One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.
—Ida B. Wells
A crusading journalist and social reformer, Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) exposed the brutal violence endured by African Americans in the American South after Reconstruction. Her most famous book, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), shocked the nation with its graphic descriptions of violence against blacks—but it would be decades before lynchings ended in the South.
Born a slave in Mississippi, Wells was freed along with her family at the end of the Civil War. Both of her parents died during a yellow fever epidemic when she was a teenager, and Wells was forced to leave school. She eventually worked her way through college and moved to Memphis in 1880.
Two events affected Wells’s views on racial justice. In 1883, she was ejected from a whites-only railroad car and unsuccessfully sued the railroad for discrimination. Ten years later, three of her friends were murdered by a white mob in Memphis.
After the deaths in Memphis—which Wells called her “first lesson in white supremacy”—Wells began writing denunciations of racial violence, describing specific instances of blacks being killed by whites. Many black men were killed after accusations that they had associated with white women, but Wells exposed how rape accusations were often used as a pretext to target blacks for other reasons. Her friends in Memphis, for instance, had run a successful grocery store that competed with white-owned stores.
Throughout the next three decades, Wells cataloged cases of lynching, forcing Americans to confront the issue. Her reporting often exposed her to personal danger, and she narrowly escaped being lynched herself on at least one occasion. She was also a founder of the NAACP and traveled abroad to publicize the plight of blacks in the United States.
Wells wrote an autobiography, Crusade for Justice, in 1928 and died three years later at age sixty-eight.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Wells married a Chicago newspaper editor, Ferdinand L. Barnett (c. 1859–1936), in 1895. She defied convention by keeping her maiden name—Wells was one of the first American women to do so.
- The NAACP continued to record instances of lynching into the 1940s. While the overall total of victims is disputed, roughly 3,000 died between the Civil War and World War I.
- Wells was featured on a US postage stamp in 1990.
