Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

By: Wanda A. Hendricks

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

Sex:  Female

Born:  Holly Springs, Mississippi, United States
16 July 1862

Died:  Chicago, Illinois, United States
25 March 1931

Activity/Profession:  Slave, Civil Rights Activist, Newspaper Editor / Publisher

(b. 16 July 1862; d. 25 March 1931),
activist.

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an ardent advocate of African Americans' civil rights, women's rights, and economic rights. Throughout her life, she maintained a fearless devotion to justice, which often placed her in physical danger or social isolation. As a journalist and an activist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett made an indelible mark on the history of the United States and offered a harsh critique of the racial, sexual, and economic exploitation of black people.

Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida Bell Wells was the eldest of the eight children of Jim Wells and Lizzie Warrenton. Jim Wells was born in Tippah County, Mississippi, the son of his master and a slave woman, Peggy. He was trained as a carpenter and apprenticed to a white contractor in Holly Springs. Lizzie Warrenton was one of ten children born into slavery in Virginia. Separated from her family and auctioned as a slave, she began to work as a cook on the plantation where Jim Wells was employed. They were married not long after, and once emancipated, the couple remained in Holly Springs.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and activist, was an ardent advocate of African Americans' civil rights, women's rights, and economic rights. Through her campaigns, speeches, reports, books, and agitation, she raised crucial questions about the future of black Americans.

Chicago Historical Society

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Like many black Americans in the postbellum South, the Wells ardently believed in education and sent their children to school as early as possible. In 1866, the Freedman's Aid Society established Shaw University in Holly Springs, later renamed Rust College, for freed black students. As an interested father and community activist, Jim Wells became a trustee at Shaw. Lizzie Wells, having no formal education, often accompanied her children to classes so that she could learn to read and write.

A yellow fever epidemic swept through Holly Springs in 1878. Jim and Lizzie Wells and their nine-month-old son, Stanley, were among the victims. Another son, Eddie, had died several years before of spinal meningitis. Sixteen-year-old Ida Wells assumed the responsibility of caring for the other five children. Her training at Shaw enabled her to pass the teacher's exam for the county schools and gain employment at a school six miles from her home at a monthly salary of twenty-five dollars. A year later, on the invitation of her mother's sister in Memphis, Tennessee, Wells left Holly Springs. Her paralyzed sister, Eugenia, and two brothers remained behind with relatives. She took the two younger girls with her to Memphis and secured a teaching job in the Shelby County school district at a higher salary than she had earned in Mississippi.

In May 1884, Wells boarded a train owned by Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and sat down in the ladies' coach. The conductor informed her that he could not take her ticket where she sat and requested that she move to the segregated car. She refused to move. After scuffling with the conductor, she was forcibly removed from the train. In retaliation, she hired a black lawyer and sued the railroad. Disappointed with his lack of attention to her case, she hesitantly turned to a white lawyer and was awarded five hundred dollars. Victory was bittersweet, however, because the state supreme court reversed the ruling of the lower court.

An avid reader and debater, Wells became a member of a lyceum of public school teachers that met on Friday afternoons. After each Friday afternoon program, the lyceum closed the meeting with a reading of a weekly newspaper, the Evening Star. It reached hundreds and was one of the few sources of communication in the black community. When the editor of the paper returned to a position in Washington, DC, Wells took over the editorship. Not long after, she also accepted the editorship of the weekly newspaper Living Way. Under the name “Iola,” her weekly column reached mostly rural, uneducated people. She committed the column to writing “in a plain, common-sense way on the things which concerned our people.” Her popularity grew, and over the years she contributed articles to local and national publications such as the Memphis Watchman, the New York Age, the Indianapolis World, and the Chicago Conservator.

In 1889, Wells bought a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and later became editor. At first, she spent much of her time writing about the poor conditions of local schools for black children. Wells argued that inadequate buildings and improperly trained teachers contributed to the mediocre education of black children. Conservative black leaders dismissed her argument, however, and the white school board did not renew her contract for the following year. To support herself, Wells began to promote subscriptions for the Free Speech. She successfully canvassed and secured subscriptions throughout the delta region in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

The Lynching in Memphis

In March 1892, three black male colleagues were lynched. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Steward were successful managers of a grocery business in a heavily populated black section just outside Memphis. The owner of a competing white grocery store in the area charged them with conspiracy. News of the indictment spread throughout the black community. The three men and several other black supporters held a meeting and voiced threats against whites. They were arrested and incarcerated. Chaos erupted in the black community. After four days of shooting, Moss, McDowell, and Steward were indicted for inciting a riot and thrown in jail. Later, they were removed from the county jail, shot, and hanged.

The deaths of Moss, McDowell, and Steward forced Wells to question not only the rationale of lynchers but also to rethink her own ideas about the reasons for lynching. She, like most Americans, black and white, believed that lynching happened to accused rapists; that is, black men who had been accused of raping white women. Yet the men brutally murdered in Memphis had not been accused of rape. Rather, they were outstanding community citizens, whose only crime was economic prosperity. Wells began to investigate cases in which lynch victims were accused of rape. She concluded that lynching was a racist device for eliminating financially independent black Americans.

Wells expressed indignation and outrage that “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.” Therefore, she urged the black citizens of Memphis to “save [their] money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, when accused by white persons.” In addition, she wrote a scathing editorial attacking white female purity and suggested that it was possible for white women to be attracted to black men. The suggestion infuriated the white Memphis community.

The Antilynching Crusade

When the editorial appeared, Wells was en route to Philadelphia to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Church's general conference. The Free Speech office was destroyed, and threats were made that Wells's life would be in danger should she dare return to Memphis. So Wells went to New York, joined the staff of the New York Age, and continued her exposé on lynching. In October 1892, her thorough investigative research culminated in a feature story, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” The publications and speaking tours on lynching and the plight of African Americans that followed gained her a national audience.

Still, it was international pressure on the United States, she argued, that offered the best means of change for African Americans. She toured England and Scotland using her investigations as proof of atrocities toward black Americans. Her efforts spawned the growth of several organizations pledged to fight segregation and lynching.

Wells's second tour of England in 1894 became highly controversial when she harshly criticized and denounced the activities of prominent white leaders considered to be supporters of black American causes. Wells argued that these leaders did not take a strong enough stance on lynching and that their silence on the issue sanctioned mob violence. In addition, she maintained that white leaders who addressed racially segregated audiences, in effect, condoned segregation and discrimination. These people, she concluded, were not friends of black Americans.

The president of the Missouri Press Association, in an effort to discredit Wells, published a letter that denounced the activities of Wells and characterized black women “as having no sense of virtue and altogether without character.” It was in part in response to this blatant attack that black women nationwide banded together and formed the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.

Wells was also an energetic and strong voice at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. She solicited funds and published twenty thousand copies of a protest pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, to publicize the inherent racism of the fair's administration. She remained in Chicago and helped spawn the growth of numerous black female and reform organizations. The Ida B. Wells Club and the Negro Fellowship League were two such associations. She served as president of the Ida B. Wells Club for five years and led the club in the establishment of the first black orchestra in Chicago and in the opening of the first kindergarten for black children.

In 1895, Wells married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer and owner of the Chicago Conservator. Barnett, a widower with two children, was a strong advocate for black equality. He contributed to her pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, was her strongest supporter, and encouraged her to continue her antilynching and political activities. Often traveling with one or more of their children, Wells-Barnett was persistent in speaking to groups about lynching and other reform activities.

In 1910, Wells-Barnett opened the Negro Fellowship League to provide lodging, recreation facilities, a reading room, and employment for black migrant males. By the end of the first year, the league boasted of finding employment for 115 black men. Depleting funds, waning public support, and competition, however, limited the continued success of the league. Philanthropic support dwindled, the Young Men's Christian Association for black men opened in 1913, and the Urban League opened its doors in 1916. By the end of the decade, the Negro Fellowship League disbanded altogether.

Wells-Barnett's antilynching activities were instrumental in making her one of two black women to sign the 1909 call for the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She later broke with the association because of its predominantly white board and because it was timid when confronting racial issues.

Suffrage Efforts

Wells-Barnett had a strong belief that the vote for all African Americans was the key to reform and economic, social, and political equality. In her 1910 article “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynching,” she asserted that if “the constitutional safeguards to the ballot” are swept aside, then “it is the smallest of small matter…to sweep aside…safeguards to human life.” Because she believed that economic and political empowerment for black citizens required the cooperative effort of black men and women, she organized the Alpha Suffrage Club. Formed in 1913, the club was the first black female suffrage club in Illinois. The club sent Wells-Barnett as an Illinois delegate to the National American Woman Suffrage Association's suffrage parade on 3 March 1913 in Washington, DC. White Illinois delegates pleaded with her to march with the black delegates at the back of the procession. She refused, arguing that, “the southern women have tried to evade the question time and again by giving some excuse or other every time it has been brought up. If the Illinois women do not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost.” Moreover, she continued, “I shall not march at all unless I can march under the Illinois banner.” Despite support from a number of white allies, Wells-Barnett's motion to march with the state contingent fell on deaf ears.

Afterward, Wells-Barnett disappeared from the parade site. Illinois delegates assumed she had admitted defeat and decided to march with the black contingent, but as the delegates began marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, she quietly stepped out from the crowd of spectators and joined her state colleagues. Her bold action was a public challenge to white supremacy and the policy of expediency adopted by white female suffrage organizations.

In 1915, she played a pivotal role in steering the Suffrage Club to endorse the election of Oscar DePriest, an election he won, to become the first black alderman of Chicago. The club's loyalty to the Republican machine also sustained the reign of white Republicans in Chicago politics. Throughout the 1920s, Wells-Barnett maintained her interest in the political arena, and in 1930, she ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois senate as an independent candidate.

Her anti–Booker T. Washington stance and alliances with Timothy Thomas Fortune and Marcus Garvey often placed Wells-Barnett at odds with her peers and with the federal government. She believed agitation, activism, and protest were the only means of change in the United States and she saw Washington's philosophy as accommodationist. Wells-Barnett supported the editor of the Age, Timothy Thomas Fortune, in his efforts to resuscitate the National Afro-American League because the organization expressed some of her own grievances—disfranchisement, lynching, inequitable distribution of education funding, the convict lease system, and Jim Crow laws. She spoke at Universal Negro Improvement Association meetings and hailed Garvey as the person who had “made an impression on this country as no Negro before him had ever done. He has been able to solidify the masses of our people and endow them with racial consciousness and racial solidarity.” As a result, the U.S. Secret Service branded her a dangerous radical.

Wells-Barnett continued writing and reporting despite the controversies surrounding her. She wrote exposés on several riots, including the riot in East St. Louis in July 1917, and she pointed out that similar conditions existed in Chicago:

"With one Negro dead as the result of a race riot last week, another one very badly injured in the county hospital; with a half dozen attacks upon Negro children, and one on the Thirty-fifth Street car Tuesday, in which four white men beat one colored man…the bombing of Negro homes and the indifference of the public to these outrages. It is just such a situation as this which led up to the East St. Louis riot"

(Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 July 1919).

Then, for fourteen days in July and August 1919, black and white Chicagoans battled. In the end, 38 died and 537 were injured.

After a thirty-year exile from the South, Ida Wells-Barnett returned in 1922 to investigate the case of the black Arkansas farmers who were indicted for murder in what was known as the Arkansas race riot, about which she published a pamphlet.

Wells-Barnett was a reformer and one of the first black leaders to link the oppression and exploitation of African Americans to white economic opportunity. She believed that black citizens had to organize themselves and take the lead in fighting for their own independence from white oppression. Through her campaigns, speeches, reports, books, and agitation, she raised crucial questions about the future of black Americans. Wells-Barnett died in Chicago of uremia, a kidney disease. Her autobiography, edited by her daughter, Alfreda Duster, was published posthumously.

See also Antilynching Movement; Journalism, Early; and Suffrage.

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