Life Story: Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born near Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862. Ida was born enslaved, but slavery was abolished in the United States before she was three years old so she had no personal memory of her enslavement. But Ida was raised with the knowledge that a terrible crime had been committed against her people. Her parents, James and Elizabeth Wells, told their children stories of their time as enslaved people, and Elizabeth carried the scars she received from beatings all her life. 

Ida was the oldest of eight children. James and Elizabeth understood the value of a good education, so after emancipation they both learned to read and made sure their children attended school. James started a successful carpentry business and became a trustee at a local college for Black students. Ida was an excellent student and attended the college when she came of age.  

In 1878 Ida’s parents and one of her brothers died of yellow fever, leaving the surviving Wells children orphans. Family friends and relatives wanted to split the children up, but sixteen-year-old Ida took on the responsibility of becoming the new head of her family to keep her siblings together.

Ida took a job as a schoolteacher to support her siblings. Her grandmother watched the younger children during the day. In addition to being the sole wage earner, Ida continued her own studies, taught Sunday school, and was responsible for the family’s cooking, washing, and ironing. It was a very challenging time in Ida’s life. In 1881 Ida’s grandmother and one of Ida’s sisters died, so Ida and her two youngest sisters moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where they had an aunt who could help Ida. Ida took another teaching job in Memphis and started writing articles for local newspapers.

The 1880s were a difficult time to be Black in the US. A harsh new system of laws and social customs that historians now call Jim Crow restricted Black Americans’ rights, and racial segregation was required by law and reinforced by acts of violence and intimidation. In 1884 Ida bought a first-class train ticket for a trip to Holly Springs. When she took her usual seat in the women’s car, the conductor told her to move because only white passengers were allowed. Ida resisted, and when the conductor tried to drag her from her seat, she bit his hand. Two men helped the conductor forcibly remove Ida while the white passengers applauded. Ida sued the railroad for damages and won, but her triumph was short-lived. The railroad won on appeal. 

Ida lost her teaching job in 1886 after she criticized conditions in the Memphis schools, so she decided to commit to journalism full time. Three years later she bought a share in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and was appointed its editor. She was the first woman co-owner and editor of a Black newspaper in the US. She used the pen name “Iola.” 

In 1892 Ida’s friend Thomas Moss was lynched by a mob because his successful grocery business threatened the business of a rival white grocer. Ida was devastated by his violent death. She bought a pistol for self-defense and wrote an editorial urging Black people to move out of Memphis for their safety. Then she turned her attention to researching the rise in lynching in America.

Ida learned that 728 lynching cases occurred in the US between 1884 and 1892. Most victims were Black men accused of raping white women. While interviewing witnesses, Ida noticed that in most cases these accusations were made after a lynching had already taken place. She began to suspect that the victims were either in consensual relationships with white women or, like her friend Thomas Moss, were perceived as social or economic threats to the white community. Ida concluded that lynching was a terrorist tactic being used to reinforce white supremacy.

The year Thomas died Ida wrote a series of anti-lynching editorials under the title Southern Horrors “to arouse the conscience of America.” She quickly became America’s best-known anti-lynching activist. But when she dared to write an editorial that suggested white women could be attracted to Black men, she knew she was playing with fire. Ida traveled north when the article hit the newsstands, but the response was worse than she feared. Angry white men issued threats against Ida and her friends and family, and her newspaper offices were burned down. Ida realized she could not safely return to Memphis. From that point on she lived in the North, mostly in Chicago. She also changed her pen name to “Exiled.”

In Chicago Ida met Ferdinand Lee Barnett, another prominent journalist and anti-lynching activist. The couple married in 1895. Ferdinand supported Ida’s career at a time when most women were expected to give up working outside the home when they got married. Together, Ida and Ferdinand raised six children. Ida found it challenging to balance the demands of motherhood, career, and activism, but she persevered. 

Anti-lynching was not the only cause Ida championed. She was also a staunch supporter of women’s suffrage and believed that the only way to pass anti-lynching laws was to get Black women the right to vote. She co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913, which became the largest Black women’s suffrage organization in Illinois. In addition to supporting women’s efforts to obtain the vote, the Alpha Suffrage Club taught women how to be politically active and promoted Black candidates for office.

Black women were not always welcome in the larger women’s suffrage movement. In 1913 organizers of a massive women‘s suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. tried to segregate Black marchers to the back of the parade. Ida refused to comply, marching with the Illinois delegation and wearing similar attire as white suffragists. She was later hailed as the “Queen of our race” by the Chicago Defender, a major Black newspaper.

Ida never stopped working for the causes she believed in. She traveled the world to raise awareness about the lynching crisis in the US. In 1922 she supported an anti-lynching bill proposed in Congress. In 1930 she tried to run for the Illinois State Senate. Ida died of kidney disease on March 25, 1931. In 2020 she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “outstanding and courageous reporting.”

• abolish: To end.
• emancipation: Setting people free from slavery.
• Jim Crow: The name for the many laws, rules, and customs that maintained segregation after the Civil War, often through violence and intimidation. The original Jim Crow was a minstrel character performed by a white actor in blackface to ridicule Black Americans.
• lynching: The extralegal execution of a person by a mob.
• pen name: A fake name used by a writer to keep their real name a secret.
• Pulitzer Prize: An annual award given by Columbia University and first awarded in 1917 in recognition of achievements in both journalism and creative writing.
• suffrage:  The right of voting; in this era, suffrage often referred specifically to women’s suffrage, or the right of women to vote.
• yellow fever: A deadly disease transmitted by mosquitos.

• AP Government Connections:
  • 1.1: Ideals of democracy
  • 3.1: The Bill of Rights
  • 3.4: First Amendment: Freedom of the press
  • 3.6: Amendments: Balancing individual freedom with public order and safety
  • 3.8: Amendments: Due process and the rights of the accused
  • 3.10: Social movements and equal protection
  • 3.11: Government responses to social movements
• Consider what the life story of Ida B. Wells tells us about the intersectional fight for suffrage and social justice in the United States.
• Pair this life story with materials in the Suffrage unit to consider how race informed the work of the suffragists.
• To learn more about the challenges Black Americans faced during Ida B. Wells’s lifetime, see:
  • The Politics of Respectability
  • Atlanta Neighborhood Union: Women Helping Women
  • Black Life in the Urban North
  • Migrating North
  • The Tulsa Massacre

POLITICS AND SOCIETY; ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE

• For more about Black experiences in this era, see Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow.