Ida Bell Wells-Barnett 1862-1931, African-American civil-rights advocate and feminist, b. Holly Springs, Miss. Born a slave, she attended a freedman's school and was orphaned at 16. She moved (1880) to Memphis, taught in black schools, attended Fisk Univ., and became an editor and writer for two weekly newspapers. In 1884 she challenged railroad segregation, ultimately losing (1887) in Tennessee's state supreme court. Becoming a part owner of and reporter for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight (1889-94), she campaigned against the inferior education available to African Americans. In addition, beginning in 1892, following the murder of a friend by a Memphis crowd, she became famous for her antilynching crusades (see lynching ). Later that year a white mob destroyed her newspaper's office and threatened to kill Wells. She subsequently moved to New York, became part owner and writer for the New York Age, and again attacked lynching. Wells was also a strong advocate for women's rights, but differed with many other feminists in her insistence on racial justice. Settling finally in Chicago, she wrote for two newspapers, married lawyer Ferdinand Lee Barnett, wrote a book on lynching (1895), created social programs for young black men and women, and worked to improve race relations in the city.

Bibliography: See her autobiography (1970); T. Harris, ed., The Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1991); M. DeCosta-Willis, ed., The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995); J. Jones-Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (1996); biographies by L. O. McMurry (1999) and P. J. Giddings (2008); studies by M. I. Thompson (1990), L. S. Jimison, ed. (1994), P. A. Schechter (2001), and J. W. Davidson (2007).

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

Journalist, founder of the antilynching campaign

Sources

Early Life. Ida Bell Wells, the oldest of eight siblings, was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on 16 July 1862, during the Civil War. Her mother, Lizzie Wells, had been sold away from her mother at age seven and belonged to several owners before she arrived at Holly Springs to work as a cook for a carpenter named Bolling. While in Holly Springs, she met and married James Wells, who had been apprenticed to Bolling by his master, who was also his acknowledged father. After Lizzie and James Wells became free, they continued to work as cook and carpenter to Bolling.

Education. Wells was educated at Shaw University (later Rust College), a freedman’s school established in Holly Springs in 1866. After her parents and three siblings died of yellow fever in 1878, sixteen-year-old Ida Wells assumed responsibility for her family, attaining a teaching position in Holly Springs by claiming to be eighteen. In 1880 she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she taught in Negro schools while attending summer-school classes at Fisk University.

Journalism and Activism. During the 1880s Wells began writing for the Negro Press Association. Soon after arriving in Memphis, she became editor of a weekly literary paper called the Evening Star and shortly thereafter became editor of another weekly, the Living Way, as well. By the end of the decade her articles for the Living Way, published under the pen name lola, were being republished in African American newspapers nationwide. She had become well known in part because of her 1884 challenge to segregation. In that year she had taken a seat in the ladies’ coach on a train. When the conductor informed her that she had to ride in the smoking car, where other blacks were seated, she refused to move and was removed from the train. Wells sued the railroad and won in a circuit court, but the decision was overturned in the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1887. In 1889 Wells bought a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, becoming editor of the paper and concentrating her efforts on criticism of inadequate funding, run-down school buildings, and poor training of teachers for Negro schools. By 1891 she had so angered the Memphis school board that they refused to renew her teaching contract. Subsequently Wells gave her full attention to journalism, becoming half owner of the Free Speech the following year.

Antilynching Campaign. In March 1892 Wells launched a one-woman crusade against lynching after three black male friends were lynched in Memphis. She lectured in Boston, New York, and other major cities, founding many antilynching societies and Negro women’s clubs. Under her editorial banner, the Free Speech led the charge against the loss of liberties that African Americans had been granted during Reconstruction. She urged Memphis blacks to fight back, not with violence but with economic pressure, by boycotting city streetcars. She also encouraged her readers to move west to the newly opened Indian territories in Oklahoma, suggesting there was “only one thing left that we can 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.” Wells further drew the ire of Memphis whites by attacking the myth of the black rapist, asserting: “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women.” Black men who were lynched were rarely accused rapists, she wrote; rather, she concluded, lynching was a racist attempt to rid a community of prosperous black men. On 27 May, while she was out of town, a mob destroyed the Free Speech office and threatened to kill her if she tried to publish the paper again. After this incident Wells moved to New York, where she became an employee and part owner of the New York Age, a weekly newspaper edited by T. Thomas Fortune. The following October the paper published Wells’s feature story on lynching, which was subsequently published as a pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892).

Taking the Antilynching Campaign Abroad. Wells left the New York Age in April 1893. She took her cause to Great Britain in 1893 and again in 1894, claiming to audiences that tolerance of lynching in the United States proved that white American society was not civilized but rather was primitive and violent. British society fell under the spell of Wells’s considerable rhetorical force, and her visits were instrumental to the creation of a British antilynching committee formed with the intention of swaying American opinion on racial violence. British citizens threatened a boycott on cotton from the American South if lynching did not stop. Wells also spoke out against American racism in general. After returning from her first trip abroad she went to live in Chicago, where she published a pamphlet protesting the virtual exclusion of African Americans from any meaningful role in the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Publishing and Politics. In Chicago Wells began writing for the Chicago Conservator, an African American weekly, and the Chicago Inter Ocean, a white paper where she was the first black employee. On 27 June 1895 Wells married a widower, Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a Chicago lawyer and founder of the Conservator. While rearing Barnett’s two children by his first marriage and four children of her own, Wells-Barnett traveled and turned her attention to local race relations. During that time she wrote A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 (1895). In 1898 Wells-Barnett was part of the committee that met with President William McKinley to demand government action in the case of an African American postman who had been lynched in South Carolina.

Isolation. Wells-Barnett played a major role in publicizing the horrors of lynching, but she received little attention or appreciation for her work. She wrote less after 1897 and devoted her efforts to improving race relations in Chicago. She established the Negro Fellowship League in 1910. She also became involved in the women’s rights movement, founding he Alpha Suffrage Club in 1915, becoming chair of the Chicago Equal Rights League in 1915, and playing an active role in the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. She died on 25 March 1931.

Sources

Gail Bederman, “Civilization, The Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells’ Anti-Lynching Campaign (1892-1894),” in Gender and American History Since 1890, edited by Barbara Melosh (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 207-239;

Nora Hall, “Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 23: American Newspaper Journalists, 1873-1900, edited by Perry Ashley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983).

Ida. B. Wells-Barnett

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), an African American journalist, was an active crusader against lynching and a champion of social and political justice for African Americans.

Ida B. Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation freed all of the slaves in the Confederate states. Her father, James, was a carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth, a cook. James Wells was a hardworking, opinionated man who was actively interested in politics and in helping to provide educational opportunities for the liberated slaves and for his own eight children. He was on the board of trustees of Rust College, a freedmen's school, where his daughter Ida received a basic education. Elizabeth Wells supervised her children's religious training by escorting them to church services and by insisting that the only book that they could read on Sunday was the Bible. Young Wells was an avid reader and stated that as a result of this rule she had read through the Bible many times.

Tragedy struck the Wells family when she was about 16 years old. Her parents and some of her brothers and sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic while Wells was in another town visiting relatives. With a small legacy left by her parents, she was determined to assume the role of mothering her younger brothers and sisters. By arranging her hair in an adult style and donning a long dress, Wells was able to obtain a teaching position by convincing local school officials that she was 18 years old. A few years later, after placing the older children as apprentices, she moved to Memphis with some of the younger children to live with a relative. She was eventually able to earn a teaching position there by obtaining further education at Fisk University.

In 1884, while she was travelling by train from school, Wells was forcibly thrown out of a first-class car by the conductor because she refused to ride in the car set aside for African Americans which was nicknamed the "Jim Crow" car. She had purchased a first-class ticket and was determined not to move from her seat, but she was not able to defend herself against the conductor, who literally dragged her from her seat while some of the white passengers applauded. However, Wells, who was determined to fight for justice, sued the railroad and won her case. When the decision was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, Wells just became more determined to fight against racial injustice wherever she found it.

When Wells joined a literary society in Memphis, she discovered that one of their primary activities was to write essays on various subjects and read them before the members. Wells' essays on social conditions for African Americans were so well received that the society members began to encourage her to write for church publications. When she was offered a regular reporting position and part ownership of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1887 she eagerly accepted. The name of the newspaper was later shortened to the Free Press, and Wells eventually became its sole owner. She was not afraid to speak out against what she perceived to be injustices against African Americans, especially in the school system where she worked. She believed that the facilities and supplies available to African American children were always inferior to those offered to whites. As a consequence of her editorials about the schools, Wells lost her teaching position in 1891.

One year later, in 1892, three of Wells' friends, who were successful businessmen in Memphis, were killed and their businesses destroyed by whites who Wells accused of being jealous of their success. The Free Speech ran a scathing editorial about the murders in which Wells harshly rebuked the white community. It was probably not coincidental that she was out of town by the time local whites read her paper. An angry mob of whites broke into her newspaper office, broke up her presses, and vowed to kill her if she returned to Tennessee.

Wells became a journalist "in exile, " writing under the pen name "Iola" for the New York Age and other weekly newspapers serving the African American population. She systematically attacked lynching and other violent crimes perpetrated against African Americans. She went on speaking tours in the northeastern states and England to encourage people to speak out against lynching. She wrote well-documented pamphlets with titles such as On Lynchings, Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans.

In 1895 Wells moved to Chicago, where she married a widower named Frederick Barnett. She remained active after she was married and carried nursing children with her during her crusades. She and her husband owned a newspaper for a while, and she continued to write articles for other journals. She actively participated in efforts to gain the vote for women and simultaneously campaigned against racial bigotry within the women's movement. In 1909 she attended the organizational meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and continued to work with the organization's founders during its formative years, although her association with the organization was not always peaceful. Wells-Barnett did agree with one of the major thrusts of the organization, however, and that was their desire to see the enactment of federal anti-lynching legislation. She found a settlement house in Chicago for young African American men and women, regularly taught a Bible class at the house, and also worked as a probation officer there. After her death in 1931 her contributions to the city of Chicago were acknowledged when a public housing project was named after her.

Further Reading

Wells-Barnett's autobiography, which was edited by her daughter, Alfreda M. Duster, is entitled Crusader for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1970). Several of Wells-Barnett's pamphlets have been reprinted by Arno Press in On Lynchings: Southern Horrors (1969). There is a short biography of Wells-Barnett in Mississippi Black History Makers (1984) by George A. Sewell and Margaret L. Dwight. An article entitled "The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, " by Thomas Holt is a part of a volume edited by John Hope Franklin and August Meier, Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (1982). □