Woman of the Month: Ida B. Wells, Warrior for Equality
Every month, I have striven to call attention to a woman who has influenced our lives today. Quarantined by the COVID pandemic, I have watched the epidemic of racism once again ravage our country. This month, I was inspired to highlight Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a journalist and activist who fought for civil rights. Throughout the 1890s, she orchestrated a campaign against lynching in the United States and fought for African American equality, particularly equality for women.
Wells-Barnett was born into slavery on July 17, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Seven months later, President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed her and her parents, Elizabeth and James Wells. Aware that their children could lead better lives than them, the couple stressed the importance of obtaining an education. James held a seat on the board for a school established and run by Northern missionaries. Every Wells child attended Rust College in Mississippi.
Wells-Barnett’s education was cut short when her parents and youngest brother died from the 1878 epidemic of yellow fever. Responsible for her remaining siblings, sixteen-year-old Wells-Barnett passed herself off as eighteen and took a job as a teacher five miles from town. She spent the next four years shuttling between home and work, living near the school during the week and returning home on the weekends to handle household chores.
In 1882, she and her two sisters moved to Memphis, Tennessee to live with their aunt. After passing the exams required to teach in the city, Wells-Barnett was offered a teaching position at a black school. Determined to further her education, she also began attending classes at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
On May 4, 1884, she bought a first-class ticket to Nashville. She was sitting in the “ladies” car when the conductor demanded she move to the blacks-only coach. She refused and was forcibly removed from the car as onlookers applauded. Furious at this mistreatment, Wells-Barnett sued the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwest Railroad Company. She won, only to have the decision overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. The court ruled that her suit was considered harassment on the grounds that the train had supplied “like accommodations” for her. Appalled by this action, she later wrote: “[I] firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I [felt] shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Heroes and Heroines]).
Following the incident, Wells-Barnett began writing articles on race and politics in the south for black publications under the pseudonym Iola. In 1887, the National Afro-American Press Convention identified her as the leading correspondent for the American black press.
Two years later, she became a one-third owner and editor of a Baptist weekly in Memphis, the Free Speech. Her involvement with the paper cost her her job when she wrote an anonymous article criticizing the “separate but equal” schools. She exposed the abysmal state of classrooms and the lack of proper educators for black students. Despite being anonymous, it was obvious who had written the article. The rankled Board of Education decided to fire her as a result of her actions.
In March 1892, tragedy struck. Thomas Moss, the father of Wells-Barnett’s goddaughter, and two friends, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, were lynched. Moss, along with McDowell and Stewart, had opened a successful grocery store across the street from a white grocery store in Memphis. The animosity between the two businesses erupted into a riot and deputies were sent to arrest Wells-Barnett’s friends. A group of black men, determined to defend the three men, fired upon the deputies. All the black men involved were arrested. Once in jail, Moss, Stewart, and McDowell were kidnapped by a white mob and murdered. Prior to this event, Wells-Barnett believed lynchings of black men were primarily a result of crimes committed against a white person. After the murder of her friends, she realized the lynchings were not being used to execute criminals but to fortify white supremacy.
Wells-Barnett responded by declaring in the Free Speech: “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,” and urged local blacks “to 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” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Black Biography]). African Americans left Memphis in droves. Entire congregations relocated to Oklahoma. Those who remained boycotted white establishments, severely impacting the economy and transportation system. Memphis papers attempted to convince those who were leaving that the west held nothing for them but devastating diseases and vicious natives. Wells-Barnett dispelled these rumors by traveling Oklahoma for three weeks. She published her experiences of the true conditions of the west in the Free Speech.
In addition to urging blacks to find safer homes, she dedicated the subsequent two months to examining lynchings across the South. Determined to uncover the full stories, she interviewed people of all colors. Her investigation revealed the numerous crimes other than rape lodged against lynch victims, with some facing execution for “being saucy”. She soon discovered that a Mississippi victim accused of raping a seven-year-old girl was actually lynched because he entered into a consensual relationship with an adult woman. The woman’s father led the lynching to protect her reputation. On May 25, 1892, Wells-Barnett published an article calling out southern men, their flimsy excuses for the lynchings, and challenged the myth about “virtuous white southern womanhood” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Black Biography]).
“Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women … If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Black Biography]).
In response to the article, the editor of another newspaper declared that the “black wretch who had written that foul lie should be tied to a stake at the corner of Main and Madison Streets, a pair of tailor’s shears used on him, and he should then be burned at the stake” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Heroes and Heroines]). Wells-Barnett was visiting New York City when she was informed by T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the Age and a fellow black journalist, that a mob had broken into the office of the Free Speech, destroyed the printing press, and burned the building down. She received news a few days later that whenever a train was returning from the north, a gunman was seen waiting at the station in Memphis.
Realizing the perils that awaited her should she return, she remained in New York, working for Mr. Fortune. A prominent story she wrote for the paper was “a front-page spread detailing names, dates, and locations of several dozen lynchings” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Heroes and Heroines]). She countered claims that the executions were justifiable by disclosing that the lynchers were well-connected men who had the means to pursue punishment for the alleged crimes had there been sufficient evidence of guilt. Upon completing the spread, she began researching and writing a series on lynching for the Age. She investigated the lynchings of the 728 men, women, and children ten years prior to the lynchings of her friends and published her findings in two pamphlets: Southern Horrors and A Red Record. Both pamphlets criticized the “congealing late-nineteenth-century ideology of white supremacy by challenging the myth of (sexually) pure white womanhood, the hypersexuality of black women and men, the integrity of the “best white men,” and the pseudoscience of social Darwinism, which was used to confirm the superiority of white civilization” (Giddings 266). Southern Horrors (1892) “was the first comprehensive analysis of lynching. It documented the fact that only about a third of black victims were actually accused of rape, much less guilty of it.” (Giddings 265–266). A Red Record (1895) reported on lynchings in the United States over three years, with all of her evidence gathered from white sources in an effort to avoid bias charges. Wells-Barnett’s research also revealed the horrible double-standard of justice. While black men were lynched for allegedly raping adult women, a white man convicted of raping an eight-year-old black girl was left untouched and allowed to live peacefully in jail.
Wells-Barnett carried her anti-lynching agenda all the way to the White House. In 1898, she lobbied President McKinley and Congress for an anti-lynching law.
She told McKinley, “We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Black Biography]).
Despite failing to enact anti-lynching legislation, her efforts set a precedent that has allowed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act to be conceived. As of June 4, 2020, the bill has yet to be passed by unanimous approval and is stuck in the Senate.
In addition to her crusade for anti-lynching laws, Wells-Barnett was determined to empower women to become involved in politics. In 1893, she organized the first black women’s club in Illinois, the Ida B. Wells Club. Two of the club’s first “projects [were] raising money to prosecute a policeman for killing an innocent black man” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Black Biography]) and founding the first kindergarten in Chicago’s black district.
Two years later, Wells-Barnett was instrumental in a conference that instituted the National Federation of Afro-American Women (later the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs). “Its motto, ‘lifting as we climb,’ informed its activities, which included community betterment, suffrage, and anti-lynching work” (Giddings 266).
When the Springfield riots broke out in Illinois in 1908, Wells-Barnett was among the “founding forty” people who established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (See Woman of the Month: Abolition to Desegregation — The Life of Mary White Ovington to read about another member of the “founding forty.”) She “provided the model for the organization’s own belated campaign against lynching and it was the NAACP’s public lobbying effort to pass a federal anti-lynching law in 1922 that established it as the premier civil rights organization in the country” (Giddings 266).
Wells-Barnett was not forgotten after her death in March 1931. Fifty-six years later, the Tennessee Historical Commission dedicated a commemorative marker to her on Beale Street in Memphis, Chicago renamed a major roadway to Ida B. Wells Drive in 2018, and in 2020, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for “outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett [Contemporary Black Biography]).
When Wells-Barnett was young, she believed in her country and government. She believed in justice and that the nation she was a member of would treat every citizen respectfully and justly. But, like many Americans today, she realized deeply seeded prejudice prevents people from being treated fairly.
She fought for the lives of blacks everywhere, and she endeavored to bring to justice those who had murdered African Americans under the guise of the law. It is deplorable that more than a hundred years later, we still struggle to treat every person living in America with equality and respect.
I am hopeful that the actions we are taking right now will officially end the reprehensible abuses against people of color, especially blacks. As people all over the world protest the inhumane murders of black citizens such as George Floyd, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Stephon Clark, and the thousands more, they are pursuing Wells-Barnett’s goal of a free and just nation. Like the people today who call for police and justice reforms, Wells-Barnett called out the unequal treatment of black and white citizens by the legal system. While white citizens accused of crimes were presumed innocent and provided their Constitutional right to trial by jury, black citizens were hunted down and slaughtered simply for being accused. And in most lynchings, like the murders of Thomas Moss, Henry Stewart, and Calvin McDowell, they were used not for justice but to terrorize and to impose white supremacy.
During this turbulent time, full of distrust and hate, I hope we can also find in each other love and support. Let us all take Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s message and story to heart, and stand with one another to advance the world.
