Ida B. Wells-Barnett

American civil rights activist

• Born: July 16, 1862
• Birthplace: Holly Springs, Mississippi
• Died: March 25, 1931
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

An organizer of the antilynching movement, Wells-Barnett was an indefatigable crusader for equal rights for African Americans in the violent decades near the beginning of the twentieth century. She also worked on issues of education, social services, woman suffrage, and racial violence.

Early Life

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was the eldest of eight children born in slavery to slave parents who were both of mixed racial parentage. (Her paternal grandfather was her grandmother’s white owner, and her mother’s father was an American Indian.) Both had learned trades during slavery carpentry and cooking which they were able to continue after the Civil War. In the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, both parents and their youngest child died, leaving Ida as the sole support of the younger children. Refusing offers from relatives and friends to parcel out the children, sixteen-year-old Ida decided to get a job as a schoolteacher. She had been educated at the Freedmen’s School in Holly Springs (later Rust College). She successfully took the teacher’s exam for the rural county schools and was able to “pass” for eighteen, teaching all week and riding a mule six miles home for the weekend. (A family friend stayed with the siblings during the week.) Later, she secured a better-paying position in Memphis. In 1886 after traveling to Fresno, California, with her aunt and siblings she actually taught school in three different states: California, Missouri, and Tennessee.

Wells-Barnett’s activist career began in 1884, when she was forcibly ejected from the ladies’ car on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad for refusing to sit in the segregated smoking car (Jim Crow segregation of transportation facilities was just beginning then). She sued the railroad and won five hundred dollars in damages; an appeal by the railroad to the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision, however, and she had to pay court costs.

Wells-Barnett’s interest in journalism began in Memphis, where she participated in a weekly lyceum with other black schoolteachers, reading and discussing the weekly black newspaper The Evening Star, among other things. When she saw how much influence the newspapers had, she began writing a weekly column, which became popular and was printed in many newspapers across the country. She signed her articles “Iola.” The name of the protagonist of fellow African American Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s popular novel Iola Leroy (1892) may have alluded to Wells-Barnett. In 1889, she purchased a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, resigned her teaching job, and began organizing, writing, and selling subscriptions for the newspaper in black communities and churches throughout the South.

Life’s Work

In 1892, three black men who owned a successful grocery store that competed with a white-owned store in a black neighborhood were lynched in Memphis, Tennessee. Wells-Barnett not only editorialized against the lynching in her newspaper but also counseled black citizens to leave Memphis and move west to Arkansas and the newly opened Oklahoma Territory. Thousands took her advice. Those who remained heeded her call to boycott the streetcar system. In 1892, therefore, Wells-Barnett organized a successful public transportation boycott, sixty years before Rosa Parks began the Montgomery bus boycott after she refused to vacate her seat in the back of the bus to let a white person take it. Thus began Wells-Barnett’s life work her crusade for justice.

When Wells-Barnett left Memphis for a speaking and writing trip to Philadelphia and New York, angry whites destroyed her offices and press and published notices that if she returned she herself would be lynched. She was hired by the important black paper the New York Age to gather lynching statistics and expose as fallacy that black men raped white women in great numbers. Only one-fourth of all those who were lynched were even accused of sexually accosting or insulting a white woman. Women and children as well as white men were victims of lynch mobs. Most lynchings, she found, were economically motivated, designed to intimidate the black community if it attempted to become financially independent. She used white newspaper accounts to gather her evidence, publishing in 1892 her first feature story (later a pamphlet), “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” She listed all lynchings by name, state, alleged crime, method of killing, and month, and continued this practice in the following years.

Even in the North, Wells-Barnett’s speeches and writings exposing lynch law were not well covered by a frightened white press, and she despaired of making any changes. She knew that international pressure could aid the cause, so she took her antilynching crusade worldwide, traveling to England to 1893 and again in 1894. She was warmly received by former abolitionists, and she published her stories in the mainstream press, lectured daily, and founded the first antilynching organizations. Her strategy worked the American press picked up the stories from England, and the antilynching story was disseminated to a wider audience. When she attacked well-known white Americans Frances Willard (the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union) and evangelist Dwight L. Moody for addressing segregated white audiences in the South and not speaking out against mob violence, Wells-Barnett became the center of an international controversy but gained much publicity for her cause.

In 1893, Wells-Barnett returned from England and, along with the venerable former slave Frederick Douglass and Ferdinand Barnett (a Chicago attorney to whom she was later married), organized the protest of excluded African Americans at the Chicago World Columbian Exposition. The three activists wrote and distributed twenty thousand copies of their pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, to people from all over the world. Douglass, the ambassador to Haiti at that time, was the only African American who was officially a part of the exposition. The pamphlet pointed out that without blacks there would be neither American civilization nor the industrial miracle so celebrated at the fair.

Remaining in Chicago after her second trip to England, Wells-Barnett was married to Barnett and eventually gave birth to four children, but she continued her political organizing and journalism in Chicago’s black newspaper The Conservator (which she purchased from Barnett). Although she was criticized by other women activists such as Susan B. Anthony for marrying and thus having “divided duty,” Wells-Barnett managed to be both a mother and an organizer, often traveling to lectures with one or another child, nursing between meetings. In Chicago, she founded the first black woman’s club (later named the Ida B. Wells Club), the Alpha Suffrage Club (the first black woman’s suffrage organization), and the Negro Fellowship League (which set up a reading room, job referrals, and a rooming house for black men newly arrived in Chicago). She helped to found a black kindergarten and a black orchestra, and she worked as a probation officer.

Wells-Barnett’s political position was very much opposed to that of accommodationists such as Booker T. Washington. She espoused a radical view akin to that of W. E. B. Du Bois and later the pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey. She believed that African Americans should use both the law and agitation to gain equal rights in all areas, and that nothing was impossible. Along with Du Bois, she was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, but she later broke with the organization because of its timid stance on racial issues.

As an Illinois delegate to the national woman suffrage parade in Washington in 1913, Wells-Barnett refused to march with the black delegates at the back of the procession; she quietly integrated the ranks of the Illinois delegates as the parade moved down Pennsylvania Avenue. She helped Chicago elect its first black alderman in 1915 and continued to work within the political structure, running herself unsuccessfully for the state senate in 1930.

Wells-Barnett continued her investigative work in the South with a campaign to give justice to the black soldiers involved in the 1917 24th Infantry rebellion in Texas during World War I. She personally investigated the causes of the East St. Louis and Chicago riots of 1919 (which she predicted in print two weeks before they occurred). In 1922, she visited and wrote an exposé of the prison conditions of the Arkansas black farmers who had formed a cooperative and were attacked by whites and then were arrested for starting a riot. For this journalistic work, she was hounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a dangerous subversive during the Red Scare of the early 1920’s.

Wells-Barnett labored to the end of her life, leaving her autobiography unfinished in midsentence when she succumbed to her final illness. She died of uremic poisoning at the age of sixty-eight.

Significance

Wells-Barnett was radical, disputatious, angry, hard to get along with, and had arguments with nearly everyone with whom she worked. She said that she did not want publicity, but her autobiography makes it clear that she craved personal publicity. Still, she was a genius of an organizer: She had political savvy and a photographic memory. She was a powerful woman who played by the men’s rules. She organized and carried out a successful economic boycott of public transportation facilities in the 1890’s, she integrated the American woman suffrage movement, she single-handedly brought international attention to bear on the lynching scandal in the United States, and she kept the Chicago school system from being segregated by enlisting the help of social workerJane Addams.

Wells-Barnett knew everyone and alienated everyone, and she took her issues personally to two presidentsWilliam McKinley and Woodrow Wilson. She worked with, at various times, African Americans Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, Madam C. J. Walker, Douglass, Anna Gaily Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, and many others. Although Wells-Barnett worked with whites when it was politically expedient to do so, she believed that a unified black community should band together for its own betterment. Her radical position and her refusal to compromise resulted in her near-erasure from American history, but Wells-Barnett has begun to garner more attention as the result of scholarly efforts in the fields of women’s history and African American history.

Bibliography

Bedermank, Gail. “’Civilization,’ The Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells’s Antilynching Campaign (1892-94).” Radical History Review no. 52 (1992): 5-30. An analysis of the racist evolutionary rhetoric of the end of the century, with special reference to Wells-Barnett’s work in England and at the Chicago World Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: William Morrow, 1984. A history of black women in the United States, with large interpretive sections on Wells-Barnett’s activist career, especially the antilynching campaign in England, the founding of the NAACP, and her activist work in Chicago. A good index and a bibliography are included.

Hendricks, Wanda. “Ida Bell Wells-Barnett.” In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1993. An important reference work that includes photographs and primary and secondary bibliographies.

Loewenberg, Bert James, and Ruth Bogin, eds. Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Includes the introduction and a selection from Wells-Barnett’s antilynching writings published in London in 1892.

McMurry, Linda. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Biography portraying Wells-Barnett as a fierce social advocate.

Schechter, Patricia A. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Chronicles Wells-Barnett’s role in early efforts toward civil rights, women’s suffrage, and Progressivism.

Sterling, Dorothy. “Ida B. Wells: Voice of a People.” In Black Foremothers: Three Lives. Old Westburg, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1979. A well-written and accessible narrative about all aspects of Wells-Barnett’s life. Contains a useful list of sources.

Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Edited by Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. This is Wells-Barnett’s unfinished autobiography, which was edited and published by her daughter. It is the best source for biographical detail about Wells-Barnett’s organizing and political work and is an important source for newspaper clippings and articles, many of which are printed verbatim.