Ida B. Wells was born into slavery on a farm near Holly Springs, Mississippi, and became free after emancipation.
In 1878, while attending Rust College, her parents and sibling died in the yellow fever epidemic. To support her younger siblings and keep them together, she became a teacher and raised them with her grandmother’s help. Two years later, her grandmother died, and they moved to Memphis, TN, to live with their aunt. There she worked as a teacher and attended the local college.
Her life took a turn at 21 when the conductor ordered her to move from the first-class carriage due to her race. Wells resisted and was forcibly removed from the train. She sued the railroad company, and her story was published as a series of articles. That was the beginning of her career as a journalist.
Wells is one of the many women who refused to give up their seats and fought for their rights years before Rosa Parks.
In her twenties, Wells became co-owner and co-editor of two local newspapers, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and Free Speech, and had more than 200 reprints of her articles.
After losing a friend to lynching, Wells dedicated her time to researching more than 700 racist lynching cases. She traveled the south alone, investigating each case, publishing her findings, and raising national and international awareness of the injustice. She toured the country and the UK, giving public speeches on the data she collected; her campaign helped decrease the number of lynchings. Reporting racial cases put her life in danger; the local mob broke into the newspaper’s offices and destroyed all the equipment. Wells fled for Chicago.
Insisting on a partner who would support her values, at 32, she married Chicago-based widower Ferdinand Barnett. To reflect her progressive views, she hyphenated her surname to Wells-Barnett. One of the few women of the era who kept their name. The couple had four children in addition to Barnett’s two children from his first marriage.
In Chicago, Wells was an active suffragist and worked in many ways to achieve equality for people of color. She co-founded several civil rights organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women, and was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Before her death, Wells was considered “one of the most famous black women in the world,” but her heritage did not last long as her peers, partially due to her gender and for being considered “too radical.”
In recent years, thanks to the efforts of her great-granddaughter, there has been an increase in public recognition of her achievements, including several statues erected in her honor, a plaque and a street sign in Chicago, as well as declaring July 16 as Ida B. Wells-Barnett day in Shelby County, TN.
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