July 16, 1862 – Birth of Civil Rights Activist Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (more commonly known as Ida B. Wells) was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862. Both her parents and a sibling died of yellow fever in 1878. She attended Rust College, a historically black liberal arts college located in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She went to work as a schoolteacher, first in Mississippi and later in Memphis, Tennessee.

Shortly after Wells arrived in Memphis, she got involved in a dispute with a white conductor on a train after he ordered her to move from the first-class seat she had purchased into the black section, which did not have first-class accommodations. She refused, and was ejected from the train. Subsequently she sued and actually won, but the decision was reversed in the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Ida B. Wells Barnett, in a photograph by Mary Garrity from c. 1893

Her activism was not restricted to her personal life. She soon became a co-owner and editor of a local black newspaper called “THE FREE SPEECH AND HEADLIGHT.” She wrote editorials under the pseudonym “Iola,” condemning violence against blacks, disfranchisement, poor schools, and the failure of black people to fight for their rights. She was fired from her teaching job and became a full-time journalist.

PBS reports how her career of documenting lynching began:

In 1892, Tom Moss, a respected black store owner and friend of Barnett, was lynched, along with two of his friends, after defending his store against an attack by whites. Wells, outraged, attacked the evils of lynching in her newspaper; she also encouraged the black residents of Memphis to leave town. When Wells was out of town, her newspaper was destroyed by a mob and she was warned not to return to Memphis because her life was in danger. Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to England and was well received.”

She wrote many pamphlets exposing white violence and lynching and defending black victims. Wells was opposed to the policy of accommodation advocated by Booker T. Washington. As women’s history professor Patricia Schechter writes:

In the 1890s especially, nascent professional social scientists, media opinion shapers, and leaders in the black community acknowledged and relied on her work.  Indeed, Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s foundational insights into the complex social dynamics behind the lynching for rape scenario have stood the test of time in the more than one hundred years since she penned them; yet her status and recognition as a social critic in the ensuing years has been embattled, to say the least.”

 

In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney. The following year she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women. In 1909, she helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Wells continued her fight for black civil and political rights and an end to lynching until shortly before she died. By all accounts she was a skilled and popular speaker, at least with audiences who were receptive to her views.

Ida B Wells with her four children, 1909

Schechter’s online analysis of Wells’ work is also very detailed and illuminating, and worth reading for analyzing Wells’ insights into the motivations behind lynching. For example, as Schechter points out:

The pamphlet refuted the justification for lynching as punishment for black on white rape by revealing that, according to published sources, fewer than 30% of reported lynchings even involved the charge of rape much less a legally proven case of it. This finding became the cornerstone of all subsequent arguments against lynching by a wide range of reformers and critics.

‘Rather’ [Schechter continues], ‘the rape charge obscured the economic and political competition that fueled white racial hostility toward African Americans in the post-Reconstruction era. Second, it hid the consensual and sometimes illicit sexual contacts between white women and black men that took place in the past and the present. Third, by describing rape as an inherent inclination of black men, white men’s institutionalized sexual power over black women (which included long-standing patterns of abuse and victimization that arose under slavery and continued in its aftermath) was eclipsed by sensationalism and an appeal to ‘nature.’”

Thus, as Schechter concludes about Wells’ findings:

“. . . the anti-lynching pamphlets of the 1890s comprised a comprehensive view of southern racialized sexual politics: a vindication of black men as true men, a critique of white southern would-be male protectors as corrupt, an expose of white women as active participants in white supremacist sexual politics, and a re-centering of black women’s experiences in the dynamics of rape, lynching, and sexualized racism.”

You can read one of Wells’ pamphlets, “Lynch Law in Georgia,” online, here.