Ida+B.+Wells-Barnett

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an African American civil rights leader and a women's rights leader. She was active during the Woman's Sufferage Movement Ida B. Wells-Barnett was known as a leader of questioning, challenging, and implementing programs to help better the well-being of the African-American community. She also strived towards creating better society to those judged off off their race, as well as social class.



Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862 this was months before the Emancipation Proclamation was passed. Her parents were James Wells and Elizabeth "Lizzie Bell" Warrenton-Wells; both were enslaved unitl the end of the Civil War. When she was fourteen, her parents died of yellow fever during an epidemic outbreak. After this tragedy, in order to keep her family together, Wells dropped out of high school and found a job as a teacher in a black school. With help of friends of the family, she was able to provided for her orphaned siblings. Despite difficulties, Wells was able to continue her education by working her way through Rust College in Holly Springs. In 1880, Wells and her siblings moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Wells began to attend classes at Fisk University in Nashville.

In 1884, Wells led a campaign against racial segregation on the local railway. When asked to give up her seat to a white man on a train of the Chesapeake, Ohio & South Western Railroad Company, she protested. Her protest was valid in the consideration of the [|Civil Rights Act of 1875], which banned discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color in theaters, hotels, transport, and other public accommodations, but this had just been declared unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases, which allowed several railroad companies to continue racial segregation. The conductor who asked her to move was disgusted mortified by Wells openly protesting against him, a white man. He even resulted in using physical force in order to get her to move to where he wanted. Wells immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad because her rights were denied. In 1885, she won her case in the local circuit court and was then granted five hundred dollars for her settlement. Soon after, the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, which reversed the court's ruling. She was found guilty and was then ordered to pay. This case had great significance behind it because it was the first case in the South where a colored plaintiff appealed to a state court since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill by the U.S. Supreme Court. This was only the beginning of her fight for justice of those who were discriminated agianst.

Wells was offered the editorial position for "Evening Star" and also wrote weekly articles for the Living Way weekly newspaper under the pen name of "Iola". She began to write about the race issue in the United States during that time and slowly gained a reputation as a writer. In 1889, she became co-owner and editor of Free Speech, an anti-segregationist newspaper based in Memphis on Beale Street. In 1892, a situation occured in which three of Wells friends were lynched after being accused of raping a white woman. This unjust situation sparked Well's interest in lynching and she began to resaerch and write about such events. In response to this event, Wells wrote an article appearing in the Free Speech, exposing the truth of the story, saying that the white mob who killed them only did it in retaliation of an earlier attack that ended badly. The emphasis in the article was on the public spectacle the attacks were made, people stood around to watch as if watching a show. Many African-Americans left Mphisis, while others organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. Because of her constant complaining and nagging about the lynchings, things became very dangerous for her and her business partner. She even admitted in her autobiography, that she took it upon herself to buy a pistol after the lynching had occurred. The Free speech was destroyed on May 27 1892, three months after the murder. She was soon ran out of Memphis and went to live in New York. After arriving in New York, Wells took a job at the New York Age and continued her fight against lynching. New York is where Wells began to participate in public speaking, relating the story of her three friends who were unjustly murdered to the audience. Wells worked to expose the hypocrisy of blacks getting lynched more than recieving a fair trail and began and became the head of the Anti-Lynching Crusade. She later moved to Chicago, Illinois to continue her work. In 1892, she published her famous pamphlet, "[|Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases"].

In 1893, she and other black leaders, among them Frederick Douglass, organized a boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Wells and the rest of her spporters produced a pamphlet to be distributed during the exposition, called Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition. More than 2,000 copies had been distributed at the fair.After the World Fair in Chicago, Wells decided to stay in the city instead of returning to New York City and took work with the Chicago Conservator, the oldest color paper in the city.

The first time Wells met Ferdinand L. Barnett was at a meeting of the Ida B. Wells Club, where Ferdinand was president of the club. In 1895, at the age of 33, Wells married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer, activist and editor. Barnett was the owner and founder of the first black newspaper in Chicago, the Conservator. She set an early precedent as being one of the first married American women to keep her own last name with her husband's. This was very unusual for that time. The two had four children: Charles, Herman, Ida, and Alfreda. In 1910 she formed the Negro Fellowship League which served as a fellowship house for new settlers from the south. The NFL also provided a space for religious services, an employment office, and served as a homeless shelter for men. The remaining years of Ida B. Wells' career were filled with more writing, activism and organizing. In 1909, she became one of the founders of the NAACP. In 1913 Wells established the first black women's suffrage club, called the Alpha Suffrage Club. She also participated in a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. and met with President McKinley about a lynching in South Carolina. The years following World War I she covered various race riots in Arkansas, East St. Louis and Chicago and published her reports in pamphlets and in the Conservator and newspapers nationwide. In 1928, Wells began her autobiography [|Crusade for Justice], stating that "the history of this entire period which reflected glory on the race should be known. Yet most of it is buried I oblivion... and so, because our youth are entitled to the facts of race history which only the participants can give, I am thus led to set forth the facts". This book was never finished. She died of uremia in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68.



Citations:

McBribe, Jennifer. "Ida B. Wells: Crusade for Justice." __Women's Intellectual Contributions to the Study of Mind and Society__. 2002. 23 Feb. 2009 .

Lewis, Jone. "Ida B. Wells-Barnett." __About: Women's History__. 2009. 25 Feb. 2009 .