03/28/2022
Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, MS in 1862. She attended Rust College, but when her parents died in a yellow fever epidemic, she took a job as a teacher to support her siblings and eventually moved them to Memphis. She continued her education at Fisk University in Nashville. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett, an attorney, and together they had four children.
In 1892, Memphis grocery store owners Calvin McDowell, Tom Moss, and Will Stewart were lynched by a white mob. Grief stricken and angry about the wrongful deaths of her friends, Ida began investigating mob violence. She published articles about lynching in newspapers and compiled her findings in a pamphlet. Furious locals stormed her newspaper office and burned her press. Fortunately, she was in New York at the time and was thus unharmed. Fearing for her life, she relocated to Chicago. President McKinley granted her an audience at the White House in 1898 where she urged him to make reforms.
Wells-Barnett also campaigned for women’s rights. She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club which worked to address both civil rights and women’s suffrage. In 1913 she organized the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. She and other club members were invited to march in the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C. but were told women of color would need to march at the back of the parade. Instead, Ida stood along the parade route and, when the Chicago contingent of white women passed, she took her place right alongside them. The Alpha Suffrage Club played a crucial role in seeing the Illinois Suffrage Act of June 25, 1913 passed, extending suffrage to all women of the state.
Ida B. Wells died on March 25, 1931. In 2020, she was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”