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from no author given, Distinguished Black Women 1981-1985 [Washington, DC: Black Women in Sisterhood for Action, 1986]

      Ida Bell Wells was a militant civil rights fighter and crusading journalist who fought against lynching. She investigated incidents of lynching and publicized the horrible facts to the world. Her newspaper articles and fiery editorials were powerful weapons used openly to condemn such violence against blacks.

      Ida Wells was born July 16, 1863 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the oldest in a family of eight children. Her parents had been slaves. When she was fourteen, her parents and three of their children died in a yellow fever epidemic. Ida became the head of the family and by claiming to be eighteen, got a position teaching in a rural school making twenty-five dollars a month. By 1892, she had become a partner in the Free Speech and traveled throughout the southern states as a correspondent.

      She began her great campaign against lynching in 1892 when three Memphis men, all friends of hers, were lynched. She denounced the crime in the Free Speech saying that the crime had not been committed in defense of southern womanhood as claimed, but because there men had been offering successful competition to white storekeepers.

      That autumn, after a brief time as a writer for the New York Age, Miss Wells launched a one woman crusade against lynching. A large, handsome woman with powerful flashing eyes, she lectured in Boston, New York and elsewhere. In 1893 and 1894 she traveled to England and Scotland on speaking tours.

      She aroused much interest in her cause and was instrumental in the founding of an antilynching committee and a society to combat racial segregation. Her reception by the British was enthusiastic and her speeches well covered in the English press. At the same time, reports of her successful tour drew attack from the white newspapers in America. By now, she had become used to being vilified in the white press but was beginning to get opposition from blacks who urged her to tone down her remarks. She, of course, refused to do so.

      Ida Wells did not limit her concern for her race to lynching issues. In 1893, she edited a booklet written by Frederick Douglass and Attorney Ferdinand Barnett that was distributed at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The booklet criticized the Columbian Exposition for not allowing black Americans to have a pavilion.

      On June 27, 1895, Ida Wells married Ferdinand Lee Barnett in Chicago. In addition to his being an attorney, Barnett was a politician, founder and editor of the Chicago Conservator, and beginning in 1896, an assistant state's attorney. They had four children, two sons and two daughters. Barnett fully shared his wife's interest. In 1895 she published a Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged cases of Lynching in the United States, 1892 - 1894.

      Mrs. Barnett was indignant at the violence carried on against blacks and she was frustrated that nothing was being done to stop it. In 1908, after three men were lynched in Springfield, Illinois, Mrs. Barnett realized that the blacks in Chicago were afraid to act against such violence. She was concerned about the growing racial prejudice in Chicago and saw that the tide of racial violence was moving north. Wherever it erupted, she would do. She wanted the responsible white official to be held accountable. She alone argued in the State House in Springfield against the rehiring of the sheriff who permitted a lynching in Cairo, Illinois. She pleaded her case against the best lawyers in southern Illinois. She won her case and that was the last lynching in the State.

      In July, 1918, no better example of Mrs. Barnett's courage and determination could be seen than when she went to East St. Louis to investigate the slaughtering of one hundred and fifty blacks by rampaging white. This was one of the worst outbreaks of racial violence in the country's history. She went down two days after the rioting and found the city an armed camp of destruction and hatred. She spent a day gathering facts and reviewing conditions. Later, she presented the Illinois Governor with her findings. Nevertheless, the fifteen black men that were tried and convicted of rioting were given fifteen year sentences and one black man was sentenced to life imprisonment. No white person received a sentence longer than five years.

      Mrs. Barnett lived in Chicago for thirty-six years and took an interest in the welfare of Chicago's black population. She organized a black women's club that started kindergartens in the black community. In 1910 she founded the Negro Fellowship League, which maintained a social center, reading rooms, and residence for newly arrived black men and helped them find work. She involved herself in areas that required legal assistance, serving as a probation officer for the Chicago municipal court from 1913 to 1916. She began the first black women's suffrage organization in Chicago and marched with five thousand suffragettes black and white, in June, 1918 to demand a suffrage plank in the Republican National Convention platform.

      In 1931, at the age of 68, Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett died. The city of Chicago named and dedicated a housing project after her in 1940. Ten years later she was cited as one of the twenty-five outstanding women in the city's history.

For More Information

      Voices from the Gaps

      Lynch Law in America, Jan. 1900, The Arena

      from Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892)

      from A Red Record (1895)

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