Ida B. Wells

Early life

Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on 16 July 1862, the eldest daughter of James and Lizzie Wells. During Reconstruction her parents were active in Republican politics, and her father helped start Rust College, where she studied.

When she was 16, yellow fever killed both of her parents and a sibling. To keep the family together she took a job teaching in a rural school, reportedly claiming to be older than she was. In the early 1880s she moved with her sisters to Memphis, Tennessee, where she taught in the city schools and studied for a time at Fisk University.

Memphis and the press

In May 1884 Wells refused to give up her seat in a first-class car and was forcibly removed from the train. She sued the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad and won $500 in a local court, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict.

She began writing for newspapers in the late 1880s under the pen name "Iola" and became partner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In 1891 the Memphis school board dismissed her after she criticized conditions in the segregated schools.

The anti-lynching campaign

In 1892 three Black grocery owners in Memphis, among them her friend Thomas Moss, were lynched after a confrontation with a white competitor. Wells began investigating and writing about lynching, challenging the excuses commonly given for it. While she was in New York, a mob destroyed the Free Speech office, and she did not return to live in the South.

That year she published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In 1893 and 1894 she took the campaign to audiences in England, Scotland and Wales. With Frederick Douglass and others she produced a pamphlet protesting the exclusion of Black Americans from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and in 1895 she published A Red Record, a statistical account of lynchings.

Chicago reformer

Wells settled in Chicago and in 1895 married the lawyer Ferdinand L. Barnett; the couple had four children. In 1898 she pressed President William McKinley for action against lynching. She helped build the National Association of Colored Women and attended the 1909 conference that led to the NAACP, though she was left off its founding committee and later distanced herself from the group. She also founded the Negro Fellowship League.

On 30 January 1913 she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club. At the women's suffrage procession in Washington that March, she refused organizers' instructions that Black women march at the back and joined the Illinois delegation. In 1930 she ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois state senate.

Legacy

Wells died of kidney disease in Chicago in 1931. Her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, was edited by her daughter Alfreda M. Duster and published after her death. In 2020 the Pulitzer Prize Board gave her a posthumous special citation for her courageous reporting on violence against African Americans during the lynching era.