Ida Wells-Barnett

Ida Wells-Barnett crusaded aggressively for civil rights her entire life and was unafraid to exercise those rights when custom ran contrary to the law. Involved in many civil rights causes, she played leadership roles in the women's suffrage movement and in the founding of the NAACP. Wells-Barnett became the era's most outspoken crusader for ending the practice of lynching African-Americans.

"I'd rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking back what I have said."

— Ida Wells-Barnett

Born: July 16, 1862 Holly Springs, Mississippi
Died: March 25, 1931 Chicago, Illinois

Crusade for Justice is the fitting title of activist Ida Wells-Barnett's autobiography, since her entire life was a vigorous fight for civil rights. Wells-Barnett's notable accomplishments include calling attention to unjust lynchings, helping found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), playing a lead role in the women's suffrage movement, and winning a discrimination lawsuit against the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, which was later overturned.

Wells-Barnett's life started with a great advance in the civil rights movement; President Abraham Lincoln gave his Emancipation Proclamation just months after her birth. Although the President had spoken eloquently about racial equality most people in the American South were far from viewing whites and blacks as equal members of society. Throughout her life, Wells-Barnett fought to end this prejudice, but her first fight was one for survival.

Born in Holly Spring, Mississippi, Ida Wells was in her mid-teens when yellow fever took the lives of her parents. Wells became the sole support of her younger siblings and herself. She worked as a teacher to make ends meet.

Family and teaching brought her to Memphis, Tennessee, where a personal incident launched her first crusade for racial justice. While riding on a train in 1884, the conductor ordered her to give up her seat to a white man and move to a smoking or "Jim Crow" car. The 1875 Civil Rights Act banned such discrimination, and Wells-Barnett protested. She was forcibly removed from the train while the other passengers, most of them white, applauded. The former slave sued the railroad for $500 in damages and won her case in local courts. The railroad company appealed the case and three years later, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned it.

Wells-Barnett's personal crusade against the railroad marked the beginning of a life of activism. Her teaching career segued into journalism, and by the late 1880s, as editor and co-owner of a local black newspaper called The Free Speech and Headlight, Wells-Barnett was criticizing the treatment of blacks in aggressive stories and editorials.

In 1892, three of Wells-Barnett's close friends were hanged. The men operated a grocery store that competed directly, and successfully, against a similar business owned by a white merchant. A grand jury indicted the grocers for maintaining a nuisance, and while awaiting their trial, the three men were abducted from their jail cells and lynched by a white mob.

Enraged and touched personally by the incident, Wells-Barnett used her newspaper post as a bully pulpit. She urged blacks in Memphis to "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." Her words spurred many blacks to leave town and boycott the Memphis streetcar system and white-owned businesses. Wells-Barnett's extensive coverage of the lynchings incensed white leaders in Memphis who burned the offices of the Free Speech and Headlight . At the time of the destruction, Wells-Barnett was traveling in Philadelphia, but the gesture made it clear that it was unsafe for her to return to her southern home.

Wells-Barnett's journalistic activism was given a different medium when she began to accept public speaking engagements. Her first appearance was in New York, where she recounted her negative experiences with lynch law to 250 black women. Wells-Barnett's writings and speeches were more than just rhetoric; in fact, she carefully documented and researched the specifics surrounding mob-lynching cases throughout the South. That studious approach helped her publish "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases," which was a pamphlet describing the inequities in the Southern justice system. The publication was widely distributed in New York.

In 1893 and 1894, Wells-Barnett took her anti-lynching crusade overseas and told British audiences of the mob lynchings taking place in the United States. She believed that raising European awareness for civil rights violations would help make American leaders more accountable for the atrocities being carried out in the South.

In 1893, when blacks were excluded from planning and celebrating the World's Columbian Exposition, an event celebrating the discovery of North and South America, in 1893, Wells-Barnett teamed up with former slave Frederick Douglass and other activists to write and distribute a pamphlet titled, "The Reason Why Colored People Are Excluded from the World's Columbian Exposition."

Although Wells-Barnett worked in partnership with other activists, her philosophies did not align in lock step with them. When the World's Columbian Exposition named a Negro Day in honor of Frederick Douglass' participation, Wells-Barnett pressed Douglass not to take part because the invitation was so late in coming. Douglass, less severe in his approach, thought a late invitation better than no invitation at all.

Wells-Barnett's direct style also differed from Booker T. Washington's. While Wells-Barnett argued for an absolute end to anti-black violence, Washington urged blacks to gain work skills that would, in time, earn them equal treatment from whites. Wells-Barnett believed that advice was cowardly and did not hesitate to say so.

In 1895, Wells-Barnett settled in Chicago and married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a lawyer and editor of the Chicago Conservator, the city's first black newspaper. Wells-Barnett devoted much time to raising the couple's children, and continued to push for better treatment for blacks.

During the early 1900s, she contributed to her husband's newspaper, organized local black women in anti-lynching campaigns and the suffrage movement, and held leadership posts in a number of organizations. In 1901, Wells-Barnett published Lynching and the Excuse for It, a book that theorized that lynching's purpose was to intimidate blacks, prevent them from becoming involved in politics and maintain white power in the South.

The social and political climate progressed slowly, and in 1909, Wells-Barnett was one of only two black women asked to be a member of a committee that laid the groundwork for the founding of the NAACP. One of the NAACP's top priorities was to end lynching. Well-Barnett convinced the organization to take their position a step further and resolve to make lynching a federal crime. The NAACP made other more incremental pleas for social change, but that approach did not please Wells-Barnett. She demanded full racial equality and wanted it immediately. She refused to acquiesce to the NAACP's more moderate style, and was denied leadership positions in the organization.

Wells-Barnett spent several years as an adult probation officer, and remained active in Chicago civic and political affairs. Displeased with major-party candidates, she became one of the first black women to run for public office in the United States by running for the Illinois State Legislature. Nearly seventy years old, Wells-Barnett died in 1931 after an unwavering, resilient, and inspiring campaign to make life better for black Americans.


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