Ida B. Wells

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Ida Wells-Barnett

Ida B. Wells, (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931), later known as Ida Wells-Barnett, was an African American civil rights advocate, and led a strong cause against lynching. She was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist and speaker.

Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the daughter of a carpenter. Her parents were slaves but they family achieved freedom in 1865. When Wells was 16 both her parents and a younger brother died of yellow fever. At a meeting following the funeral, friends and relatives decided that the five remaining Wells children should be farmed out to various aunts and uncles. Wells was devastated by the idea and to keep the family together, dropped out of high school, and found employment as a teacher in a local Black school.

In 1880, Wells moved to Memphis, where she continued teaching. During the summer sessions, she attended Fisk University in Nashville. Wells held strong political opinions and she upset many people with her views on women's rights. When she was 24, she wrote, "I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge."

Wells became a public figure in Memphis when in 1884 she led a campaign against segregation on the local railway. In 1884, she was asked by the conductor of the Chesapeake, Ohio & South Western Railroad Company to give up her seat on the train to a white man and ordered into the smoking or "Jim Crow" car, which was already crowded with other passengers. Despite the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 banning discrimination on the basis of race, creed or color, in theaters, hotels, transport and other public accommodations, several railroad companies defied this congressional mandate and racially segregated their passengers. She refused to give up her seat and the conductor, who was assisted by two other men, dragged her out of the car. When she returned to Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad. She won her case in the local circuit court, but the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, which reversed the lower court's ruling, in 1887.

During her participation in women's suffrage parades, her refusal to stand in the back because she was black resulted in the beginning of her media publicity. In 1889, she became co-owner and editor of an anti-segregationist newspaper based in Beale Street in Memphis. In 1892, however, she was forced to leave Memphis because her editorials in the paper, Free Speech, were seen as too agitating. 1892 was the same year that she published her famous pamphlet, "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases". In 1895, she published A Red Record, which documented her campaign against lynching.

In 1895, in Chicago, she married attorney Ferdinand Lee Barnett, who founded and edited the Chicago Conservator, the city's first Black newspaper. The couple had three children. Although Wells tried to retire from public life to raise her children, she soon returned to her campaign for equal rights. In 1906, she joined with William E. B. Dubois to promote the Niagara Movement, a group which advocated full civil rights for Blacks. In 1909, Wells helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP).

She never obtained a position of leadership within the NAACP, perhaps because she opposed Booker T. Washington's moderate position that Blacks focus on economic gains rather than social and political equality with Whites. Or perhaps it was because at this time women did not have such power. She founded the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, the first Black suffrage organization in 1913, and from l913-1916 worked as a probation officer in Chicago. The poet Langston Hughes said her activities in the field of social work laid the groundwork for the Urban League.

In 1930, she ran for the Illinois state legislature, one of the first black women ever to run for public office. She died in Chicago, Illinois, where a public housing complex was later named in her honor. There is also a high school named after her, on Hayes Street in San Francisco, California.

After her retirement, Wells wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928). She died of uremia on March 25, 1931.

Throughout her life, Wells was militant in her demands for equality and justice for African-Americans, and insisted that the African-American community must win justice through its own efforts.

There is a play/musical about the life of Ida B. Wells, titled Constant Star by Tazewell Thompson. The play uses five actresses to play her as well as some of the other characters involved in her miraculous life. Although it is primarily a drama, it includes about 20 negro spiritual songs, sung by the actresses. The following is a quote from the director/playwright Tazewell Thompson:

My first introduction to Ida B. Wells was the PBS documentary on her life. Her story gnawed at me. A woman born in slavery, she would grow to become one of the great pioneer activists of the Civil Rights movement. A precursor of Rosa Parks, she was a suffragette, newspaper editor and publisher, investigative journalist, co-founder of the NAACP, political candidate, mother, wife, and the single most powerful leader in the anti-lynching campaign in America. A dynamic, controversial, temperamental, uncompromising race woman, she broke bread and crossed swords with some of the movers and shakers of her time: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, President McKinley. By any fair assessment, she was a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America.

On her passing in 1931, Ida B. Wells was interred in the Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago. Her formidable contributions to the Civil Rights movement have, until most recently, been under-appreciated. Until now; almost, but not quite, an historical footnote.

This play with song is my attempt to let her story breathe freely on stage - to give it a symphonic expression - to give her extraordinary persona an audience, something she always craved.

Selected bibliography

Works by Ida Wells--

• Crusade for Justice: the Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Ed. Alfreda M Duster. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.
• Ida B. Wells Tells about Lynching. New York: African Islamic Publications, 1988.
• The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Ed. Maria DeCosta-Willis. Boston : Beacon Press, 1995.
• On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans. New York: Arno Press, 1969.
• Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Ed. Trudier Harris. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-century Black women writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
• Southern Horrors and Other Writings : The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900. Ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.
• Wells, Ida B. and Jane Addams. Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views. Ed. Bettina Aptheker. New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977.
• Wells, Ida B., et al. The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition. Ed. Robert W. Rydell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

External links

• Biography from Duke
• Works by Ida B. Wells at Project Gutenberg