III. A Voice for the People
The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.
—Ida B. Wells
She Shall Not Be Moved
One day, Ida opened the door of the Negro Fellowship League, the organization she had started informally in 1908 with a group of her Bible study students, and saw a white man standing there. Though some white people had helped provide financial support for the project, the Negro Fellowship League most often saw Black people arrive at its doorstep. The neighborhood center opened in 1910 to provide Black migrants seeking work in Chicago a place to commune. As Ida saw it, prior to the Negro Fellowship League Reading Room and Social Center’s existence, “only one social center welcomes the Negro, and that is the saloon.”
The Chicago center became more than just a gathering space. Through the Negro Fellowship League, Ida and her husband, Ferdinand L. Barnett, a lawyer, helped many young Black men who were falsely accused of crimes. Many of those men were released. An average of forty-five people per day enjoyed the meeting space. Some stayed upstairs in the dormitory for less than fifty cents per night, giving them a place to rest. The reading room was open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Ida and the Bible study students kept it stocked with Chicago newspapers, so the men could look through the job ads. Southern papers such as the New Orleans Tribune and the Oklahoma Eagle were also available so that they could read about events back home.
It didn’t just serve those who regularly spent time there: the center also hosted weekly lectures by a variety of prominent speakers, ranging from white reformers such as Jane Addams and Mary White Ovington to Black intellectuals such as William Monroe Trotter, Irvine Garland Penn, and the historian Carter G. Woodson.
So even when their supporters’ funds dried up three years into the project, Ida and Ferdinand fought to keep the League open. First, they moved the center to smaller quarters two blocks to the south, at 3005 South State Street. The new building was just a storefront, with a rent of $35 a month (or about $1,000 in modern currency). Ida then found herself a paying job in order to earn the money to support the center.
And that’s how Ida B. Wells-Barnett became Chicago’s first female probation officer.
The job paid $150 a month, a little over four times the rent on the center’s building. And despite the demanding schedule, she was able to juggle doing that job along with her work at the Negro Fellowship League. After working a full day at court, she went to the center until at least eight in the evening. She was willing to sacrifice her own time in order to help these young men get on their feet and successfully transition to life in the city. Being from the South, she knew where they were coming from and realized that all they needed was some support.
Ida held her probation officer post, in addition to her work at the center, for three years. All told, through sheer grit and using some of their own money, she and Ferdinand managed to keep the Negro Fellowship League open for a total of ten years, until 1920. During that time, Ida had helped find jobs for approximately a thousand men and had provided a place to stay for many others who might have otherwise been left to roam the streets.
A white man showed up at the door looking for Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Standing in a long, embroidered dress with a high collar, her hair carefully arranged in a bun atop her head, the short, brown-skinned woman asked what exactly the man wanted. When he told her that he needed to ask about the buttons that he’d heard were being distributed from the Negro Fellowship League office, Ida walked over to a desk in the reading room and social center, which housed a library she’d grown proud of—especially for its “race literature.”
She pulled out a button, then handed it to the man, a reporter from the Herald Examiner. Ida and her husband, Ferdinand, had made buttons to honor soldiers who had been killed by the government. The man eyed it and asked to keep the item.
Ida didn’t mind giving the reporter the button—as far as she was concerned, the more people knew about their existence, the better. It didn’t matter that the reporter had yet to understand why they were made in the first place. Ida could explain that. She was used to explaining.
After their exchange, the reporter did indeed leave with a button. Ida hoped that a story would be written about how the soldiers were being honored. But less than two hours after the reporter left, two different white men came to the office.
What now? Ida thought to herself. It was unusual for white people to show up at the Negro Fellowship League. After all, it was designed mostly for Black men who had migrated from the South and needed a place to stay.
One of the many ways Ida B. Wells engaged with her community was by talking to local newspapers, such as the Herald Examiner, about her projects.
The community space hosted lectures and readings. It was a quiet, studious area. What’s more, it was located in a part of the South Side of Chicago that even some Black people were nervous to visit. What could two other white men possibly want here on the same day?
The men held a picture of the button that Ida had given the Herald Examiner reporter. They asked if she was distributing those buttons. When she said yes, they told her they were Secret Service agents who had been sent out to warn her.
“If you continue to distribute those buttons, you could be arrested,” one of them said.
“On what charge?” she asked.
Ida’s conversation with the reporter had certainly gone better than her exchange with the Secret Service agents. After the Herald Examiner journalist asked to see the buttons, Ida inquired about whether he’d heard what happened with the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry. He said that he had, but he didn’t get what was so upsetting about the matter.
Maybe if the reporter understood, he would agree that the buttons needed to be produced. So even knowing he was short on time, Ida proceeded to tell him: A predominantly Black army unit was sent from New Mexico to guard the construction of Camp Logan on the edge of Houston, Texas. Even though these men were expected to serve their country and fight for democracy abroad, their own country expected them to endure the humiliation of Jim Crow laws. They were met with hostility from racist white police officers, racist civilians, and laws that relegated them to second-class citizenship. The Black soldiers rode in segregated streetcars; the white workers building the camps hated their very presence.
These men were trained to fight. They’d undergone a strict regimen to learn how to protect their country, and that same rigorous preparation inspired them not to show a deferential attitude toward white people. Some white people considered them to be “uppity” and viewed them as a threat. The men were met with disdain, especially from white people who believed that if they treated Black soldiers with respect, then other Black people would expect the same. They couldn’t fathom the existence of Black people with authority. So tensions grew between the Black troops guarding Camp Logan and the people of Houston, especially the police.
And then, on August 23, 1917, a Black soldier witnessed a white police officer, Lee Sparks, attempting to arrest a Black woman. When the soldier defended the Black woman, he was clubbed and then arrested. Corporal Charles W. Baltimore, a Black military policeman, went to find out what happened with the soldier, and an argument broke out. He, too, was beaten. Though he fled, Baltimore was later detained. Things escalated quickly. Rumors swirled. The town erupted into a frenzy. The Black soldiers stationed at Camp Logan heard that a white mob was coming to attack the camp.
Rather than wait like sitting ducks for the vigilantes, dozens of Black soldiers grabbed rifles and headed into downtown Houston against the orders of their superior officers. Over the course of two hours, total chaos ensued as soldiers, police, and local residents became embattled.
It had been a dark, rainy night when all the blood was shed. It was difficult to see anything in the mayhem. As a result, no one could identify the specific soldier who fired the shots that killed Captain J. W. Mattes. And so, in order to save themselves from persecution, seven Black soldiers later agreed to testify against the others in exchange for clemency.
Ultimately, a total of 118 enlisted Black soldiers were arrested, and sixty-three of the soldiers were charged with mutiny. In a mockery of a trial, they were represented by a single lawyer during the first court-martial that was convened. The accused were not even granted a chance to appeal. The soldiers were denied their constitutional rights to due process.
On November 28, 1917, thirteen Black soldiers were found guilty and sentenced to death, including Corporal Baltimore. Two weeks later, on December 11, they were hanged. An additional seven were hanged within weeks after that, and seven others were acquitted, while the rest were sentenced to various prison terms. The bodies of United States soldiers, who had trained to fight for democracy abroad, were unceremoniously thrown into mass graves with each individual identified only by a number from 1 to 13. Afterward, the scaffolding from which they were hanged was burned, too. Not one white person was punished for the travesty. No civilians were ever brought to trial, and the two officers who faced court martial were released.
Ida could not help but think about the injustice of it all. Her stepson, Ferdinand Jr., was in the army. How were he and other Black soldiers supposed to defend a country where they had no rights themselves? How could the United States government execute its own soldiers?
Ida believed that people should protest the injustice that took place in Houston, but she thought nothing would happen unless her Negro Fellowship League organized it. She and her husband, Ferdinand, wanted to hold a memorial service to honor the lives of the men who died, as a small, peaceful way to protest. She called the pastors of several large churches and asked if any of them would allow their sanctuaries to be used for a service. Unfortunately, none of them agreed. She was disappointed—it seemed that the same churches that had urged members to join the war were not brave enough to honor the soldiers who had been murdered by the government.
In 2017, one hundred years after the Houston riot, a marker was placed to commemorate that history.
The pastors seemed afraid. The climate wasn’t just hostile to Black people. Various “citizens’ organizations” had emerged to police whether Americans were “patriotic enough.” At the time, that included Americans of German heritage because the United States was fighting Germany. German-language books were burned. German Americans were fired from their jobs en masse, despite the fact that many were fighting for the United States. If white Americans were persecuting other white people, many African Americans knew they could expect even worse.
Any Black church that protested the soldiers’ execution in Houston could be targeted, even burned down, by these citizens’ organizations, who saw themselves as guardians of patriotism. So no one wanted to support the Barnetts after the Espionage Act of June 1917. Anyone who helped the Barnetts could be said to be interfering with the conduct of the war. This was a vague charge that could be used for anything from being “disloyal” to making false or malicious statements that could hinder the military effort. Anyone found guilty could be fined thousands of dollars or endure a lengthy prison sentence.
Ida took matters into her own hands, quite literally. She created buttons reading “In Memoriam Martyred Negro Soldiers Dec. 11, 1917.” She printed five hundred, then distributed them far and wide. She protested what she considered to be a “legal” lynching of Black soldiers. When she couldn’t secure a space to host the memorial, she decided to sell the buttons to recoup the cost of having them made. She wanted to make sure the soldiers’ deaths did not go unnoticed.
She knew the buttons were controversial, but she felt so strongly about the immorality of what had taken place in Houston that she didn’t care about the backlash that was sure to come.
After all, it was 1917, and, much to Ida B.’s dismay, President Woodrow Wilson was in office. Wilson was a staunch segregationist. His administration even segregated federal employees by race where they had not before: Black and white clerks who worked for the government were forbidden from using the same bathrooms and restaurants. In fact, Ida had visited Wilson at the White House in 1913 to urge him to stop the segregation. Nothing was done. A few years later, the United States officially entered World War I and expected all citizens to show their patriotism and loyalty to the country—even Black citizens who had been denied the full rights imbued to them by the Constitution. Despite centuries of discrimination, thousands of Black men volunteered to join the fight, later joined by thousands more drafted into the army’s ranks (the other branches did not accept Black enlistees at all). The war was seen by many as an opportunity to “earn” equality through service. But the battlefield provided little relief from even the most basic indignities. Black soldiers served in segregated units, watched over exclusively by white commanding officers.
Ida relayed all this to the reporter at her door. She explained that the men were soldiers for the United States Army. They were supposed to defend this country against enemies in other countries. Instead, they were killed by their own government. They didn’t even have a chance to prove their case.
Even when the reporter suggested that the soldiers could have waited instead of taking up arms, Ida was resolute in her conviction. She was emphatic that even if what they had done was wrong, they had not deserved to be killed like that. She encouraged the reporter to take the button and let other people know what this country did to its own citizens. She wanted everyone to know about the crime that had been committed by the government. And it wasn’t the first time this had happened.
At the age of fifty-five, she was probably tired of the chronic injustice. She had already seen too much. The lack of respect for the lives of Black people was embedded in the country’s history, yet she strongly believed that these soldiers needed to be honored for their service.
When the two Secret Service agents told Ida she could be brought up on treason charges, she had a simple reply: “I understand treason to mean giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war. How can the distribution of this little button do that?”
The agents were unmoved. They told her that she should be grateful not to be in a country like Germany, where she would have been shot for that kind of insubordination. They demanded her assurance that she would stop distributing the buttons altogether.
Ida scoffed. She wasn’t going to give up that easily. She had never been one to back down from others’ intimidation. She knew the men’s threats were empty and told them they ought to be very sure of their facts if they wanted to carry out their duties.
Ida B. Wells (circa 1917). She wore and distributed buttons to peacefully bring awareness to the murder of Black soldiers, but even this was viewed as a threat by the Wilson administration.
The shorter man admitted to Ida that they couldn’t arrest her, but they could confiscate her buttons. When he asked where they were, noting that he’d heard she was showing them to a man as the agents arrived, Ida was nonplussed. She said the reporter must have taken the buttons with him.
The agents weren’t satisfied with that answer. They asked her once more to turn over the buttons, reminding her that she had criticized the government.
Ida’s response was characteristically strident: “Yes, and the government deserves to be criticized. I think it was a dastardly thing to hang those men as if they were criminals and put them in holes in the ground just as if they had been dead dogs,” she said. “If it is treason for me to think and say so, then you will have to make the most of it.”
When the shorter man told her that most of her people did not agree with her, she proudly announced, “I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking back what I have said. I would consider it an honor to spend whatever years are necessary in prison as the one member of the race who protested, rather than be with all the 11,999,999 Negroes who didn’t have to go to prison because they kept their mouths shut.”
When the agents told her she ought to consult a lawyer, Ida was amused. Her husband was a lawyer, after all. The two had discussed this possibility as they planned together to distribute the buttons. She knew her rights. The Secret Service agents stared at her in amazement. They left without the buttons, and she was never bothered about them again.
The next day, stories were printed about the incident, spreading word far and wide about what Ida’s buttons were about and where to get them. The FBI later successfully went after Ida’s button printer, warning him to not make any more. Ida wore one of the buttons for many years following this incident because of the significance it held for her. Ida might have suspected then that an FBI file would be created about her in the wake of this incident, but she obviously did not care. If she did, she was right. A file was opened in early 1918.
FBI file 123754
January 2, 1918
Frank G. Clark
Chicago, Illinois
In re Mrs Ida Wells Barnett
Negro Good Fellowship League
3005 S. State Street
At Chicago
Agent called on subject together with Detective Sergeant Bush, Chief Schuttler’s office, Chicago Police Department and told her that Department of Justice wanted her to discontinue sale of buttons. She went into a great deal of detail concerning her right to protest against the recent hanging of the negro soldiers, saying it was the first time this had ever been done without an appeal to the president. She would not give me a definite answer whether she would stop the sale of these buttons or not and she also said she wanted to be brought into court so that she could die for this cause if need be. She added she would see her lawyer and obtain his advice before she would say yes or not to our order to stop this sale.
Called on Sec. Lauterer Co., 322 W. Madison St. and they say they made up 500 buttons and delivered them December 15th. I warned them not to make any further deliveries of the same, and they promised not to take any more orders. I could not locate Mrs. Barnett today, her maid saying she went to the office and the office knew nothing of her whereabouts.
Reported above facts to Mr. Olabaugh.
In Good Company
Ida was hardly the only crusader against injustice who attracted the harsh scrutiny of the FBI. Over the years, the agency has compiled lengthy files on some of the most well-known Black activists, along with other dissenters, including pacifists and labor organizers. Between the 1920s and the 1980s, the FBI and the Justice Department operated in tandem to continuously surveil communities and individuals who were deemed “suspect.” Often, that meant people like Ida—those who witnessed discrimination and violence against their people and refused to stay silent about it. Though there were many others, a small handful of those people include:
A contemporary of Ida’s, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an author, historian, and civil rights activist. The first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard University, he became a professor at Atlanta University. He later led the Niagara Movement, a group that sought equal rights for African Americans. Du Bois was also concerned with the treatment of Black people around the world, and he became a leader of Pan-Africanist thought. Like Ida, he protested lynching, Jim Crow laws, and segregation. Along with hers, his writing remains some of the most influential scholarship on racism, sociology, and Black experiences in the United States.
W. E. B. Du Bois.
A. PHILIP RANDOLPH (1889–1979)
Asa Philip Randolph was a prominent political leader who organized across the country. In 1925, he led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly African American labor union in the country. In the decades after, he protested unfair labor practices, ultimately leading President Franklin D. Roosevelt to pass an executive order banning discrimination in the military and defense industries during World War II. Randolph was also the head of the March on Washington in 1963, the civil rights movement–era action where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Ella Baker played a key role in many of the most impactful civil rights organizations of the 1900s, including the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (which the FBI also tracked). She raised money to fight Jim Crow laws in the South, ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship, and helped organize sit-ins with the student activists at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR. (1908–1972)
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was a Baptist minister who represented the people of Harlem, a New York City neighborhood, in the House of Representatives from 1945 until the year before his death, more than twenty-five years later. Before his congressional tenure, though, Powell fought various social ills using community-organizing strategies: for example, he organized a picket line at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Two years later, he led a bus boycott in Harlem, where, like many cities, Black people were routinely denied jobs despite being most of the passengers.
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (also known as Malcolm X), the American Muslim minister and human rights activist, was the subject of a ten-thousand-page FBI file because of the Nation of Islam’s supposed links to communism, as well as his strident efforts to empower Black people. He was under near-constant surveillance until his assassination in 1965.
Two Very Different Fights
By the time Ida was visited by the FBI, she had already been fighting her personal battle for respect and equality for more than thirty years. It may be hard to imagine over a century later, but by the time 1913 rolled around and Ida was entrenched in the suffrage movement, women had been fighting for the right to vote for over sixty years. Even before the Civil War started in 1861, some middle- and upper-class women, mostly concentrated in the North, had started work to expand the vote to all people. Suffrage organizations came to prominence in the late 1840s, and as time went on, divisions began to emerge among white women, specifically about the prospect of including Black women in their mission.
Ida agreed that gaining the right to vote was important and deserved a fight, but she did not feel optimistic about how much change would come from white women voting. She disagreed with Susan B. Anthony and other white suffragists’ belief that securing the vote for women would also bring a “womanly” influence to government, making it less corrupt and more compassionate. Ida had been around too long and endured too much complicity from white women involved in holding up white supremacy to believe that white women’s votes would fix the ills of the world. As an African American woman who had faced both racism and sexism, she viewed the right to vote as a tool to address race-based oppression, as well as civil and social issues. She knew that southern white women could be expected to support their husbands’ cries of white supremacy. After all, some of them were descendants of slave owners or had benefited from the institution of slavery, so they inherently viewed Black women as inferior. Thus, suffrage extended only to white women would do little to bring on much-needed racial reform.
But as women slowly gained more rights, one state at a time, Ida started to think that Susan B. Anthony was right after all: things might improve when all women won the vote. Despite the quest for the women’s vote, Black women were significantly excluded from white-dominated national suffrage organizations. Locally, Ida founded the Women’s Second Ward Republican Club and was a member of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA). She worked with white women in the efforts to gain suffrage in the state. “When I saw that we were likely to have limited suffrage and the white women were working like beavers to bring it about, I made another effort to get our women interested,” she wrote in her autobiography. Ida wanted to make sure that if white women got the right to vote, Black women did, too.
Two white women worked with Ida to found the first all-Black suffrage club in Illinois: Virginia Brooks, a young member of the IESA, and Belle Squire, president of the No Vote, No Tax League, an organization advocating that women who could not vote should not have to pay taxes. In January 1913, the Alpha Suffrage Club (ASC) was born.
One of the first activities of the Alpha Suffrage Club was to send Ida as president of the club to Washington, DC, to represent them in the suffrage march. It was planned to take place on March 3, 1913, just before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as the twenty-eighth president. Ida was one of more than five thousand women from around the country who gathered in Washington, DC, to march and demand the vote. She arrived in Washington with the sixty-two-member integrated contingent of the Illinois suffragists, who promptly began going over the logistics of their walking four abreast down Pennsylvania Avenue. While they were practicing, the group was informed that the organizers wanted the Black women to march in the back of the parade in order to appease the southern suffragists.
Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks volunteered to walk by Ida’s side in the segregated section of the parade. After announcing that she would not march at all if she was expected to be in the back, she pretended to consent to the offer. The meeting adjourned with a plan on how things would proceed.
The next day, as everyone was lining up for the parade, Ida could not be found. The parade commenced, and no one knew that Ida walked along the sidelines. When the Illinois delegation started to march, suddenly Ida B. emerged from the crowd to march front and center in the group of all-white marchers.
The March 5 issue of the Chicago Tribune ran a large photo of them, standing together, with broad suffrage sashes across their dresses. Each had a satisfied expression on her face. Ida integrated the parade without the consent of its leaders. No one was going to put her in the back—ever.
Soon after the event, the poet and suffragist Bettiola H. Fortson composed a poem titled “Queen of Our Race,” celebrating Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s participation in the historic march.
Ida B. Wells marching with the Illinois delegation, March 3, 1913.
Side by side with the whites she walked,
Step after step the southerners balked,
But Illinois, fond of order and grace,
Stuck to the black Queen of our race.
’Tis true, they’re able at this age to bar,
But justice will soon send the doors ajar
And sit the black and white face to face
There will be seen the Queen of our race.
Page after page in history you’ll read
Of one who was ready and able to lead,
Who set the nation on fire with her pace
And the Heroine will be the Queen of our race.
Unlike the Women’s Second Ward Republican Club, the ASC was nonpartisan and focused on mobilizing Black women throughout the city of Chicago. The club met at the Negro Fellowship League every Wednesday night. Even though she was a busy mother of four, the fifty-one-year-old Ida B. simply could not sit still. She began a newsletter for the organization called the Alpha Suffrage Record, which she edited in addition to the Fellowship Herald newspaper as she continued to write articles about lynching and segregation. She also ran the Negro Fellowship League, held a full-time job as a probation officer, and attended a dizzying number of meetings. There was always a battle to fight and an injustice to address.
In June 1913, the state of Illinois passed a new law that granted women limited suffrage in the state. Under this law, which was the result of lobbying by national and local suffrage organizations and clubs, women were allowed to vote for presidential candidates and local officers. They were not, however, allowed to vote for governor, members of Congress, or state representatives. Soon after the bill was passed in Illinois, suffragists and their daughters marched in a big downtown Chicago parade. Wearing a white dress with a white banner across it that read ALPHA SUFFRAGE, Ida’s nine-year-old daughter Alfreda marched down Michigan Avenue alongside her.
See You in Court
The suffrage march in Washington, DC, wasn’t the first time someone had tried to relegate Ida to a lesser placement. Ida had fought a historic battle in the state of Tennessee almost thirty years earlier. In 1881, the state of Tennessee passed a Jim Crow law specifying that Black and white train passengers ride in separate cars. Ida defied this law and continued to ride to and from the school where she taught in what was called the “ladies’ coach.”
Segregation was enforced sporadically at the time, and Ida rode largely undisturbed for more than two years. That changed on September 15, 1883. Ida rode aboard a train going from Memphis to Woodstock when she was asked to move to the colored car instead of the ladies’ car. Ida felt that was a ridiculous request, as she had purchased a first-class ticket and was riding the train just as she had been doing for years. She decided not to comply.
The conductor tried to drag the twenty-one-year-old Ida from her seat. She wasn’t going to let that happen so easily: as he grabbed her, Ida bit his hand. The angry conductor let go, but he wasn’t finished with her. He went to get two more men to help him remove the petite Ida, who stood no more than five feet tall. As she waged a fierce fight, the other passengers looked on as if the situation were entertainment and actually cheered once she gave up and allowed herself to be removed.
Rather than go into the colored car, Ida exited the train. Her clothes had been torn, and she had been bruised in several places. She knew her father would be proud of how she refused to accept humiliation without a fight. She held back tears as she stood on the side of the railroad tracks, thinking about how no white woman would ever be treated in such a disrespectful and violent way. She was an educated, professional woman who had paid her fare, yet she had been accosted simply because she was a Black woman.
Since she still needed to commute back and forth between Memphis and Woodstock in order to get to her teaching job, she continued riding in the ladies’ car for months. On May 4, 1884, Ida was reading a newspaper in the ladies’ coach when a conductor once more ordered her to move to the “colored” train car. This time she decided to get off the train and immediately visit a lawyer to file a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad. The laws of the time stated that segregated accommodations would be permitted as long as they were separate and equal. Since the colored car doubled as a smoking car where white men were free to smoke and disrespect Black women, she challenged on the grounds that the accommodations were unequal. In addition, she found it particularly insulting that a Black woman who was taking care of white children could ride in the ladies’ car, but she as an educated, professional, adult woman could not.
Ida later wrote about the incident’s larger context in The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature, a text that also included writings from Frederick Douglass, journalist and religious leader Irvine Garland Penn, and her future husband, Ferdinand L. Barnett: “White men pass through these ‘colored cars’ and ride in them whenever they feel inclined to do so, but no colored woman however refined, well-educated or well-dressed may ride in the ladies, or first-class coach, in any of these states unless she is a nurse-maid traveling with a white child.”
She knew she wasn’t alone in facing the wrath of white people who believed her to be a second-class citizen, so she decided to fight back once more. This time there was no biting, but Ida’s effect was certainly felt. At twenty-two years old, Ida B. Wells decided to take on the whole company: the powerful Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad would have to contend with her. She hired the only Black lawyer in Memphis and sued based on the fact that the rail cars were separate and unequal.
An act to establish the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad Company within the Commonwealth of Kentucky (1878). Wells sued the company after being removed from the whites-only “ladies’ car.” It was a success—until the Supreme Court reversed the decision.
Ida didn’t realize it at the time, but the case was much bigger than her. A ruling in her favor would have set a precedent of Black people challenging Jim Crow laws. Young and naïve, she was shocked and hurt to learn that her attorney had been bought off by the railroad.
Still, Ida refused to give up. Though her first attorney sold her out, she decided to press forward with the case. She had no choice but to hire a white attorney and settled on James M. Greer. He did such a great job that on Christmas Eve 1884, the circuit court ruled that the “plaintiff [Wells] was wrongfully ejected from the defendant’s [the railroad’s] car” and that she be awarded five hundred dollars in damages, an amount that was equivalent to almost a year of her teacher’s salary.
The next morning, on Christmas Day, Ida received one of the greatest gifts she could imagine: an article in the Memphis Daily Avalanche about her victory. Even though she probably smarted at the racially insulting reference to her, Ida felt a sense of satisfaction as she saw the headline:
A DARKY DAMSEL OBTAINS A VERDICT FOR DAMAGES AGAINST THE CHESAPEAKE & OHIO RAILROAD—VERDICT FOR $500
At the age of twenty-two she had taken on a powerful railroad and won. This was the first step in what would become her lifelong crusade for justice.
Unfortunately, her joy did not last long. She never could have imagined that Black people would struggle for another eighty years before Jim Crow laws were officially struck down.
Her elation was quickly squashed when a railroad attorney visited her a few days later with news that the company wanted her to back down. They threatened to appeal the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which insulted Ida. She refused to relent, believing that the law would be on her side.
Unfortunately, two years later on April 5, 1887, her case was overturned by the state Supreme Court. Not only did Ida never see the five hundred dollars that had been originally awarded, but she was ordered to pay two hundred dollars in court fees.
This was a stunning blow, both emotionally and financially, as she only earned around sixty dollars a month. The justices had ignored the evidence and had made their decision according to “personal prejudices” against Black people. She felt totally defeated, and the blow led to her disillusionment with the legal system. For Black people in America, there was nowhere to get justice.
On April 11, six days later, Ida wrote in her diary:
The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court in my behalf, last week. Went to see Judge Greer this afternoon & he tells me four of them cast their personal prejudices in the scale of justice & decided in face of all the evidence to the contrary that the smoking car was a first class coach for colored people as provided for by that statue that calls for separate coaches but first class, for the races. I felt so disappointed, because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now if it were possible would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them. O God is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us? Thou hast always fought the battles of the weak & oppressed. Come to my aid at this moment & teach me what to do, for I am sorely, bitterly disappointed. Show us the way, even as Thou led the children of Israel out of bondage into the promised land.
This experience was a turning point in Wells’s life. The decision diminished her faith in the system. She was proud that she had the audacity to stand up for herself and vowed that she would never stop seeking justice.
The Power of the Press
The people must know before they can act and there is no educator to compare with the press.
—Ida B. Wells
Though the legal system had failed Ida, she would never have been content to accept injustice just because one method hadn’t worked. And sure enough, another way clicked.
She would use her voice to fight, through writing. Before experiencing the crushing blow of legal defeat, Ida began her foray into journalism with the Evening Star, the publication of her local lyceum, or literary club. Ever full of charisma, she not only wrote and edited the Evening Star, she also read aloud from its pages every Friday night. Ida’s readings regularly packed the lyceum, including with nonmembers. One local Baptist pastor, a man named R. N. Countee, came to hear Ida read.
Although Ida only regarded writing for the newsletter as a creative outlet, her talent stood out and caught the attention of Rev. Countee. He approached her with an offer to write a weekly column for a larger publication with a broader audience—the Living Way newspaper. The idea excited Ida, even though the opportunity did not pay.
Ida accepted Rev. Countee’s offer. Soon she began writing a column for the Living Way. According to our family stories, Ida had seen her name written on a document, and it looked as if the d was written as two letters: o and l. She liked that different name and decided to use it as a pen name to start her journalism career. “Iola” was born.
In the 1880s, it was extremely rare for a Black woman to write about racial issues. Few women of any race went into journalism. Less than five percent of journalists were women, out of those who worked for the almost two hundred Black-owned newspapers. Now Ida was one of them. Most female journalists of the time—Black and white—wrote on subjects that were considered “women’s topics”: book reviews, school news, fashion, home decorating, or cleaning. Aside from these narrow categories, women journalists were also relegated to writing articles about marriage and children.
But that was never going to work for Ida, and Rev. Countee knew that when he hired her. Ida had strong opinions about everything and believed she had the right to express them. Ida’s primary aim was to write toward justice, not just away from racism. And so in her columns, everyone was fair game for “Iola” to criticize—Black, white, men, women, institutions, ministers, and laypeople. When she believed that Black people who were considered leaders did nothing to help their people, she laid into them.
Iola’s articles were popular and began to spread across the country. A number of Black-owned newspapers, including the Little Rock Sun and the Washington Bee, reprinted them. Several other journals asked her to write articles as well, including the New York Freeman, a major newspaper edited by the civil rights leader T. Thomas Fortune. Despite their immense appreciation for her writing on discrimination, most newspapers could only offer to pay her in free copies of their publication (a struggle that may be all too familiar for those who take up a similar craft today).
Her growing journalism career got a boost once she met Rev. William J. Simmons, editor of the American Baptist. He was visiting Memphis from Kentucky, and said he wanted to meet “the brilliant Iola” after reading and being impressed with several of her articles. He started her on the path to believing she could earn money from her passion when he offered one dollar per week for her work as a correspondent for his newspaper.
Up until that point, she was simply thrilled to be expressing herself through words. She had received rave reviews for her work from the likes of T. Thomas Fortune, who said, “If Iola were a man she would be a humming independent in politics. She has plenty of nerve and is as sharp as a steel trap.”
Men and women alike appreciated her work as she challenged both gender and racial roles. Ida was making a name for herself as a journalist, and to her delight was nicknamed “Princess of the Press.” She enjoyed the attention, even though it came at the price of being judged and evaluated by her looks, sometimes negatively. To this day, the burden of being judged by one’s appearance rather than aptitude or achievement in a professional role is one that women bear.
Even though she enjoyed and was focused on building her journalism career, she also was fashion conscious. In fact, she lusted after having pretty dresses made and obtaining hats and matching parasols. She found herself in debt at times in order to satisfy her desire for fine clothes, and paid for them in installments. In her diary, she fretted about how to obtain the nice things she desired and accounted for all of her expenditures in excruciating detail. She definitely needed to watch every penny, as she was not only taking care of herself but also financially supporting her siblings.
She also wore her hair in its natural state—usually in some updo style—for her entire life. This might not have been considered radical during her time, but in the twenty-first century, we’ve seen a need emerge for legislation that protects Black women’s freedom to wear their hair naturally without discrimination.
In 2020, the state of California passed the CROWN Act, making it illegal for people to be punished for wearing their hair in braids, locs, twists, and other styles that had been deemed “unprofessional.”
The fact that Black women are still judged and sometimes punished for their natural appearance has created an extra burden that requires enormous internal strength to overcome within American society. In recent years, though, many artists have created works that promote self-love despite these hurdles. The director Matthew A. Cherry’s animated short film, Hair Love, took home an Oscar at the 2020 ceremony, the award a monumental win for Cherry and his team—but also for the young Black girls who watched the delightful ode to natural kinks and curls.
Ida’s words didn’t just reach broad audiences, though. They also helped her navigate a life that was growing increasingly complicated. Indeed, changing circumstances in Ida’s teaching career—the one she’d known much of her adult life—were making her deeply unhappy. She knew that journalism, and its power to affect people beyond her, was what she most wanted to do.
Ida’s frustrations came to a head on her twenty-fifth birthday. In a journal entry that night, she wrote:
This morning I stand face to face with twenty five years of life, that ere the day is gone will have passed by me forever. The experiences of a quarter of a century of life are my own, beginning with this, for me, new year. Already I stand upon one fourth of the extreme limit (100 years), and have passed one third of the span of life which, according to Psalmist, is allotted to humanity. As this day’s arrival enables to me to count the twenty fifth milestone, I go back over them in memory and review my life. The first ten are so far away, in the distance as to make those at the beginning indistinct; the next 5 are remembered as a kind of butterfly existence at school, and household duties at home; within the last ten I have suffered more, learned more, lost more than I ever expect to, again. In the last decade, I’ve only begun to live—to know life as a whole with its joys and sorrows. Today I write these lines with a heart overflowing with thankfulness to My Heavenly Father for His wonderful love & kindness; for His bountiful goodness to me, in that He has not caused me to want, & that I have always been provided with the means to make an honest livelihood. And as I rehearse these measures my soul is singing the glad refrain “Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me, Bless His Holy Name for all His benefits.” When I turn to sum up my own accomplishments I am not so well pleased. I have not used the opportunities I had to the best advantage and find myself intellectually lacking. And accepting my regret that I am not so good a Christian as the goodness of my Father demands, there is nothing for which I lament the wasted opportunities as I do my neglect to pick up the crumbs of knowledge that were within my reach. Consequently I find myself at this age as deficient in a comprehensive knowledge as the veriest school-girl just entering the higher course. I heartily deplore the neglect. God grant I may be given firmness of purpose sufficient to essay & continue its eradication! Thou knowest I hunger & thirst after righteousness & knowledge. O, give me the steadiness of purpose, the will to acquire both. Twenty-five years old today! May another 10 years find me increased in honesty & purity of purpose & motive!
Ida spent the next few years writing articles that had a broad reach because they were reprinted in many newspapers. She became so well-known for her writing about racial discrimination that she was unanimously elected convention secretary at the 1889 meeting of the Afro-American Press Convention in Washington, DC.
There she met several renowned Black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man who had become the nineteenth century’s most famous spokesman for the rights of African Americans. He was born in Maryland around 1817 and had escaped north as a young man. Douglass was a formidable man: he published a famous and powerful autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; began the antislavery newspaper the North Star; and turned his New York home into a station on the Underground Railroad, the lifesaving network of hiding places for escaped slaves.
Frederick Douglass’s the North Star (1848). Douglass was impressed by Wells, and he encouraged her writing and played a hand in her later overseas speaking opportunities.
Ida was incredibly flattered by the encouragement of Douglass, who said he admired her, even though she was about forty-five years his junior—young enough to be his granddaughter.
Since the appetite grows for what it feeds on, the desire came to own a paper.
—Ida B. Wells
Shortly after the convention, Ida was invited to become editor for the Free Speech and Headlight, a Black-owned newspaper in Memphis with a large circulation. The paper was created through a merger of the Free Speech, by Rev. Taylor Nightingale of Memphis, and the Marion Headlight, by J. L. Fleming from Marion, Arkansas. The two men had different strengths. Nightingale led the largest Black congregation in the state, and Fleming was an established publisher who had fled from Marion after some white bigots threatened him. But the men needed an editor, and Ida B. Wells had the skills and the following they were looking for.
Ida was ecstatic about the opportunity. The only holdup was that she wanted to be in on the business deal, too. Once she scraped up the money to buy a one-third ownership share, she became one of the few women in the country to be both editor and owner of a newspaper.
Naturally, Ida had big plans for the paper. But first things first: she thought the paper’s name was too long. Now simply the Free Speech, Ida B.’s paper wasted no time in publishing articles and opinion pieces that caused controversy. She was direct in her criticism and exposure of the truth around her. Ida’s direct and descriptive style made Mr. Fleming nervous. After all, he’d already been run out of one town. Why risk another? Rev. Nightingale grew uncomfortable with some of her pieces, too: he needed to convince many white and Black businessmen to buy advertising space in order to keep the paper running.
She was so bold and determined to expose every form of inequality that she even had the audacity to criticize the Memphis school system—her only source of full-time income. She wrote about the vast differences in pay, resources, and teaching environments between white and Black schools. As a result, she was out of a job.
She needed to decide what to do with her life. Rather than look for another job, from that day forward she worked for herself. She threw herself into working full time to grow the newspaper. She continued her newspaper work undeterred—especially in the face of a devastating loss.
As she was selling subscriptions for the Free Speech in Natchez, Mississippi, tragedy struck close to home in March 1892. She didn’t learn about it until she returned to Memphis and was met with the distressing news that three of her friends had been lynched. Even then, she never wavered in her commitment to exposing unjust horrors, even the ones that cut deepest for her.
The Birth of an Activist
Nearly everyone around Memphis knew Thomas Moss. A diligent man, he co-owned the People’s Grocery with two other men, in an area called “the Curve” because of the sharp turn the streetcar line made at that point. His partners, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart, worked in the grocery during the day, while Tommie went there on Sundays and at night. Although the Curve was a predominantly Black neighborhood, a white grocery store owner named William Barrett had enjoyed a monopoly among the area’s shoppers before the Black-owned store opened. Once the People’s Grocery gave him competition, he decided to eliminate the threat to his business. Fuming, he plotted and schemed.
One day, some young boys, both Black and white, got into an argument over a game of marbles near the People’s Grocery. When the argument grew into a fight, the boys’ fathers were incensed. Barrett decided to stir up further trouble, claiming that the People’s Grocery had caused a riot in the neighborhood. He tried to have the store’s owners arrested. That didn’t work, so he continued to devise a plan on how to get rid of the enterprising men. He seethed about these three Black men who owned a prospering business. On March 5, 1892, rumors spread that Barrett was concocting a way to destroy Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. Within a week, the mob would take much more from the men and from the community who loved them.
Tommie and his partners consulted a lawyer, who told them that Memphis police could not protect them because the Curve was outside the city limits. That night, the men tried to defend themselves: they had several armed men on guard in the back of the store to protect their lives and property. Determined to destroy them, Barrett lied to the Shelby County sheriff and told him that criminals were hiding in the People’s Grocery. He knew that would get him the power needed to wreak havoc on the grocers.
The sheriff deputized ordinary citizens to handle the situation. Barrett and several other men stormed the People’s Grocery at eleven o’clock on Saturday night. They were dressed in ordinary clothes and didn’t identify themselves in any way. Thinking they were being robbed, Moss, McDowell, and Stewart defended themselves and shot at the intruders. Three of them were wounded, and the rest ran off. There was no way the grocery owners could have guessed that the men who barged into the store were “deputies.” The next morning the white newspapers, as well as Memphis authorities, were already twisting the truth about what happened and painting the three model citizens as the aggressors. There was a strongly worded implication that there would be harsh consequences if any of the temporary “law officers” died.
The community was abuzz with news of the shooting, and police descended upon the Curve. Everyone in the community was treated as a suspect. Dozens of Black people were arrested. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart turned themselves in because they truly believed that the facts would prove they acted in self-defense. After all, their store had been broken into in the middle of the night by people who never identified themselves as members of law enforcement. What else were they supposed to do but defend their property?
As the day wore on, white men felt emboldened to threaten to lynch the men, who they branded as criminals. Tension filled the air and the Black community was on edge as fear about what could happen increased. In order to provide protection for the now-prisoners, the Tennessee Rifles, which was a Black militia unit—like a National Guard today—stood guard at the jail for two days until there was an announcement on Tuesday that the three men who were shot would in fact live. The Tennessee Rifles left, thinking the prisoners would be safe.
But despite the fact that no one died, the white mob decided that the three Black store owners should still be lynched because they had the audacity to shoot at white men. They needed to get rid of the “uppity” Negroes and teach all Black people a lesson. On the evening of Tuesday, March 9, a mob entered the jail (they were probably let in, as there was no sign of a break-in) and dragged Moss, McDowell, and Stewart out of their cells. They were taken by railcar about a mile north of Memphis city limits and tortured before they were killed.
McDowell’s eyes were gouged out and the fingers of his right hand were shot off. Shortly before all three men were riddled with bullets, Thomas Moss begged for his life for the sake of his wife, daughter, and unborn baby. When he realized that it was hopeless, he said, “Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here.” His last words would turn out to be a rallying cry for the Black community.
The bodies of the three dead men were left in an open field. Anticipating outrage from the African American community, a judge of the criminal court advised the sheriff to intimidate people at the Curve. They were instructed to shoot anybody who appeared to be making trouble—which really meant anybody seen.
Inflamed and ready for more killing, the mob went to the Curve looking for anyone to shoot. Everyone in the neighborhood stayed indoors to avoid a likely death. Having nothing else to do, the mob shot into the air in frustration, then headed for the People’s Grocery, where they completely decimated the store of all the food, drinks, and other goods. By the time they finished, there was barely a trace of the neat store that the three Black men had once owned.
Ida knew that all three grocery store owners, men she had called friends, were upstanding citizens. They had committed no crime at all. Ida later wrote in her autobiography: “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’ ” Her grief turned into anger, and she vowed that the Free Speech would battle the lynchers and the people who “looked the other way.” She wouldn’t rest until the world knew the truth. She knew that she had the ability to make people react based on her words. And she vowed to somehow make the perpetrators pay for the deaths of her friends. And she wanted to make sure the rest of the country knew what had happened in Memphis.
Through the distribution of her newspaper, and having her story be picked up in other publications, she hoped that the truth of domestic terrorism would help put a stop to lynching. No one deserved to die because they had the wherewithal to open and run a successful business. She picked up her pen and wrote an editorial that appeared in her newspaper a few days after the murders:
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. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order was rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protest our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.
The impact of the article, combined with the last dying words of Thomas Moss, resonated with the Black people who were fed up with chronic oppression and terror. Hundreds packed up, abandoned property, and left Memphis behind. There was a mass exodus that predated the Great Migration, the journey that six million Black people would take decades later. Several ministers, including R. N. Countee and Rev. W. A. Brinkley, convinced most of their congregations to leave the city. People left by train, wagon, or even on foot. Some went just across the river to Arkansas, others went to the Oklahoma Territory or as far west as California. Moss’s widow, Betty, eventually left after she gave birth to their son, who she named Thomas Moss Jr. Everyone wanted to live in a place free of fear.
Ida wanted the white community to feel the consequences for the destruction of life and property. She felt that those who did and said nothing in the face of such violence against Black people were just as guilty as those who had committed the murders. Knowing that Black people had almost no rights to vote and only limited ownership of business, she urged the Memphis folks who could not leave the city to leverage their economic power. Ida encouraged them to boycott the streetcars and white-owned businesses. She had the social savvy, emotional fortitude, and skill set to make an impact on the community. With her scathing newspaper articles, she did just that. Although she ultimately faced death threats, the loss of her paper, and exile from the South, Ida knew her parents would be proud of how she used her voice to speak up against injustice and challenge a system of oppression.