Wells‐Barnett, Ida B.

Wells‐Barnett, Ida B. (1862–1931), African‐American journalist and activist.Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and educated in a local freedmen's school, Ida Wells moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1884. Her activist career began in 1883, when she refused to leave a first‐class car on the Chesapeake, Southwestern and Ohio Railway. Her account of her lawsuit against the railway led to a journalistic career and co‐ownership of The Memphis Free Speech, a black newspaper. Her editorials against three Memphis lynchings in 1892 launched her lifelong antilynching campaign. When a mob destroyed the Free Speech offices soon after the editorials ran, she shifted her campaign to New York City. In 1893–1894 she toured Great Britain, where such dignitaries as the archbishop of Canterbury publicized her cause. In such works as The Red Record (1895), Wells unmasked the racial and gender stereotypes underlying the rape‐lynch syndrome.

Marrying the Chicago lawyer and newspaper publisher Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895, Wells continued her activism while rearing four children. Her antilynching crusade inspired the formation of the National Association of Colored Women (1896), the first secular national black women's organization. One of two black women to sign the call for the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), she also founded the Negro Fellowship League (1910), a settlement house, and the Alpha Suffrage Club (1913). She led local black and interracial women's organizations; worked with the African‐American leaders William Monroe Trotter and Marcus Garvey; and organized support for victims of racial violence in Chicago and elsewhere. In 1930 she ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois State Senate.
See also African Americans; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Movement; Racism; Segregation, Racial; Woman Suffrage Movement.

Bibliography

Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 1970.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Selected Works of Ida B. Wells‐Barnett, comp. and with an introduction by Trudier Harris, 1991.

Paula Giddings