Ida B. Wells

Hillary and Chelsea

Over a century before the 2017 Women’s March, there was the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade. The day before the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson, more than five thousand women converged on Washington, D.C., to march for the right to vote. At the front of the procession was white suffragist and lawyer Inez Milholland, dressed in white, astride a white horse. At the back of the parade was a group of black women, including the twenty-two founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. But Ida B. Wells, a sorority member who had brought several members of the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago to march that day, was not with them.

Over the weeks prior, the parade’s organizers, including twenty-eight-year-old Alice Paul from New Jersey, had been quietly discouraging black women from marching in the parade at all, worrying that their inclusion would alienate Southern politicians who might otherwise support the cause of suffrage. Understandably, that did not sit well with Ida. When she was told that the members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority should march at the back of the parade, she made it very clear: She would not take part unless her group could march with the rest of the Illinois delegation near the front. On the day of the parade, defying the white suffragist leaders, that’s exactly what Ida did. “When white suffragists told her to march at the back of the line, she went straight to the front,” recounted historian Alexis Coe on the podcast No Man’s Land. “And she organized one of the first black women’s clubs to fight for enfranchisement.”

Ida B. Wells did not bear injustice quietly; instead, she fought against it with all her might. At barely five feet tall, she is among the most courageous women the United States has ever seen. She was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, three years before the end of the Civil War. At sixteen, she lost both parents and her brother to a yellow fever epidemic. To support the rest of her siblings, she dropped out of high school, moved to Memphis, and became a teacher by lying about her age. She finished school herself at night and on weekends.

When she was twenty-one years old, Ida bought a first-class train ticket to get from Memphis to her teaching job in nearby Woodstock, Tennessee. When the train conductor came to punch tickets, he told her she was in the wrong car. She knew exactly which car she was in; it was not the wrong one. He insisted that she move to the blacks-only carriage. And when he “tried to drag me out of the seat,” Wells wrote in her autobiography, “I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand.”

That incident sparked the beginning of Ida’s career as a journalist. She took the railroad company to court and won five hundred dollars in damages, which would be a little over twelve thousand dollars today. Three years later, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision and charged the court costs to Ida. Furious at the court’s verdict, she wrote about the incident in a local newspaper, the Living Way. Her account gained national attention, and in 1887, the National Afro-American Press Convention heralded her as the most prominent reporter of the American black press.

In 1891, she was fired from her teaching job for publishing editorials exposing the poor conditions of segregated black schools. The next year, Ida’s life again changed forever after the lynching of three of her close friends—Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Will Stewart—who owned a grocery store that competed for customers and profits with a white grocery store in the same community. By the late 1880s, after over twenty years of black men voting in elections, winning elections, and joining the police force, some white Memphians were determined to reassert white supremacy and rule.

Her horror and anger following her friends’ murders inspired Ida to write about lynching. Her reporting took her to some of the most dangerous parts of the country for a black woman, where she told the stories of victims of racial violence and published their names so they would not be forgotten. She wrote her stories for the newspaper she co-owned, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight.

When eight black men were lynched in one week across the South in 1892, Ida published—under a pseudonym to protect herself—an editorial challenging the old, offensive canard that whites were justified in lynching black men because white women were attracted to them. The white papers responded by attacking the editorial’s author. One paper ominously warned: “There are some things the Southern white man will not tolerate.”

“If this work can… arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.”

—IDA B. WELLS, AFTER FLEEING MEMPHIS

Ida’s anti-lynching editorials were met with death threats against her across the South, and a white mob destroyed her newspaper office. Even after that, she published, under her own name, Southern Horrors and The Red Record, pamphlets that called out lynching for what it was: racial violence intended to suppress the economic and political progress of black Americans.

She moved to Chicago in 1894 and married Ferdinand Barnett, Illinois’s first black assistant state’s attorney and the editor of the city’s first black paper, the Chicago Conservator. Throughout their life together, Ferdinand cooked dinner for the family most nights, and cared for the children, though his own job was demanding. It’s clear that he recognized the importance of Ida’s voice in speaking out against racism and other injustices.

While in Chicago, Ida helped create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded the first black women’s suffrage association in the United States, and started the first kindergarten for black children in Chicago. She continued to call out white suffragists and politicians for their racism and exclusionist views about blacks and immigrants. And she fought for equal education for black children and young people, a free press, women’s rights, civil rights, and against lynching.

Ida knew lynching wasn’t only a Southern crime. After years of intense activism by Ida and others, the governor of Illinois signed anti-lynching legislation in 1905. But in 1909, a mob in Cairo, Illinois, lynched William James after he had been charged with the rape and murder of a white woman. The mob then stormed a local jail and lynched Henry Salzner, a white man accused of murdering his wife. Under pressure from Ida as well as the recently formed NAACP and other civil rights leaders—and likely with new urgency in reaction to the white victim—the Illinois governor enforced a provision in the 1905 anti-lynching law that any officers who didn’t protect their prisoners would lose their jobs.

In December 2018, nearly ninety years after Ida died, the United States Senate unanimously—and finally—passed legislation making lynching a federal crime. Before that point, Congress had considered more than two hundred anti-lynching bills and passed none. It is certainly progress—long overdue—and, as of mid-2019, the House of Representatives is expected to pass their own equally strong version of the bill.

Ida probably would have agreed with nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber’s description of politics as “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Despite all she had seen and experienced, however, she refused to become cynical or give up on the possibility of progress. Near the end of her life, in 1930, she ran for the Illinois state senate—before black women were permitted to vote in most states.

In her lifetime, Ida fought tirelessly against white supremacy and for freedom of the press. She began a legacy carried on by journalists and advocates who are holding the powerful accountable just as she did and proving that, in Ida’s words, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” And after a ten-year crowdfunding effort, Ida’s great-granddaughter Michelle Duster recently announced that she had successfully raised enough money to commission a statue honoring Ida near her former home in Chicago. “You can’t just gloss over history,” Michelle said. “She was called fearless. I don’t believe that she had no fear. I believe she had fear and she decided to keep going forward.”