Ida B. Wells

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Wells-Barnett, Ida B. (1862–1931), journalist, editor, diarist, autobiographer, lecturer, suffragist, antilynching crusader, and civil rights activist. The essays, pamphlets, and newspaper articles of Ida B. Wells-Barnett shaped the post-Reconstruction discourse on race, while her personal narratives, including two diaries, a travel journal, and an autobiography, recorded the personal struggle of a professional woman to define African American womanhood in a pivotal era of American history. A complex woman of strong character and independent thought, Wells was shaped by firm moral convictions and profound religious beliefs. Her militant ideology of resistance, which found expression through the pen and at the podium, continued the tradition of resistance initiated by earlier African American writers and thinkers such as David Walker, Maria W. Stewart, Frederick Douglass, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

The eldest of eight children, Ida B. Wells was born to Jim and Elizabeth Warrenton Wells in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on 16 July 1862. Wells attended Shaw University (later Rust College) until the deaths of her parents and youngest brother during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. Only sixteen years old, she became a county schoolteacher, supporting her brothers and sisters on a salary of just twenty-five dollars a month. In 1882 or 1883 she began teaching in Woodstock, Tennessee, a rural community in Shelby County, but moved to Memphis when she obtained a position in the public schools in 1884.

That same year Wells sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad after she was forcibly removed from the first-class ladies' coach. In December 1884 the circuit court ruled in her favor, but three years later the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision. That experience prompted Wells to write letters to Memphis weeklies and, later, to African American newspapers like the Detroit Plaindealer, Gate City Press, and New York Freeman. Early articles, such as “Our Women” and “Race Pride,” reveal the young journalist's increasing interest in issues of gender and race. In 1886 Wells became “editress” of the Evening Star and began writing under the pen name Iola for a religious paper, the Living Way, earning the praise of newspapermen such as I. Garland Penn, who called her a militant journalist.

Between 1885 and 1887 Ida B. Wells kept a diary describing her struggle as a single professional woman to forge an independent life committed to work, self-improvement, and racial uplift. She recorded acts of mob violence and the loss of her suit; she wrote about conferences in Kansas and Kentucky, where she was elected secretary of the Negro Press Association and was invited to speak on “Women in Journalism or How I Would Edit.” Two years later, she bought an interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and became a full-time journalist in 1891, when she lost her teaching position because of editorials attacking inferior segregated schools.

After three African American grocers were brutally murdered by a white Memphis mob on 9 March 1892, Wells wrote fiery editorials urging citizens to flee the city. She maintained that lynching was a racist strategy to eliminate independent and prosperous Negroes, while the charge of rape, she suggested, often masked consensual relations between white women and African American men. Whites were so incensed by these allegations that they destroyed her newspaper office while Wells was away and dared her to return to Memphis. Unintimidated by threats, Wells kept a gun in her house and advised that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home” (Southern Horrors, 1892).

Meanwhile she bought an interest in the New York Age, wrote two weekly columns entitled “Iola's Southern Field,” and intensified her campaign against lynching through lectures, editorials, and carefully researched, well-documented pamphlets: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892); A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892, 1893, and 1894 (1895); and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). A forceful speaker and powerful writer, Wells uses strong, concrete language to examine the economic and political causes of racial oppression. In her writing she analyzes racist sexual ideology, exposes the collusion between terrorists and community leaders, and urges African Americans to resist oppression through boycotts and emigration.

In 1893 Wells cowrote and printed The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition-the Afro-American's Contribution to Columbia Literature to protest the exclusion of African Americans from the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That same year, convinced that international pressure might serve the antilynching cause, she undertook a lecture tour of Great Britain. On the voyage to England she began a short and spirited travel journal, which was later published in her autobiography. When she returned to England in 1894 for a six-month tour, Wells wrote a series of articles entitled “Ida B. Wells Abroad” for the Chicago Inter-Ocean.

After her 27 June 1895 marriage to Ferdinand L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer, newspaperman, and widower with two sons, Wells-Barnett bought the Chicago Conservator from her husband. She continued to write following the births of her children, Charles Aked, Herman Kohlsaat, Ida B. Wells, Jr., and Alfreda M. Some of her published essays during this period include “Lynching and the Excuse for It” (1901), “Booker T. Washington and His Critics” (1904), and “Our Country's Lynching Record” (1913).

Wells-Barnett broadened her reformist activities and took up the suffragist cause. She had organized the Ida B. Wells Club in 1893; she later founded the Alpha Suffrage Club and cofounded the Cook County League of Women's Clubs. She was elected secretary of the National Afro-American Council and called for a conference that led to the formation of the NAACP. In 1910 Wells-Barnett formed the Negro Fellowship League to employ southern migrants, using her salary as a probation officer to support the league. Her differences with race leaders became apparent when she challenged the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington and the integrationist leanings of W. E. B. Du Bois, while supporting Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Wells-Barnett continued her crusade against violence into her fifties. In 1918 she covered the race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, and wrote a series of articles on the riot for the Chicago Defender. Four years later she returned south to investigate the indictment for murder of twelve innocent Arkansas farmers. She then wrote The Arkansas Race Riot (1922) and raised money to publish and distribute one thousand copies of her report. Throughout her final years, she continued to write. In 1928 Wells-Barnett began an autobiography, which was edited and published posthumously by her daughter, Alfreda Duster, and she kept a diary in 1930 that depicts an active and vital woman attending meetings and lectures while campaigning for election to the Illinois State Senate. After a sudden illness, she died in Chicago on 25 March 1931.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was one of the most outstanding women of the late nineteenth century. She was a militant thinker and writer whose essays, pamphlets, and books provide a theoretical analysis of lynching; she was a reformer whose insistence on economic and political resistance to oppression laid the foundation for the modern civil rights movement; and she was an accomplished diarist and autobiographer whose personal narratives offer an insight into the formation of African American female identity in the late nineteenth century.

Bibliography

• Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 1970. Bettina Aptheker, ed., Lynching and Rape, 1977.
• Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers, 1979.
• Thomas C. Holt, “The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership,” in Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, eds. John Hope Franklin and August Meier, 1982, pp. 38–61.
• Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, 1984.
• Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 1987.
• Mildred Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 1990. Trudier Harris, ed., Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 1991. Miriam DeCosta-Willis, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, 1995.
• Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 1996

Miriam DeCosta-Willis

For more information on Ida Bell Wells, visit Britannica.com.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), an African American journalist, was an active crusader against lynching and a champion of social and political justice for African Americans.

Ida B. Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation freed all of the slaves in the Confederate states. Her father, James, was a carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth, a cook. James Wells was a hardworking, opinionated man who was actively interested in politics and in helping to provide educational opportunities for the liberated slaves and for his own eight children. He was on the board of trustees of Rust College, a freedmen's school, where his daughter Ida received a basic education. Elizabeth Wells supervised her children's religious training by escorting them to church services and by insisting that the only book that they could read on Sunday was the Bible. Young Wells was an avid reader and stated that as a result of this rule she had read through the Bible many times.

Tragedy struck the Wells family when she was about 16 years old. Her parents and some of her brothers and sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic while Wells was in another town visiting relatives. With a small legacy left by her parents, she was determined to assume the role of mothering her younger brothers and sisters. By arranging her hair in an adult style and donning a long dress, Wells was able to obtain a teaching position by convincing local school officials that she was 18 years old. A few years later, after placing the older children as apprentices, she moved to Memphis with some of the younger children to live with a relative. She was eventually able to earn a teaching position there by obtaining further education at Fisk University.

In 1884, while she was travelling by train from school, Wells was forcibly thrown out of a first-class car by the conductor because she refused to ride in the car set aside for African Americans which was nicknamed the "Jim Crow" car. She had purchased a first-class ticket and was determined not to move from her seat, but she was not able to defend herself against the conductor, who literally dragged her from her seat while some of the white passengers applauded. However, Wells, who was determined to fight for justice, sued the railroad and won her case. When the decision was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, Wells just became more determined to fight against racial injustice wherever she found it.

When Wells joined a literary society in Memphis, she discovered that one of their primary activities was to write essays on various subjects and read them before the members. Wells' essays on social conditions for African Americans were so well received that the society members began to encourage her to write for church publications. When she was offered a regular reporting position and part ownership of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1887 she eagerly accepted. The name of the newspaper was later shortened to the Free Press, and Wells eventually became its sole owner. She was not afraid to speak out against what she perceived to be injustices against African Americans, especially in the school system where she worked. She believed that the facilities and supplies available to African American children were always inferior to those offered to whites. As a consequence of her editorials about the schools, Wells lost her teaching position in 1891.

One year later, in 1892, three of Wells' friends, who were successful businessmen in Memphis, were killed and their businesses destroyed by whites who Wells accused of being jealous of their success. The Free Speech ran a scathing editorial about the murders in which Wells harshly rebuked the white community. It was probably not coincidental that she was out of town by the time local whites read her paper. An angry mob of whites broke into her newspaper office, broke up her presses, and vowed to kill her if she returned to Tennessee.

Wells became a journalist "in exile, " writing under the pen name "Iola" for the New York Age and other weekly newspapers serving the African American population. She systematically attacked lynching and other violent crimes perpetrated against African Americans. She went on speaking tours in the northeastern states and England to encourage people to speak out against lynching. She wrote well-documented pamphlets with titles such as On Lynchings, Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans.

In 1895 Wells moved to Chicago, where she married a widower named Frederick Barnett. She remained active after she was married and carried nursing children with her during her crusades. She and her husband owned a newspaper for a while, and she continued to write articles for other journals. She actively participated in efforts to gain the vote for women and simultaneously campaigned against racial bigotry within the women's movement. In 1909 she attended the organizational meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and continued to work with the organization's founders during its formative years, although her association with the organization was not always peaceful. Wells-Barnett did agree with one of the major thrusts of the organization, however, and that was their desire to see the enactment of federal anti-lynching legislation. She found a settlement house in Chicago for young African American men and women, regularly taught a Bible class at the house, and also worked as a probation officer there. After her death in 1931 her contributions to the city of Chicago were acknowledged when a public housing project was named after her.

Further Reading

Wells-Barnett's autobiography, which was edited by her daughter, Alfreda M. Duster, is entitled Crusader for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1970). Several of Wells-Barnett's pamphlets have been reprinted by Arno Press in On Lynchings: Southern Horrors (1969). There is a short biography of Wells-Barnett in Mississippi Black History Makers (1984) by George A. Sewell and Margaret L. Dwight. An article entitled "The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, " by Thomas Holt is a part of a volume edited by John Hope Franklin and August Meier, Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (1982).

journalist; editor; activist; lecturer

Personal Information

Born Ida Bell Wells, July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, MS; died March 25, 1931, in Chicago, IL; daughter of James (a carpenter and mason) and Elizabeth (a cook) Wells; married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, June 1895; children: Charles, Herman, Ida, Alfreda.
Education: Attended Rust College, Holly Springs, MS, and Fisk University, Nashville, TN.
Memberships: Alpha Suffrage Club (founder), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; founding member), National Association of Colored Women (NACW; founding member), Negro Fellowship League (founding member), Afro-American Press Association (secretary), Afro-American Council, Afro-American League.

Career

Civil rights activist and writer. Teacher in a rural school in Mississippi, 1878-83; Free Speech, Memphis, TN, editor and owner, 1884-92; New York Age, New York City, part owner and writer, 1892; anti-lynching speaking tours in the United States and England, 1893-95; Chicago Conservator, Chicago, IL, part owner and editor, 1895-98; adult probation officer, Chicago, 1913-16. Participated in the founding of several important black organizations, lectured and published on civil rights issues.

Life's Work

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a woman ahead of her time--courageous, independent, assertive, and outspoken. Born a slave, she later became the owner and editor of her own Southern newspaper, crusading at great personal risk against the illegal lynching of blacks and the injustice of segregation. Devoting herself to black progress and racial equality, she played a leading role in the black women's club movement as well as the creation of national organizations. But her determination made her incapable of compromise with fellow black and white reformers who chose to take a more accommodating approach, and her influence waned within many of the same organizations that she had helped found.

The eldest of eight children, Ida Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Her father, James Wells, was the son of his master and a slave woman. Trained as a carpenter and mason, he became active in politics and education after the Civil War, serving on the first board of trustees of Shaw University, later renamed Rust College, a freedmen's school in his hometown.

Ida was attending this school when the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 killed her parents and youngest brother. To keep the remaining family together, she obtained a teaching position in a country school after convincing the local school officials that she was older than she really was. A few years later, she placed the older children in various apprenticeships or with relatives and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with her two youngest sisters. Wells again found work as a teacher and furthered her education with a short stint at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. A pivotal event in her life then occured.

After refusing to leave the "ladies" car, for which she had purchased a ticket, and move to the segregated blacks-only coach, she was physically thrown off a Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad train by the conductor in May of 1884. Outraged, she sued the railroad and was awarded $500 in damages. But in April of 1887 the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned this decision, finding that her lawsuit constituted harassment since the railroad had provided "like accommodations" for Wells. Shocked by the ruling, she wrote in her diary, "I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them."

Wells gained considerable local fame while living in Memphis, the largest city in the Mississippi Delta region in the 1880s, of which blacks comprised about 44 percent of the population. Her fame came from readings of her essays on social conditions for blacks at one of the literary societies sponsored by the city's small black middle class, a group of teachers who met every Friday night to play music, read essays of their own composition on current events, and debate. Under the pen name "Iola," she wrote for several Baptist newspapers throughout the South. Many of her early stories highlighted her own experience fighting segregationist Jim Crow laws, such as her unsuccessful suit against the railroad.

As her fame spread so did her activism. She began attending conventions of the newly organized Colored Press Association (later renamed the Afro-American Press Association) and was elected its secretary in 1889. During this time she met T. Thomas Fortune, the nation's preeminent black journalist and editor of the New York Age and joined his short-lived organization, the Afro-American League, which he had formed to press for equal rights and full citizenship for blacks.

Her reputation as a fearless activist, however, was secured by her tenure at a small Baptist weekly in Memphis, the Free Speech and Headlight (later shortened to the Free Speech ). Wells purchased a one-third ownership of the weekly and became its editor in 1889. Never one to shun controversy, her militant editorials protesting injustices against blacks added to her growing reputation for fearlessness. After she exposed the inferiority of the city's segregated black schools, the Memphis school board fired her from her teaching post in 1891.

The defining moment of her life came the following year in March of 1892. Across the street from a white grocery store on the outskirts of Memphis, three friends of hers had opened a successful grocery store. Business animosities between the two stores soon exploded into a minor riot. Deputies sent to arrest the black storeowners were fired upon by a group of blacks determined to defend them. One deputy was wounded and scores of blacks, including the three storeowners, were arrested. Shortly thereafter, a white mob stormed the jail, kidnapped the storeowners, and killed them.

Wells was outraged. "The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival," she proclaimed in the Free Speech. Further editorials encouraged local blacks "to 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." Tensions remained high throughout the spring, and Wells began carrying a pistol for protection. An estimated 2,000 blacks left Memphis and those who remained boycotted the recently opened streetcar line, pushing it to the verge of bankruptcy. The white business community was worried; streetcar company managers came to Wells' office pleading for her to help halt the boycott.

But she was not in a conciliatory mood, particularly after a new wave of lynchings swept throughout the South. That May she left Memphis to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Church convention, leaving behind an editorial in response to this increasing violence against blacks. "Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women," she wrote. "If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."

White males were outraged. The editorial struck at the heart of their longstanding sexual fears and unchallenged myths about virtuous white southern womanhood. The white Daily Commercial openly called for a lynching. It proclaimed, "There are some things that the Southern white man will not tolerate." At night a mob broke into the Free Speech and destroyed the presses. Wells was threatened with death if she dared return to Tennessee.

Wells was in New York during the violence and friends counseled her not to return to the South. Fortune invited her to stay and write for the New York Age. In exchange for the circulation list of the Free Speech, she received one-fourth interest in the New York Age and began researching and writing a series against lynching for it and other weekly black newspapers.

Wells studied the lynchings of 728 black men, women, and children during the ten years preceding the 1892 killings in Memphis. Her detailed statistics and findings formed the basis of two pamphlets, Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), that destroyed the heretofore assumed connection between the lynching of blacks and their rape of white women. In less than one-third of these documented lynchings were blacks accused of rape, and in even fewer instances were they actually guilty of the crime. Instead, most were victims of racial prejudice, dying for crimes of incendiarism, quarreling with whites, or making threats.

To fully attack the rape fantasy, Wells went even further. Her investigations also uncovered a large number of willing interracial sexual liaisons that she cited, some initiated by white women. While blacks were killed for this behavior, whites seduced and raped black women with apparent impunity. Exposing this double standard, she used as an example the actions of a lynch mob that killed a black man from Nashville accused of visiting a white woman, but did not harm a white man convicted of raping an eight-year-old black girl.

Her analysis of mob violence concluded that it lessened when blacks fought back. "A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home," she counseled in Southern Horrors. "When the white man knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life." Wells continued her anti-lynching crusade by embarking on speaking tours. Hers was one of the few voices of the era to openly challenge this crime. By exposing the facts and bringing the horror and injustice of lynch law to the public's attention, she was convinced popular pressure would lead to its demise.

Wells lectured in the northeastern states in 1892, visiting England later that year and in 1894. While there, she helped organize the British Anti-Lynching Society in the hope that it could exert a moral influence on prominent American whites. Returning to America, she toured the northern and western states during 1894 and 1895, giving speeches and helping to create similar societies in the United States. At the same time, she started organizing clubs specifically for black women, beginning a national movement.

While visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago during 1893, Wells organized the first black women's club in Illinois. It would be named after her. One of its early projects was raising money to prosecute a policeman for killing an innocent black man. Later, its members would help establish the first black orchestra in Chicago and open the city's first kindergarten for black children.

After concluding her lecture campaign in the spring of 1895, Wells returned to Chicago to marry Ferdinand L. Barnett, a widowed lawyer who also edited and owned the Chicago Conservator, a weekly black newspaper. Marriage did not temper her fire. She wrote articles on racial issues for the Conservator, the New York Age, and other black papers. In 1895 she played a leading role in the national conference of black women's clubs that established the National Federation of Afro-American Women. The following year this group merged with two others to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).

Pregnant with her second child in 1897, Wells-Barnett resigned the presidency of the Ida B. Wells Club, the Barnetts sold the Conservator, and she ostensibly retired to private life. But she reentered public life within five months. A brutal lynching compelled her to lobby Congress and President McKinley in 1898 for an anti-lynching law, telling him, "We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home."

That same year the Afro-American Council was reorganized, and Wells-Barnett took charge of its anti-lynching bureau. Her belief that educating and influencing prominent whites to join her crusade was the key to effecting change continued. She soon became upset with the inability of Fortune, the council's militant founder, to attract and work with white reformers. But her aggressive and strident attacks on lynching, particularly her exposure of interracial sexual relations, also brought her into conflict with the more conciliatory black leader Booker T. Washington's strategy of quiet racial diplomacy. Increasingly outspoken and assertive, she was growing intolerant of those whose positions contradicted her own.

Throughout the 1890s, Southern blacks were disenfranchised, lynched with relative impunity, and victimized by mob violence. Wells-Barnett, having personally witnessed and investigated many of the most egregious incidences, was incapable of following Washington's accommodating tactics. Instead, she usually supported the more militant methods and actions of his rival, W. E. B. Du Bois. Unfortunately for her, Washington proved to be a powerful antagonist in the coming years.

Wells-Barnett briefly slowed down to give birth to two more children, Ida in 1901 and Alfreda in 1904, before renewing her work, actively investigating lynchings and race riots in Cairo and Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, and Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919. She campaigned for the Republican party in Illinois and Missouri, participated in Chicago mayoral elections, demonstrated on behalf of women being allowed to vote, and organized perhaps the first black women's suffrage group, Chicago's Alpha Suffrage Club.

In response to the Springfield riots, black and white leaders called a national conference in 1909, forming the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Such a national biracial group working for black civil rights had long been Wells-Barnett's goal. Though playing an active role in the organization's founding and serving on its executive committee for years, she never held an important leadership position at either the national or local level. Her strong-willed personality and Washington's opposition were making her an unwelcome participant in broad-based organizations.

The Springfield riots spurred Wells-Barnett to form the Negro Fellowship League in 1910, initially from members of her Sunday bible class. This shelter and settlement house in Chicago's burgeoning black ghetto provided lodging, a reading room, a social center, and an employment center for southern black migrants pouring into the city. When her political contacts resulted in a job as an adult probation officer in 1913, she worked out of the center and used her salary to help support it.

In 1916 a local branch of the National Urban League opened in Chicago. Supported by Washington's followers, its mission was the same as Wells-Barnett's Negro Fellowship League. Many of her friends and former supporters left her to endorse the new organization's settlement house. A growing lack of funds and the loss of her probation job after William Thompson became mayor in 1915 made it difficult to keep her center open. After her recovery from a gallstone operation in 1920, she closed its doors.

Wells-Barnett ran for president of the NACW in 1924 but lost to Mary McLeod Bethune. Four years later she unsuccessfully sought election to the Illinois State Senate. Rejected by the black women's club movement she had founded, denied a significant role in the NAACP after her years spent campaigning to create just such an organization, forced to close her settlement house, and lacking any political power after Mayor Thompson's election, she began writing her autobiography, Crusade for Justice.

"All at once the realization came to me that I had nothing to show for all those years of toil and labor," she wrote. It is a bitter assessment of her career, centering on the loneliness of her struggle and the ingratitude of her fellow blacks. Wells-Barnett died of uremia in March of 1931. The public did not draw the same conclusions when assessing her career. Chicago acknowledged her many contributions to the city by naming a public housing project after her. In 1987 the Tennessee Historic Commission recognized her work by dedicating a commemorative marker in her honor on Beale Street in Memphis.

Works

Writings

• Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda M. Duster, University of Chicago Press, 1970.
• On Lynching (collection, including Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans ), Arno Press, 1969.
• Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Oxford University Press, 1991.

Further Reading

Books

• Davidson, Sue, Getting the Real Story, Seal Press-Feminist, 1992.
• Holt, Thomas, Black Leaders of the 20th Century, edited by John Hope Franklin and August Meier, University of Illinois Press, 1981.
• Sterling, Dorothy, Black Foremothers: Three Lives, The Feminist Press, 1979.
• Thompson, Mildred I., Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930, Carlson Publishing, 1990.
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda M. Duster, University of Chicago Press, 1970.

• Christian Century, March 15, 1989, pp. 285-86.
• Essence, February 1988, pp. 75-9.
• Phylon, summer 1971, pp. 112-22.

— James J. Podesta

(1862-1931), anti-lynching crusader, journalist, and advocate for racial justice and women's suffrage. For Wells-Barnett, overcoming racism and halting the violent murder of black men was a central mission among her wide-ranging struggles for justice and human dignity. Born in Mississippi, she was educated at Rust University, actually a high school and industrial school. From 1884 to 1891 she taught in a rural school near Memphis and attended summer classes at Fisk University in Nashville.

A pattern of resistance to racial subordination was set early in her life. In 1887 she purchased a railroad ticket in Memphis and took a seat in the section reserved for whites. When she refused to move, she was bodily thrown off the train. She successfully sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad for damages. Upon appeal, however, the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed the lower court's ruling.

Wells-Barnett cofounded in 1891 the militant newspaper Free Speech in Memphis. She wrote scathing editorials denouncing local whites for lynching black men ostensibly to protect the sanctity of white womanhood but actually to eliminate them as economic competitors. Her pieces provoked a mob to burn her press while she was on a lecture trip to Philadelphia and New York. With a death threat hanging over her in Memphis, Wells-Barnett decided to remain in the North. During her exile, she wrote the pamphlet A Red Record (1895), a statistical account and analysis of three years of lynchings.

Wells-Barnett then launched an international crusade against lynching. She lectured in England in 1893 and 1894. She implored churches and organizations like the Young Women's Christian Association and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union to lend support. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, lawyer and editor of the Chicago Conservator. They raised four children, and she adeptly managed career, marriage, motherhood, and social protest work.

Given the fervor of her determination to end racial discrimination and sexual inequality, it is not surprising that Wells-Barnett played a pivotal role in the development of a local and national network of black women's clubs. President of the Ida B. Wells Club and founder of the Negro Fellowship League and the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, Wells-Barnett greatly influenced black life during the Progressive Era. She worked with Jane Addams to block the establishment of segregated public schools in Chicago and served as probation officer from 1913 to 1917 for the Chicago municipal court.

When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) was formed in 1909, Wells-Barnett insisted that the leadership take an unwavering stand against lynching and years later withdrew when the organization's leadership failed to adopt the militant posture she advocated. She was also unable to persuade leaders in the women's suffrage movement to speak out against racism and denounce lynching. The young white leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association--and especially its southern members--feared that too close an association with black issues would jeopardize their cause. It would not be until 1930, the year before Wells-Barnett's death, that black and white women joined forces to launch the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

Bibliography:

Alfreda M. Duster, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1970); Thomas C. Holt, "The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership," in John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (1982), 39-62.

Author:

Darlene Clark Hine

See also Lynching; Suffrage.

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was a prominent and often controversial African American reformer who spoke out against racial oppression in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The daughter of slaves, Wells-Barnett conducted a self-described crusade for justice to protest the savage lynchings of hundreds of African Americans in the South. Her impassioned antilynching lectures and publications had an enormous effect on public opinion in the United States and Great Britain. Outspoken and self-confident, Wells-Barnett was viewed with hostility by many whites and rebuffed by several African American leaders who resented her frequent criticism of their efforts. Yet, even her detractors conceded that Wells-Barnett's unshakable commitment to the social, political, and economic advancement of African Americans propelled the struggle for civil rights.

Born July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells-Barnett was the oldest of eight children of James Wells and Elizabeth Warrenton Wells. After the Civil War, her father was a carpenter and a leader in local Reconstruction activities. Wells-Barnett attended Shaw University (later renamed Rust College), an African American school for all grade levels established in Holly Springs in 1866 by Freedmen's Aid, a church-sponsored effort to educate former slaves. The northern Methodist missionaries who taught at the school considered Wells-Barnett an exemplary student.

When Wells-Barnett was sixteen years old, her parents and youngest brother died in a yellow fever epidemic. Wells-Barnett insisted on raising her surviving siblings while teaching school in a rural district. By 1883, her brothers were old enough to begin work as carpenters, so Wells-Barnett and her sisters moved to Memphis, to live with an aunt. Wells-Barnett attended classes at Fisk University and taught school in Memphis until 1891, when she was fired from her job for criticizing the segregationist policies of the Memphis School Board. Angry articles by Wells-Barnett in the small newspaper Free Speech and Headlight denounced the limited educational opportunities for African Americans in "separate-but-equal" Memphis schools. Writing under the pen name Iola, Wells-Barnett discovered her talent for journalism and her calling as a social activist.

Wells-Barnett became co-owner and editor of Free Speech and a vocal opponent of Jim Crow laws in the South. In one Free Speech article, she described her own frustrating 1884 lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, & Southwestern Railroad. The dispute began when Wells-Barnett boarded a train in Memphis en route to Woodstock, Tennessee. After taking her usual seat in the "ladies car," which was a first-class coach, she and the other African American women in that car were told by the conductor to move to the smoking car, which was not first-class. By Tennessee law, African Americans were to be assigned separate and equal accommodations on public transportation.

When Wells-Barnett refused to sit in the smoking car, she was forced off the train. Later, she sued the railroad and won $500 in damages from a lower state court. Her triumph was short-lived, however, because the award was overturned in 1887 by the Supreme Court of Tennessee, which determined that a smoking car could indeed serve as a first-class accommodation for African Americans (Chesapeake, Ohio, & Southwestern Railroad Co. v. Wells, 85 Tenn. (1 Pickle) 613, 4 S.W. 5 [1887]). The Tennessee high court suggested that Wells-Barnett's real motive in refusing to sit in the smoking car was to harass the railroad and to lay the groundwork for a profitable lawsuit. The court chastised Wells-Barnett for failing to try in good faith to secure a comfortable seat. The stark injustice of the court's reversal fueled Wells-Barnett's determination to speak out against the mistreatment of African Americans.

For Wells-Barnett, the pivotal event in her activist career was the lynching in 1892 of her friends Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Henry Stewart, three African American merchants from Memphis. The men owned the People's Grocery, a thriving operation that had cut into the profits of its white competitors. When a mob of white men was deputized to arrest the three merchants on trumped-up criminal charges, violence erupted, and the innocent African Americans were hanged.

Wells-Barnett was outraged. She wrote a scathing editorial in Free Speech, denouncing not only the murder of her friends but also the offensive, widely accepted rationale for most lynchings. Wells-Barnett observed that contrary to southern myth, lynchings were rarely if ever spontaneous group acts in retaliation for sexual misconduct by African American men. A lynch mob was actually a barbaric mechanism for maintaining power among whites and for denying African Americans their civil rights. Protecting the reputation of southern white women was a smoke screen. Wells-Barnett also asserted that any sexual liaisons between African American men and white women were consensual, an observation that enraged much of the conservative white population.

After the editorial was published, an angry throng of white men stormed the Free Speech office and destroyed Wells-Barnett's printing press. Wells-Barnett was in Philadelphia at the time.

These episodes of mob rule, so contrary to the democratic ideal, led Wells-Barnett to launch an antilynching campaign. Wells-Barnett relied not only on righteous indignation but on shocking national statistics to make her case against lynching. In articles and speeches, she quoted a grim fact: in 1894, 132 legal executions were carried out in the United States, and 197 lynchings occurred. African Americans were receiving the death penalty from self-appointed white citizens without the benefit of criminal investigations, formal charges, legal representation, or trials. Wells-Barnett's findings were published in 1895 in a detailed book entitled A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894.

In 1893, Wells-Barnett carried her antilynching campaign to Great Britain in the hope of exerting international pressure on U.S. legislators to enact antilynching laws. She was well received in Great Britain and spoke to large crowds. While in Europe, she was a guest at several women's civic clubs and was impressed with their worthwhile, community-minded activities. Wells-Barnett exported the idea to the United States, where African American women's clubs flourished.

In 1895, Wells-Barnett married Ferdinand L. Barnett, the first African American state's attorney in Illinois. After the marriage, Wells-Barnett curtailed her international speaking but continued to write in national publications. The couple lived in Chicago and had four children. Wells-Barnett worked hard to improve conditions for African Americans in Chicago by serving as a social worker and community organizer.

Wells-Barnett was well-known throughout the United States, yet the political power she craved eluded her. Although she was involved in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she alienated many of her African American colleagues with her sharp tongue and unbending manner. Also, she was an unreserved critic of the accommodationist position favored by Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute and the most influential African American leader at the time. Wells-Barnett favored a militant approach to achieving racial equality and was not welcome in the Washington camp. Other women such as Mary McLeod Bethune eventually eclipsed Wells-Barnett in influence. A combination of politics and personal animosity prevented Wells-Barnett from achieving the level of African American leadership she sought.

Although Wells-Barnett felt stymied near the end of her career, she earned an honored and lasting place in history as one of the first African American civil rights activists. Daughter Alfreda M. Barnett Duster wrote that Wells-Barnett "fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena" (Wells 1970, xxxii).

Wells-Barnett died in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of sixty-eight. In 1950 the city of Chicago named her one of the twenty-five most outstanding women in its history.

Quotes:

"One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap."

Ida B. Wells
Born	July 16, 1862(1862-07-16) Holly Springs, Mississippi
Died	April 25, 1931 (aged 68) Chicago, Illinois
Education	Freedman's School, Rust College, Fisk University
Occupation	Civil rights & Women's rights activist
Spouse(s)	Ferdinand L. Barnett
Parents	James Wells Elizabeth "Lizzie Bell" Warrenton

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862–March 25, 1931) was an African American journalist, newspaper editor and, with her husband, a newspaper owner^[1]. An early leader in the civil rights movement, she documented the extent of lynching in the United States. She was also active in the women's rights movement and the women's suffrage movement.

Contents 1 Life 2 Legacy 3 See also 4 References 5 Sources 6 External links

Life

Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862,^[2] just before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Her father James Wells was a carpenter and her mother was Elizabeth "Lizzie" Warrenton Wells. Both parents were slaves until freed at the end of the Civil War.

Wells attended the Freedmen's School Shaw University, now Rust College in Holly Springs . When she was 14, both Wells' parents and her 10-month old brother, Stanley, died of yellow fever during an epidemic that swept through the South.

At a meeting following the funeral, friends and relatives decided that the six remaining Wells children would be sent to various aunts and uncles. Wells was devastated by the idea and, to keep the family together, dropped out of high school and found employment as a teacher in a black school. She was determined to keep her family together, even under the difficult circumstances. Her grandmother, Peggy Wells, stayed with the children during the week while she was away to teach; without this help she would have not been able to provide for the family.

In 1880, Wells moved to Memphis. There she got a summer job and when possible, she attended summer sessions at Fisk University in Nashville, whose graduates were well respected in the black community. Wells held strong political opinions and she upset many people with her views on women's rights. When she was 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."

A Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad train conductor ordered Wells to give up her seat on the train to a white man and move to the "Jim Crow" car, which was already crowded with other passengers. At the time, the Supreme Court had just struck down, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations. Several railroad companies were able to continue legal racial segregation of their passengers.

Wells protested and refused to give up her seat, 71 years before Rosa Parks. The conductor and two other men dragged Wells out of the car. When she returned to Memphis, she immediately hired an African American attorney to sue the railroad. Wells became a public figure in Memphis when she wrote a newspaper article about her treatment on the train.

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 settlement. The railroad company appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court's ruling in 1887, concluding that "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"

While teaching elementary school, Wells was offered an editorial position for the Evening Star. She also wrote weekly articles for the Living Way weekly newspaper under the pen name "Iola."

Ida B. Wells-Barnett House is a Chicago Landmark, National Register of Historic Places-listed and National Historic Landmark building.

She slowly gained a reputation for writing about the race issue in the United States. In 1889, she became co-owner and editor of Free Speech, an anti-segregationist newspaper based at the Beale Street Baptist Church Beale Street in Memphis that published articles about racial injustice.

In 1892, racial tensions rose in Memphis when a grocery store owned by three black men, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, was perceived as taking away substantial amount of business from a white-owned grocery store. One night, while Wells was out of town in Natchez, MS selling newspaper subscriptions, an attack broke out, which ended in three white men being shot and injured. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart, who were Wells' friends, were jailed after being accused of raping a white woman. A large lynch mob took the men from jail and killed them in an open field.

After the lynching of her friends, Wells wrote an article in the Free Speech urging blacks to leave Memphis: "there is... 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." Wells emphasized the public spectacle of the lynching. Some blacks did leave; others organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. Being personally threatened with violence, Wells wrote in her autobiography that she bought a pistol: "They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth".^[3]

The murder of her friends sparked Wells' interest in researching the real reason behind lynching. She began investigative journalism about lynching, positing that lynchings stemmed from economics and greed rather than the crime of raping white women. She wrote an article that implied that liasions between black men and white women were consensual. While she was away in Philadelphia, The Free Speech was destroyed on May 27, 1892, three months after the murders of Moss, Stewart, and McDowell.

She went from Philadelphia to New York City. After arriving in New York, Wells took a job at the New York Age and continued her fight against lynching. Her speaking abilities were tested for the first time when she was asked to speak in front of many important African American women of the time.

As she spoke about the lynchings of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart, she began to cry. Wells became the head of the Anti-Lynching Crusade, later moving to Chicago to continue her work.

In 1892 she published a pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and a A Red Record, documented research on a lynching. Having examined many accounts of lynching based on alleged "rape of white women", she concluded that Southerners concocted rape as an excuse to hide their real reason for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened not only white Southerners' pocketbooks but also their ideas about black inferiority.

In 1893, Wells and other black leaders, among them Frederick Douglass, organized a boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn and Ferdinand L. Barnett wrote sections of a pamphlet to be distributed during the exposition. Called Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, it detailed the workings of Southern lynchings and a handful of other issues impinging on black Americans. She later reported to Tourgée that 2,000 copies had been distributed at the fair.^[4] After the World's 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.

Also in 1893, Wells contemplated a libel suit against two black Memphis attorneys. She again turned to Tourgée, who had trained and practiced as a lawyer and judge, for possible free legal help. Deeply in debt, Tourgée could not afford to do the work, but he asked his friend Ferdinand L. Barnett if he could.Barnett accepted the pro bono job. Ferdinand was born in Alabama. Along with being a lawyer, he was the editor of the "Chicago Conservator" in 1878. The first time Ida met Ferdinand was at a meeting of the Ida B. Wells Club, where Ferdinand was president of the club. Ferdinand was an assistant state attorney for 14 years.^[5] Two years later, he and Wells were married.^[6] 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 a chapter of her autobiography titled "A Divided Duty", she explains the difficulty she has splitting her time between her family and her job. Wells continues to work after the birth of her first two children, traveling and bringing them along with her. Although she tried to balance the two worlds, she was not as active and, as Susan B. Anthony said, Wells "was distracted". Her work focused in Chicago and local groups such as the Ida B. Wells Club and the Chicago Women's Club.

She received much support from other prolific social activists and her fellow clubwomen. In his response to her article in the Free Speech, Frederick Douglass expressed approval of Wells-Barnett's literature: "You have done your people and mine a service…What a revelation of existing conditions your writing has been for me" (Freedman, 1994). Wells- Barnett took her campaign into Europe with the help of many supporters. "People all of the country raised several thousand dollars to enable her to travel abroad" (Feldman, 1964). "A few months after founding the Women’s League, the Women’s Loyal Union, under the leadership of Victoria Matthews, united 70 women from Brooklyn and Manhattan in support of Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching crusade, helping her to finance her 1892 speaking tour of the United States and the British Isles " (Hewitt & Lebsock, 1993, p. 247). One club, the Women’s Era Club, based in Boston, wrote an open letter of support for Wells and her work (Bressey, 2008). "It was given wide publicity in England, and Wells believed it gave greater weight to the arguments she had been making against lynching" (2008).

In 1893, Wells went to Great Britain at the behest of British Quaker Catherine Impey. An opponent of imperialism and proponent of racial equality, Impey wanted to be sure that the British public was informed about the problem of lynching. Wells went to rally a new reform moral crusade to the English. Although Wells and her speeches, complete with at least one grisly photograph showing grinning white children posing beneath a suspended corpse, caused a stir among doubtful audiences. Her intentions were to raise money and expose the United States, however Wells was paid so little that she could barely pay her travel expenses.^[7]

Wells returned to Great Britain in 1894. Before leaving she called on the Editor of Daily Inter-Ocean, Mr. William Penn Nixon and told him about her return to Britain. As she points out in her book Crusade for Justice, the Daily Inter- Ocean was the only paper in America which had persistently denounced lynching. "Mr. Nixon asked her to write for the newspaper while away, and I very gladly accepted the opportunity." ^[8] In doing so, she became the first black woman paid to be a correspondent for a mainstream white newspaper.^[9] (Tourgée had been writing a column for the same paper, which was the local Republican Party organ and competitor to the Democratic Chicago Tribune.)^[10] Wells column was called “Ida B. Wells Abroad.” An example of an article that she wrote was called “In Pembroke Chapel.” ^[11] This specific article focused on her invitation to speak in the Pembroke chapel whose reverend was C.F. Aked. She describes the reverend as “one of the most advanced thinkers in the pulpit of today"^[12] He himself was not confident about the stories that Ida B. Wells told but he went to New York for the World’s Fair and actually saw the reports on the Miller lynching in Bardwell, Kentucky.^[12] After that point he knew that Ida B. Wells was telling the truth. She was well accepted in Europe, though most of the people there were shocked about the treatment of African Americans in the United States. Wells was successful in spreading the news and getting people to formally release statements saying they disapproved of the situation in America. On a number of accounts, she was faced with people who protested what she was saying, and in these moments she was able support all of the information with research and studies that she had found.

In 1899 while Wells was struggling to manage a home life and a career life, she was still a fierce competitor in the anti-lynching circle.^[13] This was illustrated when The National Association of Colored Women's club met that year in Chicago. To Wells' surprise, she was not invited to take part in the festivities. When she confronted the president of the club, Mrs. Terrell, Wells was told that Terrell had received letters from the women of Chicago that if Wells were to take part in the club, they would no longer aid the association. However, Wells later came to find out that the real reason she had not been invited was because Mrs.Terrell's selfish intentions. Mrs.Terrell had been president of the association 2 years' running and wanted to be elected a third time. Mrs.Terrell thought the only way of doing that was to keep Wells out of the picture.^{[citation needed]}

Ida B. Wells's two tours to Europe helped gain support for her cause. She called for the formation of groups to formally protest the actions of white Americans and the lynchings they commit. Wells was a major influence for the formation of many groups across Europe, which helpd led to the international pressure on America for equality.

After traveling through the British Isles and the United States teaching and giving speeches to bring awareness to the lynching problems in America, Wells settled in Chicago, and worked to improve conditions for the rapidly growing African American population there. In 1916 two percent of Chicago’s population was African American; by 1970 it was up to thirty three percent. This rapid increase led to racial tensions much like those in the South, and also tensions, between the African American population and the immigrants from Europe who were now in competition for jobs. Wells spent the latter thirty years of her life working on urban reform in Chicago. While there, she also raised her family and worked on her autobiography. After her retirement, Wells wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928).The book was never finished, in fact it ends in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word. She died of uremia in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68.

Legacy

Throughout her life, Wells was militant in her demands for equality and justice for African-Americans and insisted that the African-American community must win justice through its own efforts. Playwright Tazewell Thompson sums her up:

"...A woman born in slavery, she would grow to become one of the great pioneer activists of the Civil Rights movement. A precursor of Rosa Parks, she was a suffragist, newspaper editor and publisher, investigative journalist, co-founder of the NAACP, political candidate, mother, wife, and the single most powerful leader in the anti-lynching campaign in America. She was a one women reform against lynching. She also wrote a novel about the ancient Romans. Along with co-founding the NAACP, she also had a part in the organization and founding of The National Association of colored women (1896), Negro Fellowship League (1910), and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1916). A dynamic, controversial, temperamental, uncompromising race woman, she broke bread and crossed swords with some of the movers and shakers of her time: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frances Willard, and President McKinley. By any fair assessment, she was a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America."

She was born in a rural area and moved to the city of Chicago, where she worked thirty years for reform. She started out as a figure of national fame and over time became more a figure of local fame. She was social worker, a muckraker, and champion of those who did not speak up for themselves.

On February 1, 1990, the United States Postal Service issued a 25 cent postage stamp in her honor.^[14]

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Ida B. Wells on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[15]

See also

• Ida B. Wells-Barnett House

References

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. See talk page for details. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2008)

1. ^ http://www.africawithin.com/bios/ida_wells.htm
2. ^ Women in History at Lakewood Public Library (OH) website, "Ida B. Wells-Barnett". Accessed October 15, 2009.
3. ^ Wells 63
4. ^ Elliott, Mark. Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessey v. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press (2006), 239-40.
5. ^ Elliott, 239.
6. ^ "Miss Ida B. Wells About to marry.". Washington Post. June 13, 1895. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost_historical/access/196565212.html?dids=196565212:196565212&FMT=CITE&FMTS=CITE:FT&date=JUN+13%2C+1895&author=&pub=The+Washington+Post&desc=Miss+Ida+B.+Wells+About+to+Marry.&pqatl=google. Retrieved 2008-05-09. 
7. ^ Elliott, 240-41.
8. ^ Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice. Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970, 125.
9. ^ Elliott, 242.
10. ^ Elliott, 232.
11. ^ Wells, Ida B. (1970). Alfreda M. Duster. ed. Crusade For Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Negro American Biographies and Autobiographies Series. John Hope Franklin, Series Editor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 128. ISBN 0226893421. http://lccn.loc.gov/73108837. Retrieved 2008-12-23. 
12. ^ ^{a b} Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice. p. 129.
13. ^ Protests Against Maysville Lynching. (1899, December 9). The Washington Post (1877-1954),p. 4. Retrieved December 23, 2008, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers The Washington Post (1877 - 1992) database. (Document ID: 190136962).
14. ^ Scott catalog # 2442.
15. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.

Sources

• Buechler, S.M. (1951). Women’s Movements in The United States. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• Davis, E.L. (1922). The Story of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Chicago: Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs
• Gere, A.R. & Robbins, S. R. (1996). Gendered Literacy in Black and White: Turn-of-the-Century African-American and European American Club Club Women's Printed Text. Signs , 643-648.
• Giddings, P.J. (2008). Ida A Sword Among Lions. New York: Harper Collins Publisher.
• Hendricks, W.A. (1998). Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• McCammon, H. (2003). The Changing Tactical Repertoire of the U.S. Women's Suffrage Movements. Social Forces , 787-813.
• McMurray, L.O. (1998). To Keep the Waters Troubled. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Royster, J.J. (1997). Southern Horrors and Other Writings. New York: Bedford.

This article's factual accuracy is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page. (February 2009)

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Ida B. Wells

• Works by Ida B. Wells at Project Gutenberg
• Lynch Law by Ida B. Wells
• "Ida B. Wells - Illinois During the Gilded Age, 1866-1896, Illinois Historical Digitization Projects at Northern Illinois University Libraries". Northern Illinois University. http://dig.lib.niu.edu/gildedage/idabwells/index.html. Retrieved 2008-03-28. 
• Lee D. Baker. "Ida B. Wells-Barnett(1862-1931) and Her Passion for Justice, Black Women, African American Women, Sufferage, Women's Movement, Civil Rights Leaders". Duke University. http://www.duke.edu/~ldbaker/classes/AAIH/caaih/ibwells/ibwbkgrd.html. Retrieved 2007-12-09. 

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