Cathy's back with another post about a prominent woman in history!
Ida B. Wells was an African American journalist who was at the forefront of the antilynching crusade in the US in the 1890s.
Wells was born on July 16, 1862 into slavery. After the Civil War, she enrolled at Rust University, a school for freedmen in her native Holly Springs, Mississippi. In 1878, a yellow fever epidemic hit her hometown and took the lives of her parents and infant brother. Having been left to raise her remaining siblings, she began teaching in a country school in order to support them and continued after moving to Memphis, Tennessee in 1884.
In 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against Wells in a suit she brought against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for being forcibly removed from her seat after she refused to give it up for one in a "colored only" car. This led to her first interaction with journalism. She would write, under the pen name Iola, about issues of race and politics in the South.
After the People's Grocery Store Lynching in which three of her friends were lynched Wells began her campaign against the practice and published multiple pieces condemning it. Locals were enraged and they subsequently destroyed her publication, the Memphis Free Speech. In addition, she was told if she ever set foot in Memphis again she would be killed (she was traveling to New York at the time of the attack). She moved to Chicago and despite the opposition, continued her anti-lynching crusade, first as a staff writer for the New York Age and then as a lecturer and organizer of antilynching societies. She traveled to speak in major US cities and visited the UK twice for the cause. She contributed to the Chicago Conservator, her husband's newspaper, and other local journals.
From 1898 to 1902, Wells served as a secretary of the National Afro-American Council and participated in the founding the NAACP (though she later distanced herself from the organization because she was not content with the white and elite black leadership).
In 1910, she became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League which aided newly arrived migrants from the south. In 1913 she founded what may have been the first black woman suffrage group, Chicago's Alpha Suffrage Club. She also served as a probation officer of the Chicago municipal court. She was militant in her demand for justice for African Americans and in her insistence that it was to be won by their own efforts.
She died on March 25, 1931 at the age of 68 due to kidney disease. To this day she remains a symbol of strength and activism as she worked to reveal the truth and advocate for equality despite countless obstacles.
Sources:
https://www.biography.com/people/ida-b-wells-9527635
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ida-B-Wells-Barnett
It is always awesome to read about empowered women. Ida B Wells had to be strong enough to support her siblings. I can't imagine having to work for my siblings and having to provide for them. Through, all the hardships she's gone through I believe it made her to be the strong women she is. She was threatened with death yet she persevered. She teaches a powerful lesson to both men and women, that perseverance is key to success.
ReplyDeleteIda B Wells is a very impressive women. It is very cool that she born into slavery and lost her parents and brother to sicken and still was able to overcome it. She stepped up to the occasion and took care of raising her sisters. It's impressive that She then advocated for herself when she felt she received unfair treatment by the railroad company. Even when she was turned by the supreme court she kept fighting by becoming a journalist and spreading her words and ideas all around the states and the world.
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