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Introduction
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931), more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was an activist, suffragist, journalist, and advocate for the rights of women. She has been called “the most famous Black Woman in the U.S. during her lifetime.” She was also an important leader in the late 19th and early 20th Black Freedom Movement. She was one of the founders of the Niagra Movement, the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she traveled internationally decrying the lynching of black Americans.

Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was manumitted following the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil War and at the age of 16 she became a school teacher in order to support her family. Wells lost both her parents and two siblings in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic and moved with two of her sisters to Memphis, Tennessee in 1883 where she continued working as a teacher. It was in Memphis where she began her career as a journalist and activist. At 19 years old she challenged the segregation of trains on a Chesapeake and Ohio railcar in September of 1883, developed a national reputation by publishing in numerous black papers in the 1880s, and in 1889 became the editor and co-owner of a newspaper called the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight with J.L. Fleming.

Wells became the foremost voice on lynching in the United States in the late 19th century beginning with the publication of a widely read exposition of the lynching of Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and William Stewart at The People's Grocery in Memphis on March 21, 1892. Wells subsequently investigated lynching across the South in two major publications, Southern Horrors (June 1892) and The Red Record (1895). In her work Wells sought to prove wrong the frequent claims by whites that lynchings were reserved for black criminals only. Wells used documentary evidence to suggest that lynching was a barbaric practice used by whites to intimidate and oppress black people seeking economic, social, or political advancement.

Wells left Memphis for Chicago in 1892 after a white mob burned her newspaper office to the ground. But her investigative work on lynching in the United States brought her international renowned and led to speaking tours on the subject in England in 1893 and 1894. In 1895, Wells married the black newspaperman and owner of The Chicago Conservator Ferdinand Lee Barnett and the couple had four children together.

Wells was connected to numerous public figures through her work in the Black Freedom Movement and Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States, but often encountered conflicts with prominent leaders including with NAACP co-founder W.E.B. DuBois, Tuskegee Institute Founder Booker T. Washington, and Women's Christian Temperance Union President and suffragist Frances E. Willard.

Amidst the Progressive Era in 1913, Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago to involve black women in political work in Illinois. Because the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had long believed that the success of their effort for a voting amendment enfranchising women depended on the support of white women in the U.S. South, black suffragettes were marginalized and black disfranchisement largely ignored. But just as white women engaged in civic work without voting in the Progressive Era, Wells believed black women could do the same. Wells organized black women in Chicago to become involved as campaign workers and precinct captains and in the election of 1915 contributed directly to the election of Oscar DePriest, Chicago's First Black Alderman.

In the final years of her life, Wells remained active in local, national, and global politics. She was elected to represent Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association at the first Pan-African Congress in 1919 at Versailles, but was denied a passport to attend. In 1926, she became active with A. Phillip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, eventually the largest black union in the country, and in 1930 she ran unsuccessfully as the first woman seeking the Illinois State Senator District Three seat. She joined the campaign to oppose Herbert Hoover's Supreme Court of the United States nominee John J. Parker and continued working on her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. Wells died on March 25, 1931 from urmeic poisoning at 68 years old.

As the Rev. Joseph M. Edmonds said in his eulogy at The Metropolitan Church, “she will be missed.” The Chicago Defender noted that the "throngs in the pews, the throng lining the walls, the throng high in the balcony, the throngs packed in the vestibules answered with nods of their heads - she will be missed."

Early Life
Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, the first born child of James Wells and Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Warrenton). James Wells' father was a white man who slept with a black slave named Peggy. Before dying, Wells' father brought him to Holly Springs at 18 years old to become a carpenter's apprentice where he developed a skill and worked as a "hired out slave living in town." Lizzie's experience as an enslaved person was quite different. One of ten children born on a plantation in Virginia, Lizzie was sold away from her family and siblings and tried without success to locate her family following the Civil War.

Like many African Americans in the postbellum South, James Wells valued education and became a trustee of Shaw College (now Rust College). He refused to vote for Democratic Candidates during the period of Reconstruction, became a member of the Loyal League, and was known as a 'race man' for his involvement in politics and his commitment to the Republican Party. James Wells founded a succesful carpentery business in Holly Springs in 1867, and Lizzie Wells became known as a “famous cook.”

Ida B. Wells was one of eight children ultimately born to James and Lizzie Wells, and she ultimately enrolled in the historically black liberal arts college Rust College in Holly Springs (formerly Shaw College). In September of 1878, tragedy struck the Wells family when both of her parents died during a Yellow Fever epidemic that claimed three of her siblings also. Wells had been visiting her grandmother’s farm near Holly Springs at the time and was spared.

Following the funerals of her parents and brother, friends and relatives decided that the five? remaining Wells children should be split up and sent to various foster homes. Wells resisted this solution. To keep her younger siblings together as a family, she found work as a teacher in a black elementary school in Holly Springs. Her paternal grandmother, Peggy Wells, along with other friends and relatives, stayed with her siblings and cared for them during the week while Wells was teaching.

But when Peggy Wells died from a stroke and her sister Eugenia passed away, Wells accepted the invitation of her aunt Fanny to bring her two remaining sisters to Memphis in 1883.

Early career
Soon after moving to Memphis, Wells was hired in Woodstock by the Shelby County school system. During her summer vacations she attended summer sessions at Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville. She also attended Lemoyne-Owen College, a historically black college in Memphis. She held strong political opinions and provoked many people with her views on women's rights. At 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."

On May 4, 1884, a train conductor with the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad ordered Wells to give up her seat in the first-class ladies car and move to the smoking car, which was already crowded with other passengers. The year before, the Supreme Court had ruled against the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 (which had banned racial discrimination in public accommodations). This verdict supported railroad companies that chose to racially segregate their passengers. When Wells refused to give up her seat, the conductor and two men dragged her out of the car. Wells gained publicity in Memphis when she wrote a newspaper article for The Living Way, a black church weekly, about her treatment on the train. In Memphis, she hired an African-American attorney to sue the railroad. When her lawyer was paid off by the railroad, she hired a white attorney. She won her case on December 24, 1884, when the local circuit court granted her a $500 award. The railroad company appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court's ruling in 1887. It concluded, "We think it is evident that the purpose of the defendant in error was to harass with a view to this suit, and that her persistence was not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for the short ride." Wells was ordered to pay court costs. Wells' reaction to the higher court's decision revealed her strong convictions on civil rights and religious faith, as she responded: "I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people ... O God, is there no ... justice in this land for us?"

While continuing to teach elementary school, Wells became increasingly active as a journalist and writer. She was offered an editorial position for the Evening Star in Washington, DC, and she began writing weekly articles for The Living Way weekly newspaper under the pen name "Lola." In 1889, Wells became editor and co-owner with J.L. Fleming of The Free Speech and Headlight, a black owned newspaper established by the Reverend Taylor Nightingale and based at the Beale Street Baptist Church in Memphis.

In 1891, Wells was dismissed from her teaching post by the Memphis Board of Education due to her articles that criticized conditions in the blacks schools of the region. Wells was devastated but undaunted, and concentrated her energy on writing articles for The Living Way and the Free Speech and Headlight.

The Lynching at the Curve in Memphis
In 1889, a black proprietor named Thomas Moss opened the Peoples Grocery in a South Memphis neighborhood nicknamed ‘The Curve.’ Ida B. Wells was close to Thomas Moss and his family, having stood as godmother to his first child. Moss' store did well, and competed with a white-owned grocery store across the street owned by William Barrett.

On March 2, 1892, a young black boy named Armour Harris was playing a game of marbles with a young white boy named Cornelius Hurst in front of the People’s Grocery. The two boys got into an argument and a fight during the game. As the black boy Harris began to win the fight, the father Cornelius Hurst intervened and began to ‘thrash’ Harris. The People's Grocery employees William Stewart and Calvin McDowell saw the fight, and rushed outside to defend the young Harris from the adult Hurst as people in the neighborhood gathered in to what quickly became a "racially charged mob."

The white grocer Barrett returned the following day, March 3, 1892 to The People's Grocery with a Shelby County Sheriff's Deputy looking for William Stewart. But Calvin McDowell, who greeted Barrett, indicated Stewart was not present at the grocery. Barrett was unsatisfied with the response, and frustrated that the People's Grocery was competing with his store. Angry about the previous day's melee, Barrett responded that "blacks were thieves" and hit McDowell with a pistol. McDowell wrestled the gun away and fired at Barrett - missing narrowly. McDowell was later arrested but subsequently released.

On March 5, 1892, a group of six white men including a sheriff's deputy took electric streetcars to The People's Grocery. The group of white men were met by a barrage of bullets from The People’s Grocery, and Shelby County Sheriff Deputy Charley Cole was wounded as well as civilian Bob Harold. Hundreds of whites were deputized almost immediately to put down what was perceived by the local Memphis newspapers Commercial and Appeal-Avalanche as an armed rebellion by black men in Memphis.

Thomas Moss, a postman in addition to being the owner of the People's Grocery, was named as a conspirator along with McDowell and Stewart. The three men were arrested and jailed pending trial.

Around 2:30 a.m. on the morning of March 9, 1892, 75 men wearing black masks took Moss, McDowell, and Steward from their jail cells to at the Shelby County Jail to a Chesapeake and Ohio rail yard one mile north of the city and shot them to death. The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche reports: "There was no boisterous whooping, not even loud talking, no cursing in fact, nothing boisterous. Everything was done decently and in order....the vengenace was sharp, swift, and sure but adminstered with due regard to the fact that people were aslpeep all around the jail...[they] did not know until the morning papers that the avengers swooped down last night and sent the murderous souls of the ring-leaders in the Curve riot to eternity."

Just before he was killed, Moss told the mob "Tell my people to go west, there is no justice here."

After the lynching of her friends, Wells wrote in Free Speech and Headlight urging blacks to leave Memphis altogether:

“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.”

The event led Wells to begin investigating lynchings using investigative journalist techniques. She began to interview people associated with lynchings, including a lynching in Tunica, Mississippi in 1892 where she concluded that the father of a young white woman had implored a lynch mob to kill a black man she was sleeping with "to save the reputation of his daughter."

In May of 1892, Wells published an editorial espousing what she called the “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women." Wells newspaper office was burned to the ground, and she would never again return to Memphis.

Southern Horrors and the Red Record
On October 26, 1892, Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Having examined many accounts of lynchings due to the alleged "rape of white women," she concluded that Southerners cried rape as an excuse to hide their real reasons for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened white Southerners with competition, and white ideas of enforcing black second-class status in the society. Black economic progress was a contemporary issue in the South, and in many states whites worked to suppress black progress. In this period at the turn of the century, Southern states, starting with Mississippi in 1890, passed laws and/or new constitutions to disenfranchise most black people and many poor white people through use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other devices. Wells-Barnett recommended that black people use arms to defend against lynching.

She followed-up with greater research and detail in The Red Record (1895), a 100-page pamphlet describing lynching in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It also covered black peoples' struggles in the South since the Civil War. The Red Record explored the alarmingly high rates of lynching in the United States (which was at a peak from 1880 to 1930). Wells-Barnett said that during Reconstruction, most Americans outside the South did not realize the growing rate of violence against black people in the South. She believed that during slavery, white people had not committed as many attacks because of the economic labour value of slaves. Wells noted that, since slavery time, "ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution."

Frederick Douglass had written an article noting three eras of "Southern barbarism," and the excuses that whites claimed in each period.

Wells-Barnett explored these in detail in her The Red Record.


 * During slavery time, she noted that whites worked to "repress and stamp out alleged 'race riots.'" or suspected slave rebellions, usually killing black people in far higher proportions than any white casualties. Once the Civil War ended, white people feared black people, who were in the majority in many areas. White people acted to control them and suppress them by violence.
 * During the Reconstruction Era white people lynched black people as part of mob efforts to suppress black political activity and re-establish white supremacy after the war. They feared "Negro Domination" through voting and taking office. Wells-Barnett urged black people in high-risk areas to move away to protect their families.
 * She noted that whites frequently claimed that black men had "to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women." She noted that white people assumed that any relationship between a white woman and a black man was a result of rape. But, given power relationships, it was much more common for white men to take sexual advantage of poor black women. She stated: "Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that black men rape white women." Wells connected lynching to sexual violence showing how the myth of the black man's lust for white women led to murder of African-American men.

Wells-Barnett gave 14 pages of statistics related to lynching cases committed from 1892 to 1895; she also included pages of graphic accounts detailing specific lynchings. She notes that her data was taken from articles by white correspondents, white press bureaus, and white newspapers. The Red Record was a huge pamphlet, and had far-reaching influence in the debate about lynching. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and The Red Record's accounts of these lynchings grabbed the attention of Northerners who knew little about lynching or accepted the common explanation that black men deserved this fate. Generally southern states and white juries refused to indict any perpetrators for lynching, although they were frequently known and sometimes shown in the photographs being made more frequently of such events.

Despite Wells-Barnett's attempt to garner support among white Americans against lynching, she believed that her campaign could not overturn the economic interests whites had in using lynching as an instrument to maintain Southern order and discourage Black economic ventures. Ultimately, Wells-Barnett concluded that appealing to reason and compassion would not succeed in gaining criminalization of lynching by Southern whites.

Wells-Barnett concluded that perhaps armed resistance was the only defense against lynching. Meanwhile, she extended her efforts to gain support of such powerful white nations as Britain to shame and sanction the racist practices of America.

Speaking Tours in Britain
Wells travelled twice to Britain in her campaign against lynching, the first in 1893 and the second in 1894. She and her supporters in America saw these tours as an opportunity for her reach larger, white audiences with her anti-lynching campaign, something she had been unable to accomplish in America. She found sympathetic audiences in Britain, already shocked by reports of lynching in America.

Wells had been invited for her first British speaking tour by Catherine Impey and Isabella Fyvie Mayo. Impey, a Quaker abolitionist who published the journal Anti-Caste  had attended several of Wells' lectures while traveling in America. Isabella Fyuie Mayo was a well-known writer and poet who wrote under the name of Edward Garrett. Both women had read of the particularly gruesome lynching of Henry Smith in Texas and wanted to organize a speaking tour to call attention to American lynchings. They asked Frederick Douglass to make the trip,  but citing his age and health, he declined. He then suggested Wells, who enthusiastically accepted the invitation.

In 1894, before leaving the US for her second visit to Great Britain, Wells called on William Penn Nixon, the editor of Daily Inter-Ocean, a Republican newspaper in Chicago.[55] It was the only major white paper that persistently denounced lynching.[56] After she told Nixon about her planned tour, he asked her to write for the newspaper while in England.[56] She was the first African-American woman to be a paid correspondent for a mainstream white newspaper.[57]

Wells toured England, Scotland and Wales for two months, addressing audiences of thousands,[53] and rallying a moral crusade among the British. [5]  She relied heavily on her pamphlet Southern Horrors in her first tour, and showed shocking photographs of actual lynchings in America.

As a result of her two lecture tours in Britain, Well received significant coverage in British and American news. Many of the articles published at the time of her return were hostile personal critiques, rather than critiques of her anti lynching positions. The New York Times, for example, called her “a slanderous and nasty-nasty-minded Mulatress.” Despite these attacks in the white press, she had nonetheless gained extensive recognition and credibility, and an international audience of white supporters of her cause.

Marriage and Family
In 1895, Wells married attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett,[38] a widower with two sons, Ferdinand and Albert. A prominent attorney, Barnett was a civil rights activist and journalist in Chicago. Like Wells, Barnett spoke widely against lynchings and for the civil rights of African Americans. Wells and Barnett had met in 1893, working together on  a pamphlet protesting the lack of Black representation at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Barnett founded the Chicago Conservator, the first Black newspaper in Chicago, in 1878.

Wells’ marriage to Barnett was a legal union as well as a partnership of ideas and actions. Both were journalists, and both were established activists with a shared commitment to civil rights. In an interview, Wells’ daughter Alflreda said that the two had "like interests" and that their journalist careers were "intertwined". This sort of close working relationship between a wife and husband was unusual at the time, as women often played more traditional domestic roles in a marriage.

In addition to Barnett's two children from his previous marriage. the couple had four more: Charles, Herman, Ida, and Alfreda. In the chapter of her Crusade For Justice autobiography, called A Divided Duty, Wells described the difficulty she had splitting her time between her family and her work. She continued to work after the birth of her first child, traveling and bringing the infant Charles with her. Although she tried to balance her roles as a mother and as a national activist, she was not always successful. Susan B. Anthony said she seemed "distracted".[39]

Willard Controversy
Willard Controvery

Alpha Suffrage Club
In the years following her dispute with Willard, Wells continued her Anti Lynching campaign and organizing in Chicago. She focused her work on black women’s suffrage in the city following the enactment of a new state law enabling partial women’s suffrage. The Illinois Presidential and Municipal Suffrage Bill of 1913, enacted 1913, gave women in the State women the right to vote for presidential electors, mayor, aldermen and most other local offices, but not for governor, state representatives or members of Congress. Illinois was the first state west of the Mississippi to give women these voting rights.

This act was the impetus for Wells and her white colleague Belle Squire to organize the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913. One of the most important black suffrage organizations in Chicago, the Alpha Suffrage Club was founded as a way to further voting rights for all women, to teach black women how to engage in civic matters and to work to elect elect African Americans to city offices. Two years after its founding, the club played a significant role in electing Oscar DePriest as the first African American Alderman in Chicago.

As Wells and Squire were organizing the Alpha Club, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was organizing a suffrage parade in Washington D.C. Marching the day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson in 1913, suffragists from across the country gathered to demand universal suffrage. Wells, together with a delegation of members from Chicago, attended. On the day of the march, the head of the Illinois delegation told Wells the delegates that the NASWA wanted “to keep the delegation entirely white." and all African American suffragists, including Wells were to walk at the end of the parade in a "colored delegation." Instead of going to the back with other African Americans, however, Wells waited with spectators as the parade was underway, and stepped into the white  Chicago delegation as they passed by.

Organizing in Chicago
Having settled in Chicago Wells continued her anti-lynching work while becoming more focused on the civil rights of African Americans in Chicago. She worked with national civil rights leaders to protest a major exhibitions, she was active in the national women's club movement, and she ultimately ran for the Illinois State Senate.

Columbian Exposition
In 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago. Together with Frederick Douglass and other black leaders, Wells organized a black boycott of the fair, for its exclusion of African Americans from the exhibits. Wells, Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Well's future husband, Frederick Barnett, wrote sections of the  pamphlet “The Reason Why: The Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.”   It detailed the progress of blacks since their arrival in America and also exposed the basis of Southern lynchings. Wells later reported to Albion W. Tourgée that copies of the pamphlet had been distributed to more than 20,000 people at the fair.[44] That year she started work with the Chicago Conservator, the oldest African-American newspaper in the city.

Women’s Clubs
Living in Chicago In the late 19th century Wells was very active in the national Woman's club movement. In 1893, she organized The Women's Era Club, a first-of-its-kind civic club for African-American women in Chicago. It would later be renamed, the Ida B. Wells Club in her honor.[46]  In 1894 she helped found two Chicago clubs in response to a new state law that gave women the right to vote in certain national and state offices, and to run for the elective office of Trustee of the University of Illinois.[47] To support the Republican Party nomination of Lucy L. Flower as a University Trustee, Wells helped organize the Republican Women's Club in Illinois. Flower was eventually elected.[48]  That same year Wells was part of a group of women who formed the Alpha Suffrage Club, to encourage women's participation in Chicago politics. On a national level, Wells sought to organize African-American groups across the United States. In 1896 Wells, working with Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Harriet Tubman Mary Church Terrell and others, helped found the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs and the National Afro-American Council

Wells received much support from other social activists and her fellow club women. Frederick Douglass praised her work: "You have done your people and mine a service ... What a revelation of existing conditions your writing has been for me."[49]

Despite Douglass’ praise, Wells was becoming a controversial figure among local and national women's clubs. This was evident when in 1899 the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs intended to meet in Chicago. Writing to the President of the ANCW, Mary Terrell, Chicago organizers of the event stated that they would not cooperate in the meeting if it included Wells. When Wells learned that Terrell had agreed to exclude Wells, she called it a staggering blow.”

Urban Reform And Politics
Wells worked on urban reform in Chicago during the last 30 years of her life. In 1930, disillusioned with the candidates from both parties, she ran as an independent candidate for the Illinois Senate, but lost to the incumbent. As such, she was one of the first Black women to run for a state legislature. source New World encyclopedia.org  find a more reliable one

Autobiography and Death
Wells began writing her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928), but never finished it; she died of uremia (kidney failure) in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68. She was buried in the Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. (The cemetery was later integrated by the city.)

Representation in other media[edit]
In 1995, the play In Pursuit of Justice: A One-Woman Play About Ida B. Wells, written by Wendy Jones and starring Janice Jenkins, was produced. It is drawn from historical incidents and speeches from Wells' autobiography, and features fictional letters to a friend. It won four awards from the AUDELCO (Audience Development Committee Inc.), an organization that honors black theatre.

Her life is the subject of Constant Star (2002), a musical drama by Tazewell Thompson that has been widely performed. The play explores Wells as "a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America."

In 2016's Dinesh D'Souza's Hillary's America book and film, Carol Swain, a black law professor at Vanderbilt University, tells Wells' story of fighting lynchings and challenging U.S. President Woodrow Wilson over his administration's racial resegregation of the federal work force

Influence on black feminist activism
Although not a feminist writer herself, Wells-Barnett tried to explain that the defense of white women's honor allowed Southern white men to get away with murder by projecting their own history of sexual violence onto black men. Her call for all races and genders to be accountable for their actions showed African American women that they can speak out and fight for their rights. By portraying the horrors of lynching, she worked to show that racial and gender discrimination are linked, furthering the black feminist cause.