Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, several months before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The oldest of eight children, at 16 years of age Wells was forced to take care of her siblings after both her parents passed away from Yellow Fever. Despite such responsibilities, she was able to complete her studies at Rust College and in 1888 became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee.
Wells first became acquainted with political activity in 1884 after an incident on a passenger train. The twenty-one year old boarded a train and took her seat in the first class ladies coach. But the recent black codes, precursors to Jim Crow, forbid blacks such positions.
When a conductor asked her to move, Wells refused, stating that she had paid for a first-class coach seat and intended to remain. When two guards forcibly tried to remove Wells, she left the train angrily vowing to see this matter through. The young Wells hired a lawyer and sued the railroad. To the surprise of the local white community, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad was ordered by a Minnesota Judge to pay Wells $500. The small town was in an uproar.
"DARKY DAMSEL GETS DAMAGES" was the headline plastered across the Memphis Appeal, the local newspaper. The railroad however appealed the case and won. It was overturned by a white court, who upheld the laws of black codes over the equality promised by the Constitution. In a reversal of justice, in the end it was Wells who was forced to pay $200 in court fees.
But the experience served to Wells benefit for it led her to publish an editorial article in a church newspaper. In the article she not only voiced her dissatisfaction with the case but also urged blacks to fight the recently erected black codes. Her article increased the paper's circulation and stimulated conversations among blacks throughout the South. A small black newspaper in Memphis offered Wells a part-time position as an editor. Wells wrote articles on various subjects dealing with the black condition.
One of her editorials criticized the condition of Memphis' black schools due to the "separate but equal" policies. Memphis' Board of Education dismissed Wells from her teaching position because of the article, which allowed her to take on full-time responsibilities at the newspaper. Within a year, her fiery articles had tripled the newspaper's circulation. Black newspapers throughout the United States had reprinted her articles and Ida B. Wells soon became a name of some note. But it was a tragic event in 1892 that changed her life forever.
Three men, friends of Wells, were prominent black businessmen in Memphis. When angry whites attacked the store, envious of the prosperous black business, the men defended themselves. For this they were jailed. But before they could be tried in a court of law, a white mob took the three men from their prison and beat and lynched them. A shocked and angry Wells immediately wrote an editorial article describing the details of the events and chastising the city of Memphis for the men's deaths. The article sparked such an outrage, the newspaper office was destroyed by a mob of whites and several of the city's newspapers even printed written death threats aimed at Wells.
While attending an editor's convention in New York, Wells received word not to return to Memphis because her life would be in danger. Remaining up East, Wells worked as a regular correspondent for several black newspapers where she continued her attack on lynching. She sought regularly not only to publicize lynching incidents but to also dispel the myths white society used to legitimize the murderous acts.
To understand the enormity of Wells task, and the danger of her work, it is necessary to take a glimpse into America at the time. With the end of Reconstruction, and the removal of Union troops, white southerners sought to turn back the clock, and remake the antebellum South. Blacks were removed from state and federal offices; stripped of the ability to vote; placed into prison gangs for minor offenses; forced into sharecropping labor that mimicked the old slave regime; and limited in their possibilities by black codes and Jim Crow laws.
To maintain this social order of white domination, the same violence employed during slavery was brought to bear. And for more than a century, angry whites made the life of black America a continuous nightmare of oppression and death. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, thousands of whites, angry at an editorial in a black newspaper that took exception with white claims of pure white womanhood, exploded in several days of rioting. Reverend Charles S. Morris recalled the carnage: "Nine Negroes massacred outright; one man ... was given the privilege of running the gauntlet up a broad street ... while crowds of men lined the sidewalks and riddled him with a pint of bullets ... thousands of men and women and children fleeing in terror from their humble homes in the darkness of night ... within three hundred miles of the White House."
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921, a white mob began a riot resulting in the destruction of the city's prosperous black business and residential district. In Paducah, Kentucky, a black rape suspect was lynched by a mob which then allegedly murdered a black onlooker for "expressing sympathy" for the first. In East Texas, a father and his three sons were lynched for the grand crime of harvesting the first cotton in the county that year. In Waco, a mob pulled a retarded black youth from a courtroom, burned him alive, and then sold his teeth as souvenirs.
In Brooks County, Georgia a mob stormed the countryside for a week killing more than 10 blacks. This included a pregnant black woman, Mary Turner who according to accounts was hung by her ankles, doused with gasoline and set afire, but not before her unborn child was cut from her stomach, ripped out and trampled to death.
And to be sure, this violence was not confined to the South. As early as 1829 a white Cincinnati mob drove more than half of the black population from the city. From 1832 to 1849 there were no less than five anti-black riots in Philadelphia. The most infamous of the day were the anti-draft riots of New York in 1863 during the Civil War. Enraged white citizens (mostly Irish and other immigrants) fearing the competition they were certain would come with a free skilled black work force, and angry and unequal military drafting policies, rioted for four days. Blacks were lynched from lampposts, raped, mutilated and shot in the streets of NY. Not even a black orphanage was spared, as white mobs burned it to the ground. In 1908 for six days a white mob rioted in Springfield, Illinois, lynching, shooting, raping and mutilating scores of blacks and driving hundreds more from the city. The climax of this violence outside of the South occurred in the Red Summer of 1919, as 26 anti-black riots left an unknown number dead from Chicago to Omaha.
While some of this violence was committed by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the vast majority of the perpetrators were common white citizens. Lynching, rioting, mutilation, rape of black women, beatings and more became not aberrations, but normal everyday life in America. Actor Henry Fonda, 14 at the time when his father took him to a lynching in Omaha, Nebraska, remembered a lynching to which he was witness: "It was the most horrendous sight I'd ever seen…My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope."
In this bizarre culture of normalized violence, postcards were made of lynching victims, and sold as memorabilia. The lynching of blacks took on a daily, ritualized atmosphere, that some have compared to a carnival. When black laborer Sam Hose for instance was killed by a white mob, his body was mutilated, stabbed, and burned alive in front of 2,000 cheering whites—men women and children; he was then hacked apart and sold piecemeal to souvenir seekers; his fingers and toes went for pennies; slices of his cooked liver sold for more; an Atlanta meat market proudly displayed his severed knuckles in its front window for a week.
This was the cause against which Wells had to fight against, one that seemed monstrous with little avenues for redress. She attacked the notion that black men were lynched because of attacks on white women by showing the numerous reasons most black men were lynched—which included everything from unpopularity to slapping a white child.
In fact only a fraction (less than 20%) of those lynched were ever actually accused of rape; fewer were ever tried or found guilty. Wells contended that the underlying reasons whites resorted to lynching blacks was because they saw it as a tactic which would keep blacks "in their place." Her life was put in such jeopardy due to her activism, it is claimed she took to carrying two loaded pistols and urged other blacks to do the same as a deterrent to white violence.
Realizing she would have to expand her struggle, Wells took her cause to England, hoping to shame America in the international community. Working with social and activist groups, she established the London Anti-Lynching Committee. Upon one of her returns, in 1895 she published a treatise titled, A Red Record, which documented a history of lynching and their reasons since the post Civil War period. A leader of women's rights as well, Wells founded the Women's Era Club, the first civic organization for African-American women. The name was later changed to the Ida B. Wells Club in honor of its founder. In 1909, Barnett was asked to be a member of the "Committee of 40" which helped establish some of the groundwork for the founding of the NAACP.
In 1913 Wells marched in a suffrage parade for women in Washington DC and met with President McKinley about a lynching in South Carolina. After World War I she covered the large number of race riots in Arkansas, East St. Louis and Chicago, publishing her reports in pamphlets and in newspapers nationwide.
In 1928 Wells began her autobiography, stating that "the history of this entire period which reflected glory on the race should be known. Yet most of it is buried... 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." As late as 1930, impatient with the sad state of Chicago's black ghettos, Wells ran for the Illinois state senate, which she lost to the incumbent.
Ida B. Wells passed away in 1931. She is remembered as a powerful social researcher, activist, organizer and the most vocal anti-lynching crusader of her day. Her work would put names and photos to those murdered, shedding a light on these acts of violence. Her legacy would be felt by W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP, who would rally fiercely against lynching for decades. It would stir a 1930s Jewish union activist and schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, to write a poem called Strange Fruit, which Billie Holiday would set to song in 1939. It would inspire famed physicist Albert Einstein to join black actor/activist Paul Robeson in the American Crusade Against Lynching, which in 1946 marched on the White House, helping in part set the framework for the coming Civil Rights Era. Today Ida B. Wells many documentations are considered invaluable resources in examining this period of American history.
References:
Ida B. Wells-Barnett. A Red Record (1895).
Leon F. Litwack. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Random House, 1998.
Patricia A Schechter. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Walter White, "The Work of a Mob," The Crisis Vol. 16 (September 1918), Pgs.221-223.
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