Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery on the sixteenth of July 1862 at Holly Springs, Mississippi, the eldest of eight children of James Wells — a carpenter who had been the apprentice of his enslaved-master father — and Elizabeth Warrenton Wells, a cook. She was three at Emancipation. Both parents died of yellow fever in the September 1878 epidemic at Holly Springs; she was sixteen and supported her seven surviving siblings by teaching at the local Black school. She entered Rust College for adult studies the same year.

She moved to Memphis in 1882 to teach at the segregated Memphis Public Schools. On the fourth of May 1884, on the train from Memphis to Woodstock, the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad conductor ordered her to leave the ladies' first-class car for the smoker reserved for Black passengers. She refused and was forcibly removed. She sued the railroad in the Memphis circuit court, won a five-hundred-dollar judgment that the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed in 1887, and recorded the experience in the diary that produced her early journalistic career.

She purchased one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1889 and the editorship the following year. Her decisive journalistic intervention came on the ninth of March 1892 with the lynching of three Black grocers — including her friend Thomas Moss — at Memphis. Her investigative editorials in the Free Speech across April and May 1892 — naming the lynching as the murder of three economically successful Black men in retaliation for competition against a white grocer — drew the destruction of the Free Speech offices by a white mob on the twenty-seventh of May 1892. She had moved to New York to seek subscriptions for the paper the week before.

She published her decisive pamphlet — Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases — in 1892, the second — A Red Record — in 1895, and the third — Mob Rule in New Orleans — in 1900. The three pamphlets together established the empirical statistical basis of the modern anti-lynching campaign and the rhetorical framework against the white-Southern justification of lynching as a response to sexual violence.

She married Ferdinand Barnett in 1895 and continued her journalism from Chicago as editor of the Conservator. She was a founding signatory to the 1909 call for the NAACP and to the 1913 Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago. She died at Chicago on the twenty-fifth of March 1931, at sixty-eight.

She is honored here as the anti-lynching crusader.