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(b. July 16, 1862, Holly Springs, Miss. ;d. March 25, 1931, Chicago, Ill.),
American journalist, advocate of civil rights, women's rights, and economic
rights, and anti-lynching crusader.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the first of Jim and Elizabeth Wells's eight children,
was born six months prior to the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation. She attended Shaw University (now Rust College) in her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi, until she was forced to drop out when her parents died of yellow fever in 1878. Following their deaths, Wells-Barnett supported herself and her siblings by working as a schoolteacher in rural Mississippi and Tennessee. She took summer courses at Fisk University and continued to teach through 1891, when she was fired for writing an editorial that accused the Memphis school board of providing inadequate resources to segregated black schools.
In May 1884, Wells-Barnett filed suit against a railroad company after she was forced off of a train for refusing to sit in the Jim Crow car designated for blacks. She was awarded $500 by a circuit court, but the decision was overruled by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1887, a rejection that ultimately strengthened her resolve to devote her life to upholding justice.
Wells-Barnett embarked on a career in journalism when she was elected editor of The Evening Star and then The Living Way, weekly church newspapers in Memphis. She became the editor of Free Speech, also in Memphis, in 1889. Her articles, written under the alias "Iola," were direct and confrontational, and two editorials she wrote in 1892, in response to the persecution and eventual lynching of three black businessmen, were particularly controversial. The first, published on March 9, encouraged blacks to leave Memphis for Oklahoma and boycott segregated transportation. The second, which appeared on May 21, suggested that white women were often the willing initiators in interracial relationships. Whites who were angered by her work responded by wrecking the offices and press of Free Speech.
Wells-Barnett took refuge in the North, reporting in the black newspapers the New York Age and the Chicago Conservator on the violence and injustices being perpetrated against African Americans. Through a lecture tour of England, Scotland, and Wales in 1893 and 1894, Wells-Barnett inspired international organizations to apply pressure on America to end segregation and lynching. In 1895, she published an analysis of lynching entitled A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, which argued that the impetus behind lynching was economic.
Marrying Ferdinand Barnett, a Chicago lawyer and editor, in 1895, Wells-Barnett put her writing on hold to focus on her family (the couple had four children), but she remained politically active. She helped to found the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, the Negro Fellowship League and the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People in 1910, and the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913. In 1916, she became involved with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association.
During the last 15 years of her life, Wells-Barnett wrote extensively on the race riots in East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919), and Arkansas (1922), and continued to promote civil rights and justice for African Americans. In honor of her legacy, a low-income housing project in Chicago was named after her in 1941, and in 1990 the U.S. Postal Service issued an Ida B. Wells-Barnett stamp.
The above image is an example of her work as journalist and advocate for Human Rights. It appeared in the Richmond Planet on August 26, 1893.
Biographical information excerpted from Women Win the Vote distributed by The National Women's History Project, 7738 Bell Road, Windsor, California, 95492-8518.
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