Ida B. Wells

Born enslaved in Holly Springs, MS on July 16,1862, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was a Black journalist who is most known for her investigations into the violent lynching of Black people by white people through her journalism and was actively involved in the civil rights and suffrage movements.

Following their escape from enslavement after the Civil War, Wells-Barnett’s parents took an active role in politics during the Reconstruction Era and enforced the importance of education to their kids. Wells-Barnett attended Rust College before dropping out at 16, when her parents died of the yellow fever outbreak. As the caretaker, Wells-Barnett convinced a local school she was 18 and was hired as a teacher. 

Wells-Barnett moved to Memphis, TN with her sisters to be with their aunt. During her time in Memphis, Wells-Barnett sued a train car company that threw her off a train for refusing to leave a car reserved for white women, even though she had purchased a ticket. She won 500 dollars in local court, but the ruling was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. 

This prompted Wells-Barnett to write an editorial and buy a share of Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis newspaper, to advocate for the civil rights of Black people. Wells-Barnett also worked as a teacher in a segregated school, where she actively spoke out and criticized the schooling conditions that Black students and teachers were subjected to in Memphis. 

After one of Wells-Barnett’s friends and two of the friend’s coworkers were lynched by a violent white mob, Wells focused her writing on anti-lynching, beginning to investigate into the violence inflicted onto Black people by white people. As a writer for the Memphis Free Speech, she wrote her findings and published an editorial campaign against lynching. White people responded with violent threats against her and Memphis Free Speech. As a result of her office getting destroyed by violent white people, who threatened her several other times, Wells-Barnett left Memphis and moved to Chicago, Illinois. 

Wells-Barnett’s move did not silence her. In fact, she took her anti-lynching campaign to the White House as a call for change and traveled across the world to highlight the lynching and white violence against Black people in the United States. Wells-Barnett not only organized anti-lynching societies, but also other causes, such as centering Black women in the suffrage movement. 

In 1895 she married Ferdinand L. Barnett, an attorney and newspaper editor for the Chicago Conservator. After adding “Barnett” to her last name, Wells-Barnett became one of the first married women to keep her maiden name. 

Wells-Barnett continued working as an activist by co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), as well as creating the Alpha Suffrage Club. 

On March 25, 1931 Wells-Barnett died due to kidney disease, but her political and social activism lives on through the numerous organizations that still fight to this day for Black people’s civil rights and liberation. In 2020, Wells-Barnett received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for “her outstanding and couregous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americand during the era of lynching.”