Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was an African-American journalist and a leader in the early Civil Rights Movement. She was also widely known for her campaign against the practice of the lynching of African-Americans.
Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, just a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves was issued by President Abraham Lincoln, she grew up during the Reconstruction period that followed the end of the Civil War.
One of eight children, her life changed greatly when she was 16 when both her parents and one of her brothers died of a yellow fever epidemic. She took over caring for the family, dropping out of school to work as a teacher. In 1883, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee with three of her younger siblings to live with her aunt.
In the same year, she was forcibly removed from a train car reserved for white women. This was decades before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a bus. Ida sued the railroad, won her case, but was overruled by the Tennessee Supreme Court.
While teaching, she began writing newspaper articles about the race issue in the South, and in 1889 she became co-owner and editor of Free Speech and Headlight, an anti-segregation newspaper that published articles about racial injustice. Because of articles criticizing conditions in the colored schools of the region, she was dismissed from her teaching post.
In 1892, three of Well’s friends were lynched by a white mob.
Lynching, or hanging, had become widespread in the South in the decades following the Civil War. Once African-Americans had been given their freedom, many whites felt economically and politically threatened. “Jim Crow” laws were passed by the white controlled state legislatures, effectively disenfranchising most African-Americans through a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other requirements. Lynchings were meant to control and terrorize the African-American communities. As well as being hanged, victims were sometimes burned alive and tortured.
In response to her friends’ lynching, Ida wrote in her newspaper:
“The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left to 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.”
By directly challenging the white power structure, she became a target, and the office of her newspaper, the “Free Speech”, was attacked by a white mob and burned to the ground.
She moved to New York City, then to Chicago, and published an article and pamphlet, titled “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” in which she documented lynchings throughout the South, and the circumstances surrounding those lynchings. The pamphlet was widely distributed.
She stated: “It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed. Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. “
Frederick Douglass, the famous African-American abolitionist, orator, and statesman, wrote the following words to Ida:
“Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.
“Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.”
She continued her anti-lynching campaign, and took it abroad, touring England, Scotland and Wales for two months, addressing audiences of thousands.
During the last thirty years of her life in Chicago, she worked in many ways to improve conditions for the city’s rapidly growing African-American population. She campaigned strongly for women’s suffrage, and was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
She was only one person, but she showed what one woman, imbued with a burning sense of justice, could do. She stood up, and helped to change the world for the better.
