspaper office was ransacked, and Wells herself had to leave for Chicago. There, she continued to write about Southern lynchings and actively investigated the fraudulent justifications given for them.

In 1892, Wells also published the famous pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, followed by A Red Record in 1895, documenting her research on lynching. Having examined many accounts of lynching based on alleged "rape of white women," she concluded that southerners concocted the rape excuse to hide their real reason for lynching black men: black economic progress, which threatened not only white pocketbooks but also their ideas about black inferiority.

Reformer for women's suffrage

Upon moving to Chicago, Wells established the Alpha Suffrage Club and 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. She was also a tireless worker for Women's suffrage, and participated in many marches and demonstrations and in the 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C.

Taking her story to England

She received much support from other prolific social activists and her fellow clubwomen. In his response to her article in the Free Speech, Frederick Douglass expressed approval of Wells' literature: "You have done your people and mine a service…What a revelation of existing conditions your writing has been for me." Wells took her campaign into Europe with the help of many supporters. "People all of the country raised several thousand dollars to enable her to travel abroad." A few months after founding the Women’s League, the Women’s Loyal Union, under the leadership of Victoria Matthews, united 70 women from Brooklyn and Manhattan in support of Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching crusade, helping her to finance her 1892 speaking tour of the United States and the British Isles. One club, the Women’s Era Club, based in Boston, wrote an open letter of support for Wells and her work. "It was given wide publicity in England, and Wells believed it gave greater weight to the arguments she had been making against lynching."

Wells went to Great Britain at the behest of British Quaker Catherine Impey. An opponent of imperialism and proponent of racial equality, Impey wanted to be sure that the British public was informed about the problem of lynching due to racism. Although Wells and her speeches—complete with at least one grisly photograph showing grinning white children posing beneath a suspended black corpse, caused a stir among doubtful audiences, Wells was paid so little that she could barely pay her travel expenses.(Elliott, 240-41)

During her second British lecture tour, again arranged by Impey, Wells wrote about her trip for Chicago's Daily Inter Ocean in a regular column, "Ida B. Wells Abroad." In doing so, she became the first black woman paid to be a correspondent for a mainstream white newspaper. (Elliott, 242-232)

Boycott, marriage, NAACP and politics

In 1893, she and other black leaders, among them Frederick Douglass, organized a boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the suggestion of white abolitionist and anti-lynching crusader Albion Tourgée, Wells and her coalition produced a pamphlet to be distributed during the exposition. Called Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, it detailed in English and a few other languages the workings of Southern lynchings and a handful of other issues impinging on black Americans. She later reported to Tourgée that 2,000 copies had been distributed at the fair.

Also in 1893, Wells found herself thinking of filing a libel suit against two black Memphis attorneys. She again turned to Tourgée, who had trained and practiced as a lawyer and judge, for possible free legal help. Deeply in debt, Tourgée could not afford to do the work, but he asked his friend Ferdinand L. Barnett if he could. Barnett accepted the pro bono job. He was also editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers.

Two years later, he and Wells were married. She set an early precedent as being one of the first married American women to keep her own last name with her husband's. This was very unusual for that time. After her marriage, she wrote: "I was married in the city of Chicago to Attorney F. L. Barnett, and retired to what I thought was the privacy of a home." She did stay home to raise two sons and later two daughters, but she was still active writing and organizing. She contributed to the Chicago Conservator, her husband’s newspaper, and to other local journals.

From 1898 to 1902 she was secretary of the National Afro-American Council, and in 1910 she created the Negro Fellowship League for which she served as the first president. This organization helped newly arrived migrants from the South. From 1913 to 1916 she was a probation officer for the Chicago municipal court.

In 1906, she joined the Niagara Movement to further its work. When the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was formed in 1909, she was invited to be a member of the "Committee of 40." She was just one of two African American women to sign "the call" to join. Although she was one of the founding members she was viewed as one of the most radical among the few Black leaders who opposed the strategies of Booker T. Washington. As a result she was marginalized from positions within its leadership.

By 1930 she became disgruntled with the weak candidates from the major parties to the state Illinois State legislature and decided to run herself. Thus, she was one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States, but within a year she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.

Legacy

Throughout her life, Wells was unrelenting in her demands for equality and justice for African-Americans and insisted that the African-American community must win justice through its own efforts. As playwright Tazewell Thompson sums her up, "...A woman born in slavery, she would grow to become one of the great pioneer activists of the Civil Rights movement. A precursor of Rosa Parks, she was a suffragist, newspaper editor and publisher, investigative journalist, co-founder of the NAACP, political candidate, mother, wife, and the single most powerful leader in the anti-lynching campaign in America. A dynamic, controversial, temperamental, uncompromising race woman, she broke bread and crossed swords with some of the movers and shakers of her time: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Francis Willard, and President McKinley. By any fair assessment, she was a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America."

One of her greatest accomplishments was to successfully block the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago. She did this with Jane Addams, the founder of Hill House in Chicago. After her retirement, Wells-Barnett wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928). She died of uremia in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68.

On February 1, 1990, the United States Postal Service issued a 25 cent postage stamp in her honor.

Significant quotation

"One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap."

See also

• Susan B. Anthony
• W. E. B. Du Bois
• Jane Addams

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Baker, Lee D. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) and Her Passion for Justice, Black Women, African American Women, Sufferage, Women's Movement, Civil Rights Leaders Retrieved November 30, 2008.
• Elliott, Mark. Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 9780195181395
• Franklin, Vincent P. Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of African American Intellectual Tradition. New York: Scribner, 1995. ISBN 9780689121920
• Thompson, Mildred I. Ida B. Wells-Barnett: an exploratory study of an American Black woman, 1893-1930, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Pub., 1990. ISBN 9780926019218
• Townes, Emilie M. Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993. ISBN 9781555406837
• Wells, Ida B. and Duster, Alfreda M. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, Chicago, 1970. OCLC 186020519
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B. and Royster, Jacqueline Jones (ed.). Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. ISBN 9780312128128

External links

All links retrieved November 30, 2009.

• Works by Ida B. Wells. Project Gutenberg
• Lynch Law by Ida B. Wells
• Ida B. Wells - Illinois During the Gilded Age, 1866-1896, Illinois Historical Digitization Projects at Northern Illinois University Libraries, Northern Illinois University
• Women in History
• Library of Congress, American Memory

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