Ida Wells-Barnett
Born in HollySprings, Mississippi in 1862, Ida Wells Barnett was a crusader against lynching, as well as a suffragist and journalist. Born in slavery to parents who were skilled in a trade, her mother as a cook, and her father as a skilled carpenter, her parents were emancipated just after the War.
After the tragic death of her parents to yellow fever when she was fourteen, Wells-Barnett found a teaching position, thereby allowing her to keep the family together. She later moved to Memphis where she began her fight for racial and gender equality.
For example, in 1884, while traveling by train, the conductor asked her to give up her seat to a white man, despite the fact that the 1875 Civil Rights Act prohibited means of public transportation from discriminating on the basis of race. She refused and was forcefully removed from the train, garnering applause from the all white train car. When she attempted to fight this case in court, she won the lower circuit courts but lost to the Supreme Court of Tennessee.
However, this experience had a silver lining; newspapers wanted to hear her story. She helped purchase the Free Speech and Headlight in 1889, and used this forum to express her opinion, particularly the senseless lynching of three of her friends.
She wrote in 1892, “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.”
Her newspaper office was ransacked and burned after the publication of this article, and Wells-Barnett moved to Chicago, where she helped develop various African American reform organizations. She wrote Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, and joined in the 1913 women’s suffrage march in Washington, DC.
In 1909, she was one of two women to sign the proclamation for the NAACP; at the same time, despite her status as one of the NAACP founding members, she opposed the viewpoints of its leader, Booker T. Washington.
Wells-Barnett continued to advocate on behalf of the oppressed, and just one year before her death in 1931 at the age of sixty-nine, she attempted to run for the Illinois state legislature, making her the first black woman to run for public office in the United States.
Bibliography
Franklin, Vincent P. Living our Stories, Telling our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of African American Intellectual Tradition. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995.
Murray, Linda. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999.
