Ida B. Wells-Barnett 1862–1931

Journalist, editor, activist, lecturer

At a Glance…

Turning Point

Crusaded Against Lynching

Formed Black Women’s Clubs

Personality Conflicts

Declining Prestige

Selected writings

Sources

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a woman ahead of her time—courageous, independent, assertive, and outspoken. Born a slave, she later became the owner and editor of her own Southern newspaper, crusading at great personal risk against the illegal lynching of blacks and the injustice of segregation. Devoting herself to black progress and racial equality, she played a leading role in the black women’s club movement as well as the creation of national organizations. But her determination made her incapable of compromise with fellow black and white reformers who chose to take a more accommodating approach, and her influence waned within many of the same organizations that she had helped found.

The eldest of eight children, Ida Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Her father, James Wells, was the son of his master and a slave woman. Trained as a carpenter and mason, he became active in politics and education after the Civil War, serving on the first board of trustees of Shaw University, later renamed Rust College, a freedmen’s school in his hometown.

Ida was attending this school when the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 killed her parents and youngest brother. To keep the remaining family together, she obtained a teaching position in a country school after convincing the local school officials that she was older than she really was. A few years later, she placed the older children in various apprenticeships or with relatives and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with her two youngest sisters. Wells again found work as a teacher and furthered her education with a short stint at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. A pivotal event in her life then occured.

After refusing to leave the “ladies” car, for which she had purchased a ticket, and move to the segregated blacks-only coach, she was physically thrown off a Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad train by the conductor in May of 1884. Outraged, she sued the railroad and was awarded $500 in damages. But in April of 1887 the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned this decision, finding that her lawsuit constituted harassment since the railroad had provided “like accommodations” for Wells. Shocked by the ruling, she wrote in her diary, “I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.”

At a Glance…

Born Ida Bell Wells, July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, MS; died March 25, 1931, in Chicago, IL; daughter of James (a carpenter and mason) and Elizabeth (a cook) Wells; married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, June 1895; children: Charles, Herman, Ida, Alfreda. Education: Attended Rust College, Holly Springs, MS, and Fisk University, Nashville, TN.

Civil rights activist and writer. Teacher in a rural school in Mississippi, 1878-83; Free Speech, Memphis, TN, editor and owner, 1884-92; New York Age, New York City, part owner and writer, 1892; ant-lynchmg speaking tours in the United States and England, 1893-95; Chicago Conservator, Chicago, IL, part owner and editor, 1895-98; adult probation officer, Chicago, 1913-16. Participated in the founding of several important black organizations, lectured and published on civil rights issues.

Member; Alpha Suffrage Club (founder), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N AACP; founding member), National Association of Colored Women (NACW; founding member), Negro Fellowship League (founding member), Afro-American Press Association (secretary), Afro-American Council, Afro-American League.

Wells gained considerable local fame while living in Memphis, the largest city in the Mississippi Delta region in the 1880s, of which blacks comprised about 44 percent of the population. Her fame came from readings of her essays on social conditions for blacks at one of the literary societies sponsored by the city’s small black middle class, a group of teachers who met every Friday night to play music, read essays of their own composition on current events, and debate. Under the pen name “loia,” she wrote for several Baptist newspapers throughout the South. Many of her early stories highlighted her own experience fighting segregationist Jim Crow laws, such as her unsuccessful suit against the railroad.

As her fame spread so did her activism. She began attending conventions of the newly organized Colored Press Association (later renamed the Afro-American Press Association) and was elected its secretary in 1889. During this time she met T. Thomas Fortune, the nation’s preeminent black journalist and editor of the New York Age and joined his short-lived organization, the Afro-American League, which he had formed to press for equal rights and full citizenship for blacks.

Her reputation as a fearless activist, however, was secured by her tenure at a small Baptist weekly in Memphis, the Free Speech and Headlight (later shortened to the Free Speech). Wells purchased a one-third ownership of the weekly and became its editor in 1889. Never one to shun controversy, her militant editorials protesting injustices against blacks added to her growing reputation for fearlessness. After she exposed the inferiority of the city’s segregated black schools, the Memphis school board fired her from her teaching post in 1891.

Turning Point

The defining moment of her life came the following year in March of 1892. Across the street from a white grocery store on the outskirts of Memphis, three friends of hers had opened a successful grocery store. Business animosities between the two stores soon exploded into a minor riot. Deputies sent to arrest the black storeowners were fired upon by a group of blacks determined to defend them. One deputy was wounded and scores of blacks, including the three storeowners, were arrested. Shortly thereafter, a white mob stormed the jail, kidnapped the storeowners, and killed them.

Wells was outraged. “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,” she proclaimed in the Free Speech. Further editorials encouraged 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.” Tensions remained high throughout the spring, and Wells began carrying a pistol for protection. An estimated 2,000 blacks left Memphis and those who remained boycotted the recently opened streetcar line, pushing it to the verge of bankruptcy. The white business community was worried; streetcar company managers came to Wells’ office pleading for her to help halt the boycott.

But she was not in a conciliatory mood, particularly after a new wave of lynchings swept throughout the South. That May she left Memphis to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Church convention, leaving behind an editorial in response to this increasing violence against blacks. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she wrote. “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.”

White males were outraged. The editorial struck at the heart of their longstanding sexual fears and unchallenged myths about virtuous white southern womanhood. The white Daily Commercial openly called for a lynching. It proclaimed, “There are some things that the Southern white man will not tolerate.” At night a mob broke into the Free Speech and destroyed the presses. Wells was threatened with death if she dared return to Tennessee.

Crusaded Against Lynching

Wells was in New York during the violence and friends counseled her not to return to the South. Fortune invited her to stay and write for the New York Age. In exchange for the circulation list of the Free Speech, she received one-fourth interest in the New York Age and began researching and writing a series against lynching for it and other weekly black newspapers.

Wells studied the lynchings of 728 black men, women, and children during the ten years preceding the 1892 killings in Memphis. Her detailed statistics and findings formed the basis of two pamphlets, Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), that destroyed the heretofore assumed connection between the lynching of blacks and their rape of white women. In less than one-third of these documented lynchings were blacks accused of rape, and in even fewer instances were they actually guilty of the crime. Instead, most were victims of racial prejudice, dying for crimes of incendiarism, quarreling with whites, or making threats.

To fully attack the rape fantasy, Wells went even further. Her investigations also uncovered a large number of willing interracial sexual liaisons that she cited, some initiated by white women. While blacks were killed for this behavior, whites seduced and raped black women with apparent impunity. Exposing this double standard, she used as an example the actions of a lynch mob that killed a black man from Nashville accused of visiting a white woman, but did not harm a white man convicted of raping an eight-year-old black girl.

Her analysis of mob violence concluded that it lessened when blacks fought back. “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” she counseled in Southern Horrors. “When the white man knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.” Wells continued her anti-lynching crusade by embarking on speaking tours. Hers was one of the few voices of the era to openly challenge this crime. By exposing the facts and bringing the horror and injustice of lynch law to the public’s attention, she was convinced popular pressure would lead to its demise.

Wells lectured in the northeastern states in 1892, visiting England later that year and in 1894. While there, she helped organize the British Anti-Lynching Society in the hope that it could exert a moral influence on prominent American whites. Returning to America, she toured the northern and western states during 1894 and 1895, giving speeches and helping to create similar societies in the United States. At the same time, she started organizing clubs specifically for black women, beginning a national movement.

Formed Black Women’s Clubs

While visiting the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago during 1893, Wells organized the first black women’s club in Illinois. It would be named after her. One of its early projects was raising money to prosecute a policeman for killing an innocent black man. Later, its members would help establish the first black orchestra in Chicago and open the city’s first kindergarten for black children.

After concluding her lecture campaign in the spring of 1895, Wells returned to Chicago to marry Ferdinand L. Barnett, a widowed lawyer who also edited and owned the Chicago Conservator, a weekly black newspaper. Marriage did not temper her fire. She wrote articles on racial issues for the Conservator, the New York Age, and other black papers. In 1895 she played a leading role in the national conference of black women’s clubs that established the National Federation of Afro-American Women. The following year this group merged with two others to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).

Pregnant with her second child in 1897, Wells-Bamett resigned the presidency of the Ida B. Wells Club, the Barnetts sold the Conservator, and she ostensibly retired to private life. But she reentered public life within five months. A brutal lynching compelled her to lobby Congress and President McKinley in 1898 for an anti-lynching law, telling him, “We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home.”

That same year the Afro-American Council was reorganized, and Wells-Barnett took charge of its anti-lynching bureau. Her belief that educating and influencing prominent whites to join her crusade was the key to effecting change continued. She soon became upset with the inability of Fortune, the council’s militant founder, to attract and work with white reformers. But her aggressive and strident attacks on lynching, particularly her exposure of interracial sexual relations, also brought her into conflict with the more conciliatory black leader Booker T. Washington’s strategy of quiet racial diplomacy. Increasingly outspoken and assertive, she was growing intolerant of those whose positions contradicted her own.

Personality Conflicts

Throughout the 1890s, Southern blacks were disenfranchised, lynched with relative impunity, and victimized by mob violence. Wells-Barnett, having personally witnessed and investigated many of the most egregious incidences, was incapable of following Washington’s accommodating tactics. Instead, she usually supported the more militant methods and actions of his rival, W. E. B. Du Bois. Unfortunately for her, Washington proved to be a powerful antagonist in the coming years.

Wells-Barnett briefly slowed down to give birth to two more children, Ida in 1901 and Alfreda in 1904, before renewing her work, actively investigating lynchings and race riots in Cairo and Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, and Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919. She campaigned for the Republican party in Illinois and Missouri, participated in Chicago mayoral elections, demonstrated on behalf of women being allowed to vote, and organized perhaps the first black women’s suffrage group, Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club.

In response to the Springfield riots, black and white leaders called a national conference in 1909, forming the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Such a national biracial group working for black civil rights had long been Wells-Barnett’s goal. Though playing an active role in the organization’s founding and serving on its executive committee for years, she never held an important leadership position at either the national or local level. Her strong-willed personality and Washington’s opposition were making her an unwelcome participant in broad-based organizations.

The Springfield riots spurred Wells-Barnett to form the Negro Fellowship League in 1910, initially from members of her Sunday bible class. This shelter and settlement house in Chicago’s burgeoning black ghetto provided lodging, a reading room, a social center, and an employment center for southern black migrants pouring into the city. When her political contacts resulted in a job as an adult probation officer in 1913, she worked out of the center and used her salary to help support it.

Declining Prestige

In 1916 a local branch of the National Urban League opened in Chicago. Supported by Washington’s followers, its mission was the same as Wells-Barnett’s Negro Fellowship League. Many of her friends and former supporters left her to endorse the new organization’s settlement house. A growing lack of funds and the loss of her probation job after William Thompson became mayor in 1915 made it difficult to keep her center open. After her recovery from a gallstone operation in 1920, she closed its doors.

Wells-Barnett ran for president of the NACW in 1924 but lost to Mary McLeod Bethune. Four years later she unsuccessfully sought election to the Illinois State Senate. Rejected by the black women’s club movement she had founded, denied a significant role in the NAACP after her years spent campaigning to create just such an organization, forced to close her settlement house, and lacking any political power after Mayor Thompson’s election, she began writing her autobiography, Crusade for Justice.

“All at once the realization came to me that I had nothing to show for all those years of toil and labor,” she wrote. It is a bitter assessment of her career, centering on the loneliness of her struggle and the ingratitude of her fellow blacks. Wells-Barnett died of uremia in March of 1931. The public did not draw the same conclusions when assessing her career. Chicago acknowledged her many contributions to the city by naming a public housing project after her. In 1987 the Tennessee Historic Commission recognized her work by dedicating a commemorative marker in her honor on Beale Street in Memphis.

Selected writings

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

On Lynching (collection, including Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans), Amo Press, 1969.

Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Oxford University Press, 1991.

Sources

Books

Davidson, Sue, Getting the Real Story, Seal Press-Feminist, 1992.

Holt, Thomas, Black Leaders of the 20th Century, edited by John Hope Franklin and August Meier, University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Sterling, Dorothy, Black Foremothers: Three Lives, The Feminist Press, 1979.

Thompson, Mildred I., Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930, Carlson Publishing, 1990.

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

Periodicals

Christian Century, March 15, 1989, pp. 285-86.

Essence, February 1988, pp. 75-9.

Phylon, summer 1971, pp. 112-22.

—James J. Podesta

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

BORN: July 16, 1862 • Holly Springs, Mississippi

DIED: March 25, 1931 • Chicago, Illinois

Journalist; political activist

Ida B. Wells-Barnett began life as a slave. As a young woman, she was forcefully removed from a train after refusing to give up her seat to a white man. This prompted her to begin a career in journalism that would eventually make her the most outspoken opponent of lynching (putting a person to death, without a trial and usually by hanging).

"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."

Born into slavery

Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, to slave parents. Six months after her birth, President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65) signed the Emancipation Proclamation, giving all slaves their freedom. Wells's father was a carpenter who was active in politics and became interested in helping educate the freed slaves, including his own seven children. Wells and her siblings received basic academic and religious training through school and church.

When she was just sixteen years old, Wells lost her parents and one brother in a yellow fever epidemic that swept through Holly Springs in 1878. (Yellow fever is a deadly virus transmitted by mosquitoes.) Not quite finished with her high-school education, Wells now had to find a way to care for her five younger brothers and sisters. By pinning up her hair and wearing a long dress, Wells was able to convince the superintendent of a school five miles from home that she was eighteen. She was hired as a teacher, a position that paid $25 a month. During the week, she lived near the school while her siblings stayed with various people in their hometown. On weekends, Wells would return home to care for the children and do all the tasks required for keeping a large family, such as cooking and doing laundry.

In 1882, Wells and her two sisters moved to Memphis, Tennessee, leaving behind their brothers to work as carpenter's apprentices (students). Wells found another teaching job in one of the city's all–African American schools. During the summer, she took classes at Fisk University in Nashville. She had also attended Rust University in Holly Springs for a short time, but never earned a degree from either institution.

Stands up for her rights

In 1884, Wells bought a first-class train ticket to Nashville, Tennessee. Despite having paid for a ticket that would allow her to travel in the first-class car, once onboard, Wells was instructed to move to the back of the train, where African Americans were forced to ride. She refused, and as the conductor was forcibly trying to remove her, Wells bit his hand. It took the help of a baggage handler to get Wells out of the train car and into the back. She rode to the next stop, where she left the train and headed back to Memphis.

Wells filed a lawsuit against the railroad and won a settlement of $500. In 1887, however, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the ruling on the grounds that she had intended only to cause difficulty for the railroad company. The final decision was a blow to Wells's belief that justice would win out. She did not let her discouragement stop her from standing up for what she believed was right. Soon the name "Iola" was appearing in African American newspapers. Iola was the name Wells used when she wrote about politics and race issues in the South. In 1887, less than one year after she began writing under an assumed name, the National Afro-American Press named her the most prominent (outstanding) correspondent for the American black press. She was also elected as the assistant secretary of the organization.

Buys a newspaper

In 1891, Wells became co-owner of an African American newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. She quickly became the newspaper's editor. Her duties included writing articles, hiring correspondents, and increasing the paper's subscription base. She continued to teach during the school year.

Wells's teaching career came to an abrupt halt when she wrote and published an article criticizing Memphis's school system. The federal law at the time made it a crime for African Americans not to have the same rights as whites, but it upheld the belief that the two races should remain segregated (separated). This concept was known as "separate-but-equal." In reality, African Americans were still not treated equally. Although they had their own restaurants and public places, such facilities were never as good as those reserved for white patrons. This separate-but-equal philosophy infiltrated the South's school systems, and it suffered from the same inequalities. Although African American children were being taught in classrooms, their teachers were paid less, their textbooks were not as good as those used in white classrooms, and their schools received only a small percentage of the funding white schools received.

The school board knew Wells had written the article, even though she did not include a byline (indication of author). Wells was relieved of her duties as teacher, and her time was now freed and completely dedicated to improving the conditions of her race.

The year 1892 was a crucial one for Wells. Three people, one a good friend of Wells, were lynched while defending their grocery store from white attackers who wanted to put the store out of business. In the scuffle, one of the owners shot one of the attackers. A gang of white men seeking vengeance came after the three men and hanged them all. An outraged Wells criticized the event in a series of articles in which she specifically discussed the evils of lynching. She argued that the cruel punishment was not used to keep criminals in line but to enforce white supremacy (the idea that whites were superior to African Americans). She encouraged African Americans to boycott (not shop at) all white businesses, and even to leave town if need be. While visiting New York City shortly after her editorials went to press, a white mob ransacked and destroyed her newspaper office and told her they would kill her if she ever returned.

A new job, a continuing mission

Wells knew it was too dangerous to return to Memphis, so she stayed in New York and took a job as a writer at a magazine called Age. One of her first stories detailed several dozen recent lynchings, including names of the murderers, dates, and locations. The article was published at a good time. Historians estimate that 233 lynchings took place between 1880 and 1884; 381 from 1885 to 1889. These figures are probably much lower than the actual number of lynchings that took place. Many people never reported lynchings for fear of retaliation from whites.

Although the issue in which Wells's article was published sold ten thousand copies, its readers were primarily African American, and they already knew the horror of lynching. Wells knew she had to reach a white audience if she was to get help in putting an end to the barbaric act that took the lives of so many African Americans.

In an effort to bring her message to people who could help, Wells went on a tour of Europe and the British Isles. While there, she founded the National Afro-American Council and served as chairman of its Anti-Lynching Bureau. With the help of reformers in England, her cause was reported in American newspapers. Unfortunately, those same papers also attacked Wells as a nasty woman who spread lies. Conservative whites disliked her, but so did wealthy African Americans, who saw her as a threat to their security. They enjoyed the life of upper-class society, and to be associated with Wells, even if only by skin color, was not something they wanted.

Wells returned home in 1893 and moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she began working for an African American newspaper called the Conservator. That same year, she joined forces with another reformer, abolitionist (antislavery activist) Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), and wrote a pamphlet titled "The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not Represented in the World's Columbian Exposition." Ten thousand copies of the pamphlet were distributed at the Chicago World's Fair, an event that changed the cultural and social landscape of America forever.

Marries and retires, but not really

In 1895, Wells married lawyer Ferdinand Barnett, who happened to also be her editor. Her plan was to go into retirement, but that plan fell through. She did cut back on the amount of international travel she did to speak publicly at conventions, but that same year, Wells-Barnett published a detailed account of all the lynchings she could find information on in a book titled A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894. Wells-Barnett and her husband eventually had four children, and she dedicated her time to raising her family while not losing sight of the importance of her cause.

Wells-Barnett encouraged other African Americans to become active in their local regions. She herself helped establish the first kindergarten in the African American district of Chicago. She also joined Jane Addams (1860–1935; see entry), founder of the famous Hull-House Settlement (an early social-services community), in successfully protesting Chicago's plan to segregate its public schools. Wells-Barnett continued to denounce discrimination publicly. In the early 1900s, she exposed the segregationist policies of the popular Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), causing a handful of wealthy donors to withdraw their financial support of the group. They channeled their money instead into the Negro Fellowship Reading Room and Social Center.

Helps establish the NAACP

Wells-Barnett worked tirelessly for three years with other African American reformers and activists to help found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The organization was formally established in 1909 with the goal of ensuring the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all African Americans. Wells-Barnett resigned her membership not long after the formation of the NAACP, however, because she believed the group was not militant (radical) enough. African American activists were basically separated into two groups during those days. One group favored accommodation, which meant they made the best of whatever situation they found themselves in and did not rally for more of anything—rights, money, social equality. The other group believed the only way to attain equality was through insisting on truly equal rights; Wells-Barnett sided with this group.

Her last years

Wells-Barnett spent the last two decades of her life involved in community organization and social work in Chicago. She made herself available to do what she believed needed to be done. For instance, in 1913, she worked as an adult probation officer, a duty she remained committed to for three years. Also in 1913, she formed the first African American women's suffrage (right to vote) organization, the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago. She wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, in 1928. In 1930, she unsuccessfully ran for the Illinois state legislature, becoming the first African American woman ever to run for public office.

Wells-Barnett would not live to see the end of lynching as a common southern occurrence. It would be 1968 before regular lynchings would gradually stop. According to Robert Zangrando's article "About Lynching," 1882 was the first year any sort of reliable lynching statistics were kept. Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 5,000 people—3,446 of them African American men, women, and children—were lynched. Mississippi had the most lynchings (539 African American victims, 42 white). Well into the twentieth century, lynchings were social events. White families would bring their children to watch the torture and hanging of victims. Spectators watched, fascinated, as victims were dismembered (had body parts cut off), soaked in oil and set on fire alive, then hanged. Railroads sold tickets to lynchings. Newspapers often carried notices of planned executions so townspeople could be sure to put the event on their calendars.

Wells-Barnett died in Chicago of uremia (toxins in the bloodstream due to kidney disease) on March 25, 1931. She was sixty-nine years old. A low-income housing project was built in Chicago in 1941 and named after her. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. A commemorative stamp bearing her likeness was issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1990.

For More Information

BOOKS

Als, Hilton, et al. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000.

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

Schechter, Patricia A. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Welch, Catherine. Ida B. Wells-Barnett: Powerhouse with a Pen. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 2000.

Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Edited by Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

WEB SITES

Baker, Lee D. "Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Passion for Justice." Duke University. http://www.duke.edu/~ldbaker/classes/AAIH/caai/ibwells/ibwbkgrd.html (accessed on September 6, 2006).

Gado, Mark. "Lynchings in America." Crime Library.http://www.crimelibrary.com/classics2/carnival/ (accessed on September 6, 2006).

"Ida B. Wells-Barnett." AfricaWithin.com.http://www.africawithin.com/bios/ida_wells.htm (accessed on September 6, 2006).

Library of Congress. "The Progress of a People: Ida B. Wells-Barnett." African American Perspectives.http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/idawells.html (accessed on September 6, 2006).

Long Island University. "Lynchings in America." B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library of the C. W. Post Campus.http://www.liu.edu/CWIS/CWP/library/african/2000/lynching.htm (accessed on September 6, 2006).

Naill, Katherine. "Ida B. Wells-Barnett 'Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases."' University of Arkansas.http://www.uark.edu/depts/comminfo/women/wells.htm (accessed on September 6, 2006).

PBS. "Ida B. Wells." The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people_wells.html (accessed on September 6, 2006).

Without Sanctuary.http://withoutsanctuary.org/ (accessed on September 6, 2006).

Zangrando, Robert L. "About Lynching." University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Modern American Poetry.http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm (accessed on September 6, 2006).

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.

See also Abolition; Douglass, Frederick; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Garvey, Marcus; Journalism; Lynching; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Niagara Movement; Randolph, Asa Philip; Universal Negro Improvement Association; Washington, Booker T.

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

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1862–1931

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett gained a national reputation in the 1890s as a pioneering crusader against lynching. Her long career spanned a wide variety of venues, including schoolroom, settlement house, municipal court, electoral politics, home, church, and social club. Journalism, however, was her calling. Her publications, many of them too militant or sharply worded to find a substantial receptive audience, remain her greatest legacy.

The eldest of eight children, Ida was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, fifty miles southeast of Memphis. Her parents died in the yellow fever epidemic that swept through the Mississippi River Valley in 1878, leaving sixteen-year-old Ida to care for five siblings. She quickly secured a teaching position, made possible by her education at Shaw University in Holly Springs. Between 1880 and 1882 she relocated to Memphis, taking along two sisters and leaving her other siblings in the care of relatives.

Wells found her teaching career in Memphis unsatisfying, and she soon discovered a far more rewarding form of pedagogy: journalism. She published her first newspaper article in a church weekly in 1883, and began sending articles about black women to major African American publications in eastern cities. By 1885, writing as “Iola,” she was among the few African American women writing about politics, and in 1889 she became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Her straightforward criticism in 1891 of the Memphis school board’s neglect of black children and exploitation of black female teachers led to a decision not to renew her teaching appointment.

Wells’s uncompromising journalism reflected her general approach to race relations. At the age of twenty-two, she sued a railroad after being thrown off the train for refusing to ride in a segregated car. In 1892 three Memphis black grocers were lynched after a conflict with a white competitor envious of their success. Wells later recalled that the event “changed the whole course of my life” (DeCosta-Willis 1995). Her unsigned attack on the lynching eschewed the cautious convention observed by southern black spokesmen who paired their criticism of lynching with ritualized reminders that the black community should not accept criminal behavior within its ranks. Wells understood that lynching was meant less to punish depravity (which white southerners expected from “their Negroes”) than to punish the more dangerous sin of a black person not accepting his place.

Wells left Memphis immediately, probably expecting the mob attack on her newspaper the following day. She spent the next three years in eastern cities and Great Britain, lecturing and writing (now under the name “Exile”). Drawing on statistics compiled from careful research, she demonstrated that less than a third of lynching victims had even been accused of rape. Lynching, she argued, had less to do with the honor of white womanhood than “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down’ ” (DeCosta-Willis 1995, p. xiii). Her charge that liaisons between white men and black women constituted the true threat to racial purity stirred even greater controversy.

Wells visited Chicago in 1893 to protest the exclusion of African Americans from the World’s Columbian Exposition. Characteristically, she took a more militant position that most of her peers, advocating a boycott of the “Colored American Day” granted by the fair managers to placate the protesters. She relocated to Chicago permanently two years later, marrying prominent attorney Ferdinand Barnett. Over the next three decades she wrote less, putting her energies into the woman suffrage movement, local politics, and social work. In 1910 she founded the Negro Fellowship League as a venue for “missionary work” and “social work” on the city’s South Side. Facing competition first from the city’s black YMCA (1913) and then Urban League (1915), the Fellowship League shifted to a focus on politics and had only a minor presence by the time black southerners began moving to Chicago in large numbers in late 1916.

Wells-Barnett, who attended the founding meeting of the NAACP in 1910 in New York, never established herself as a major figure in African American institutional life. Although conventionally middle class in style, manners, and religious observance, she had limited patience with polite diplomacy during a generally cautious era of black politics.

Although she effectively mobilized black voters briefly through the Alpha Suffrage Club (established in 1913), Ida B. Wells was more adept at analytical and rhetorical provocation than organization. She understood in the 1890s what W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) would famously enunciate four decades later in Black Reconstruction (1935): that African American success and dignity were less likely to win equal citizenship than to provoke the violence necessary to keep “the Negro” in his place.

SEE ALSO Journalism; Lynchings; Militants; Resistance; White Supremacy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

Wells, Ida B. 1892. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry.

Wells, Ida B., Frederick Douglass, I. Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett. [1893] 1999. The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, ed. Robert W. Rydell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1895. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1899. Lynch Law in Georgia. Chicago pamphlet, distributed by Chicago Colored Citizens.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1900. Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death. Chicago pamphlet.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1917. The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century. Chicago: The Negro Fellowship Herald Press.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1922. The Arkansas Race Riot. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1991. Selected works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Comp. Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press.

secondary sources

DeCosta-Willis, Miriam, ed. 1995. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Boston: Beacon Press.

Grossman, James. 1997. “Social Burden” or “Amiable Peasantry”: Constructing a Place for Black Southerners. In American Exceptionalism?: U.S. Working-class Formation in an International Context. Eds. Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris, 221–243. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Holt, Thomas C. 1982. The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership. In Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, eds. John Hope Franklin and August Meier, 38–61. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Schechter, Patricia A. 2001. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

James Grossman

WELLS-BARNETT, IDA BELL

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was a prominent and often controversial African–American reformer who spoke out against racial oppression in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The daughter of slaves, Wells-Barnett conducted a self-described crusade for justice to protest the savage lynchings of hundreds of African Americans in the South. Her impassioned antilynching lectures and publications had an enormous effect on public opinion in the United States and Great Britain. Outspoken and self-confident, Wells-Barnett was viewed with hostility by many whites and rebuffed by several African–American leaders who resented her frequent criticism of their efforts. Yet, even her detractors conceded that Wells-Barnett's unshakable commitment to the social, political, and economic advancement of African Americans propelled the struggle for civil rights.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it does seem that notwithstanding all those social agencies and activities there is not vigilance, which should be exercised in the preservation of our rights."
—Ida B. Wells Barnett

Born July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells-Barnett was the oldest of eight children of James Wells and Elizabeth Warrenton Wells. After the Civil War, her father was a carpenter and a leader in local Reconstruction activities. Wells-Barnett attended Shaw University (later renamed Rust College), an African American school for all grade levels established in Holly Springs in 1866 by Freedmen's Aid, a church-sponsored effort to educate former

slaves. The northern Methodist missionaries who taught at the school considered Wells-Barnett an exemplary student.

When Wells-Barnett was sixteen years old, her parents and youngest brother died in a yellow fever epidemic. Wells-Barnett insisted on raising her surviving siblings while teaching school in a rural district. By 1883, her brothers were old enough to begin work as carpenters, so Wells-Barnett and her sisters moved to Memphis, to live with an aunt. Wells-Barnett attended classes at Fisk University and taught school in Memphis until 1891, when she was fired from her job for criticizing the segregationist policies of the Memphis School Board. Angry articles by Wells-Barnett in the small newspaper Free Speech and Headlight denounced the limited educational opportunities for African Americans in "separate-but-equal" Memphis schools. Writing under the pen name Iola, Wells-Barnett discovered her talent for journalism and her calling as a social activist.

Wells-Barnett became co-owner and editor of Free Speech and a vocal opponent of jim crow laws in the South. In one Free Speech article, she described her own frustrating 1884 lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, & Southwestern Railroad. The dispute began when Wells-Barnett boarded a train in Memphis en route to Woodstock, Tennessee. After taking her usual seat in the "ladies car," which was a first-class coach, she and the other African–American women in that car were told by the conductor to move to the smoking car, which was not first-class. By Tennessee law, African Americans were to be assigned separate and equal accommodations on public transportation.

When Wells-Barnett refused to sit in the smoking car, she was forced off the train. Later, she sued the railroad and won $500 in damages from a lower state court. Her triumph was short-lived, however, because the award was overturned in 1887 by the Supreme Court of Tennessee, which determined that a smoking car could indeed serve as a first-class accommodation for African Americans (Chesapeake, Ohio, & Southwestern Railroad Co. v. Wells, 85 Tenn. (1 Pickle) 613, 4 S.W. 5 [1887]). The Tennessee high court suggested that Wells-Barnett's real motive in refusing to sit in the smoking car was to harass the railroad and to lay the groundwork

for a profitable lawsuit. The court chastised Wells-Barnett for failing to try in good faith to secure a comfortable seat. The stark injustice of the court's reversal fueled Wells-Barnett's determination to speak out against the mistreatment of African Americans.

For Wells-Barnett, the pivotal event in her activist career was the lynching in 1892 of her friends Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Henry Stewart, three African–American merchants from Memphis. The men owned the People's Grocery, a thriving operation that had cut into the profits of its white competitors. When a mob of white men was deputized to arrest the three merchants on trumped-up criminal charges, violence erupted, and the innocent African Americans were hanged.

Wells-Barnett was outraged. She wrote a scathing editorial in Free Speech, denouncing not only the murder of her friends but also the offensive, widely accepted rationale for most lynchings. Wells-Barnett observed that contrary to southern myth, lynchings were rarely if ever spontaneous group acts in retaliation for sexual misconduct by African–American men. A lynch mob was actually a barbaric mechanism for maintaining power among whites and for denying African Americans their civil rights. Protecting the reputation of southern white women was a smoke screen. Wells-Barnett also asserted that any sexual liaisons between African–American men and white women were consensual, an observation that enraged much of the conservative white population.

After the editorial was published, an angry throng of white men stormed the Free Speech office and destroyed Wells-Barnett's printing press. Wells-Barnett was in Philadelphia at the time.

These episodes of mob rule, so contrary to the democratic ideal, led Wells-Barnett to launch an antilynching campaign. Wells-Barnett relied not only on righteous indignation but on shocking national statistics to make her case against lynching. In articles and speeches, she quoted a grim fact: in 1894, 132 legal executions were carried out in the United States, and 197 lynchings occurred. African Americans were receiving the death penalty from self-appointed white citizens without the benefit of criminal investigations, formal charges, legal representation, or trials. Wells-Barnett's findings were published in 1895 in a detailed book entitled A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894.

In 1893, Wells-Barnett carried her antilynching campaign to Great Britain in the hope of exerting international pressure on U.S. legislators to enact antilynching laws. She was well received in Great Britain and spoke to large crowds. While in Europe, she was a guest at several women's civic clubs and was impressed with their worthwhile, community-minded activities. Wells-Barnett exported the idea to the United States, where African–American women's clubs flourished.

In 1895, Wells-Barnett married Ferdinand L. Barnett, the first African–American state's attorney in Illinois. After the marriage, Wells-Barnett curtailed her international speaking but continued to write in national publications. The couple lived in Chicago and had four children. Wells-Barnett worked hard to improve conditions for African Americans in Chicago by serving as a social worker and community organizer.

Wells-Barnett was well-known throughout the United States, yet the political power she craved eluded her. Although she was involved in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she alienated many of her African–American colleagues with her sharp tongue and unbending manner. Also, she was an unreserved critic of the accommodationist position favored by booker t. washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute and the most influential African–American leader at the time. Wells-Barnett favored a militant approach to achieving racial equality and was not welcome in the Washington camp. Other women such as Mary McLeod Bethune eventually eclipsed Wells-Barnett in influence. A combination of politics and personal animosity prevented Wells-Barnett from achieving the level of African–American leadership she sought.

Although Wells-Barnett felt stymied near the end of her career, she earned an honored and lasting place in history as one of the first African American civil rights activists. Daughter Alfreda M. Barnett Duster wrote that Wells-Barnett "fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena" (Wells 1970, xxxii).

Wells-Barnett died in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of sixty-eight. In 1950 the city of Chicago named her one of the twenty-five most outstanding women in its history.

further readings

Franklin, John Hope, and August Meier, eds. 1982. Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.

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

Schechter, Patricia A. 2001. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.

Wells, Ida B. 1970. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.