Ida B. Wells
1862 – 1931 · United States
Known for: Investigative journalist who documented lynching and co-founded the NAACP
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
Biography
Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on 16 July 1862, and was freed as an infant when Union troops took the town. Her father, a carpenter hired out as an apprentice while enslaved, became a trustee of the newly founded Shaw University and refused to be told how to vote; her mother, trafficked away from her family in Virginia as a child, searched for them after the war and never found them. In September 1878 a yellow fever epidemic killed both parents and an infant brother while Ida, then sixteen, was away at her grandmother's farm. Relatives proposed to divide the surviving children among foster homes. She refused, took work teaching in a country school, held the family together, and in 1883 moved with her youngest sisters to Memphis.
In Memphis a conductor on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway ordered her out of the first class ladies car; when she would not go, three men dragged her from it. She sued, and she wrote about it, and journalism took hold. She became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, and in 1892, after three friends who kept a grocery store were taken from a city jail and lynched for competing successfully with a white merchant, she began the investigation that defined her life. She gathered names, dates, places and the stated pretexts, and in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases in 1892 and The Red Record in 1895 she showed with the evidence itself that the usual accusation against the victims was largely a fiction, and that lynching served to terrorise Black communities and to destroy Black competitors in business. A white mob wrecked her printing press and office and made it plain that she would be killed on sight. She was in the North at the time and did not return.
From Chicago she carried the record further, lecturing across the United States and twice in Britain, where her audiences helped to form an anti lynching committee. She married the lawyer and editor Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895, raised four children and did not stop working. She was among the founders of the NAACP in 1909, founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913 to bring Black women into the suffrage movement, and stood for the Illinois state senate in 1930. Disapproval followed her all her life, including from allies who found her too plain spoken. She died in Chicago on 25 March 1931. In 2020 the Pulitzer Board awarded her a posthumous special citation for her reporting during the era of lynching.