Ida B. Wells-Barnett

An uncompromising woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker.

Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, Ida's parents were able to support their seven children after the war because her mother and father were skilled workers--as cook and carpenter. When Ida was fourteen, however, Yellow Fever killed her parents and youngest siblings, and Ida took it upon herself to keep the family together. She began a a job as a teacher, working to continue her own education at nearby Rust College.

In Memphis, where Ida moved to live with aunt and young sisters, that she first began to fight--literally--for racial and gender justice. In 1884 she was asked by the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company to give up her seat to a white man; she was ordered into the smoking, or "Jim Crow," car.

Despite the 1875 Civil Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color, in theaters, hotels, transports, and other public accommodations, many railroad companies defied the congressional mandate and racially segregated its passengers. It is also important to note that Ida B. Well's defiant act was took place before Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the deceptive doctrine of "separate but equal," which constitutionalized racial segregation.

Wells wrote in her autobiography:

I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.

Ida Wells was forcefully removed from the train and the other passengers--all whites--applauded. Back home in Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad, and won her case in the local circuit courts. But the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. This was the first of many struggles Wells engaged, and from that moment forward, she worked fearlessly to overturn injustices against women and people of color.

Her suit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company also gave rise to a new career as a journalist. Many newspapers wanted to hear the story of the 25-year-old school teacher who stood up against white supremacy. Her writing career blossomed in papers geared to African American and Christian audiences.

In 1889 Wells became a partner in the Free Speech and Headlight. The paper was also owned by Rev. R. Nightingale-- the pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church. He "counseled" his large congregation to subscribe to the paper and it flourished, allowing her to leave her position as a schoolteacher.

Then, in 1892 three of her friends--Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart--were lynched. . These men owned the People's Grocery Company, and their small grocery had taken away customers from competing white businesses. A group of angry white men thought they would "eliminate" the competition so they attacked People's grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. The three men were arrested, but a lynch-mob broke into the jail, dragged them away from town, and brutally murdered all of them.

This atrocity galvanized Ida Wells, and she wrote 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. 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.

Many people took Wells' advice and left town; others in the Black community organized a boycott of white-owned businesses to try and stem the threat, the terror, of lynchings. Ida's newspaper office was destroyed as a result of her stories of the murder of her three friends. Ida Wells could not return to Memphis, so she moved to Chicago, where she continued her blistering attacks on Southern injustices, especially through investigation to expose the fraudulent "reasons" given to lynch Black men, which by now had become a common occurrence.

In Chicago, she developed numerous African American women and reform organizations, but she remained diligent in her anti-lynching crusade, writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She was also a tireless worker for women's suffrage, and marched in the 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C. Not able to tolerate injustice of any kind, Ida B. Wells, along with Jane Addams, successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.

In 1895 Wells married the editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers, saying, "I was married in the city of Chicago to Attorney F. L. Barnett, and retired to what I thought was the privacy of a home." Ida B. Wells-Barnett did not stay retired long. She continued to write and to organize, and in 1906, she W. E.B. DuBois and others to further the Niagara Movement. She was one of two African American women to sign "the call" to form the NAACP in 1909.

As late as 1930, disgusted by the nominees of the major parties to the state legislature, Wells-Barnett decided to run for the Illinois State legislature, making her one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States.

A year later, she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.

But what she might have said about a woman running for president in 2008, about a black man becoming president in 2008.

Somewhere, Ida B. Wells is smiling, and probably saying, "I told you so."