Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a tenacious fighter for justice and equality for African American people. Born in slavery in Holly Springs, Missouri, in 1862, she was educated by missionaries at a Missouri Freedmen's School called Rust University. When Ida Wells was sixteen, her parents and three of her siblings died of yellow fever, leaving her to raise her six remaining brothers and sisters.

She found work teaching school. In 1884, she relocated to Tennessee to accept another teaching job while she attended Fisk University. At that time, the federal troops which had enforced Reconstruction in the South had been gone for about seven years, and the White former slave owners were trying their best to regain political control of the state and local governments. They were busy instituting laws called "Black Codes," and "Separate but Equal" laws, which were designed to shove African American citizens back into a second-class status. Some Black people held protests against these restrictions, but upon many occasions people who spoke out were lynched.

One morning when Ida B. Wells was 22 years old, she purchased a first class ticket to ride the train to her teaching job in Woodstock, Tennessee. She boarded the train and took her seat, but soon thereafter, the conductor approached her and informed her that the new "Separate but Equal" policy stated that she would have to sit in the smoking coach. She informed him that she did not want to move to the smoking coach. He got another conductor to assist him, and the two men attempted to physically remove Miss Wells from the first class coach. She resisted. Finally, she ended up getting off the train, but she filed a discrimination lawsuit against the railroad, and won. A local court awarded her $500, but the railroad appealed. The decision was reversed by the Tennessee Supreme Court three years later.

Miss Wells blasted the unfair decision and the Black Codes in general in a series of articles she wrote for a church newspaper. The success of these articles within the Black community inspired her to continue writing against injustice, which cost her her teaching job after she wrote about the condition of the separate but unequal Black schools. She obtained an editorship at the Black newspaper which had published the articles, and continued to write. In 1892, three respected businessmen she knew were lynched after opening a grocery store in close proximity to a White-owned store. Miss Wells wrote a series of scathing editorials criticizing Memphis-area government officials for their toleration of lynchings. The newspaper office was subsequently trashed by a White mob which had come looking for Miss Wells.

She moved to New York City and became a writer for The New York Age. She continued to investigate and report on lynchings throughout the South, putting herself at risk while interviewing witnesses. She found that charges of rape were most commonly cited, but upon investigation it turned out that the real reasons were that the lynching victims had done things like registering to vote, or becoming more successful in business or farming enterprises than their White competitors.

Ida B. Wells became a prominent lecturer on the subject, travelling around the U.S. and also to Europe to speak about the problem. In 1895 she married Chicago lawyer and publisher Ferdinand L. Barnett, and they had four children together. In Chicago, Mrs. Wells-Barnett organized local women into anti-lynching societies, an organization to combat discrimination, and into women's suffrage leagues. She organized a protest against the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, whose organizers did not wish to highlight the achievements of African Americans since Emancipation.

Undaunted by early hardship and adversity, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett obtained an education and rose above what must have been a difficult family situation that she faced when her parents died. Her tough determination to stand up for justice resulted in her becoming a nationally known and respected journalist, speaker, and civil rights advocate. Her achievements are a true inspiration.

by
Susan Robinson

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