Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

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Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

July 6, 1862
March 25, 1931

The journalist and civil rights activist Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the first of eight children of Jim and Elizabeth Wells. Her father was a slave—the son of his master and a slave woman—and worked as a carpenter on a plantation. There he met his future wife, who served as a cook. After emancipation, Jim Wells was active in local Reconstruction politics.

Young Ida Wells received her early education in the grammar school of Shaw University (now Rust College) in Holly Springs, where her father served on the original board of trustees. Her schooling was halted, however, when a yellow fever epidemic claimed the lives of both her parents in 1878 and she assumed responsibility for her siblings. The next year, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to live with an aunt, and Ida found work as a teacher. She later studied at Fisk University and Lemoyne Institute.

A turning point in Wells's life occurred on May 4, 1884. While riding a train to a teaching assignment, she was asked to leave her seat and move to a segregated car. Wells refused, and she was physically ejected from the railway car. She sued the railroad, and though she was awarded $500 by a lower court, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision in 1887. In the same year, she

launched her career in journalism, writing of her experiences in an African-American weekly called the Living Way. In 1892 she became the co-owner of a small black newspaper in Memphis, the Free Speech. Her articles on the injustices faced by southern blacks, written under the pen name "Iola," were reprinted in a number of black newspapers, including the New York Age, the Detroit Plain-Dealer, and the Indianapolis Freeman.

In March 1892, the lynching of three young black businessmen, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Steward, in a suburb of Memphis focused Wells's attention on the pressing need to address the increasing prevalence of this terrible crime in the post-Reconstruction South. Her approach was characteristically forthright. She argued that though most lynchings were fueled by accusations of rape, they actually were prompted by economic competition between whites and blacks. Wells infuriated most whites by asserting that many sexual liaisons between black men and white women were not rape but mutually consensual.

She urged African Americans in Memphis to move to the West (where, presumably, conditions were more favorable) and to boycott segregated streetcars and discriminatory merchants. Her challenges to the prevailing racial orthodoxy of the South were met by mob violence, and in May 1892, while she was out of town, the offices of the Free Speech were destroyed by an angry throng of whites.

Wells then began to work for the New York Age, and she continued to write extensively on lynching and other African-American issues. She penned exposés of southern injustice and decried the situation before European audiences in 1893 and 1894. During these European tours, she criticized some white American supporters of black causes for their halfhearted opposition to lynching. Wells's most extended treatment of the subject, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, appeared in 1895. This was the first serious statistical study of lynchings in the post-Emancipation South. She continued this work for the rest of her life. Some of her more widely read articles in this area include "Lynching and the Excuse for It" (1901) and "Our Country's Lynching Record" (1913). Perhaps her greatest effort in this arena was her tireless campaign for national anti-lynching legislation. In 1901 she met with President William McKinley to convince him of the importance of such legislation. Her appeal was to no avail.

Another issue that provoked Wells's ire was the decision not to permit an African-American pavilion at the 1893 World's Fair. Wells, with the financial support of Frederick Douglass, among others, published a widely circulated booklet entitled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Exposition (1893).

In 1895 Wells married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a lawyer and editor from Chicago who was appointed assistant state attorney for Cook County in 1896. The couple had four children, and Chicago would remain their home for the rest of their lives. While Wells-Barnett was a devoted mother and homemaker, her political and reform activities were unceasing. She served as secretary of the National Afro-American Council from 1898 to 1902 and headed its Antilynching Speakers Bureau. She played an important role in the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, and in 1910 she founded the Negro Fellowship League, which provided housing and employment for black male migrants. The Barnetts challenged restrictive housing covenants when they moved to the all-white East Side of Chicago around 1910. Her concern for the welfare of Chicago's black community led Wells Barnett to become, in 1913, the first black woman probation officer in the nation. She lost her appointment in 1916, when a new city administration came to power.

Wells-Barnett was also active in the fight for women's suffrage. In 1913 she organized the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first black women's suffrage club in Illinois. That year, and again in 1918, she marched with suffragists in Washington, D.C. On the former occasion she insisted on marching with the Illinois contingent, integrating it over the objection of many white women marchers.

Wells-Barnett's militant opposition to the southern status quo placed her at odds with Booker T. Washington and his strategy of accommodationism. She was much more sympathetic to the ideology of W. E. B. Du Bois, and in 1906 she attended the founding meeting of the Niagara Movement. She was also a member of the original Executive Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. She was, however, uneasy about the integrated hierarchy at the organization, believing that their public stance was too tempered, and she ceased active participation in 1912.

In 1916 Wells-Barnett began an affiliation with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In December 1918, at a UNIA meeting in New York, Wells-Barnett was chosen, along with A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), to represent the organization as a delegate to the upcoming Versailles Conference. Both representatives were repeatedly denied U.S. State Department clearance, however, so they never attended the meeting. Wells-Barnett did speak on behalf of the UNIA at Bethel AME Church in Baltimore at the end of December 1918, but her continued affiliation with the organization after this was less public.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

"Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an 'unwritten law' that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal."

"lynch law in america," the arena 23.1 (january 1900): 15-24.

In the last decades of her life, Wells-Barnett continued to write about racial issues and American injustice. The East St. Louis race riot of July 1917 and the Chicago riot of July and August 1919 provided the impetus for impassioned denunciations of the treatment of African Americans in the United States. She wrote The Arkansas Race Riot in 1922 in response to the accusation of murder aimed at several black farmers, an accusation that was said to have instigated the disturbance. Most of her later work targeted social and political issues in Chicago. In 1930, Wells-Barnett ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois.

Ida Wells-Barnett died on March 25, 1931. In 1941 the Chicago Housing Authority named one of its first low-rent housing developments the Ida B. Wells Homes. In 1990 the U.S. Postal Service issued an Ida B. Wells stamp.

Bibliography

Burt, Olive W. Black Women of Valor. New York: J. Messner, 1974.

McMurry, Linda O. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of aIda B. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, ed. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: the Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.

Sterling, Dorothy. Black Foremothers. Old Westbury, N.Y.:Feminist Press, 1979.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda Duster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

margaret l. dwight–barrett (1996)
Updated bibliography

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History