35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a formidable force in the battle for equality and economic parity for Blacks. Her scathing editorials denouncing lynchings and other white violence against Blacks alerted the country to the atrocities common in the post-Reconstruction South. This "crusader for justice," as she was called, spent her life lecturing against discrimination and persecution, and she exhorted Blacks to use their economic power to change racist white behavior. 

Wells-Barnett was born a slave in Mississippi, in 1862, to a family with a strong faith in education. They were all emancipated by the Civil War. Her mother and father were able to use their respective skills in cooking and carpentry to provide for eight children. Then her parents and youngest brother died of yellow fever in 1878, after which the young teenager dropped out of high school to begin teaching so she could care for her siblings. Wells-Barnett later moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she lived with an aunt and continued to raise her two youngest sisters. While maintaining her teaching job, she furthered her own education in summer school at Fisk University, in what turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong quest for equality. 

In 1884, Wells-Barnett refused to accept a seat in a smoke-filled Jim Crow car and was forcefully removed from the ladies section. She filed a successful lawsuit in the circuit court against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company, but the ruling, with its $500 award, was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. This event gave her the impetus to seek justice through other means. Her militant actions, along with some editorials she wrote that were critical of inadequate African-American schools, caused her to lose her teaching job. 

Wells-Barnett, under the pen name Iola, launched a full-time career using her mighty pen to call the country to task for its treatment of Blacks. After editing several small Black papers, Wells-Barnett became part-owner of The Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis paper. In 1892, three Black men who were her friends, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Steward, were lynched because their grocery business was competing with a white firm. Wells-Barnett fired off a series of blistering editorials, accusing whites of using lynchings to punish financially independent African Americans. She declared, "The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself from 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." 

She called for Blacks to leave the towns that refused to protect them. Many followed her advice, while others staged a boycott of white establishments. In response, furious white citizens burned down her paper's presses and threatened her life if she returned to the South. She was in Philadelphia at the time of the backlash, and returning to Memphis was not an option. Perhaps the best-kept secret of the postbellum "chivalrous" South is that Black women, as well as Black men, were being lynched. Had Wells returned, she certainly would have been killed. 

Wells-Barnett transferred her talents to New York, continuing her angry attacks on lynching in the pages of militant journalist T. Thomas Fortune's New York Age. She published pamphlets on the lynching problem and traveled to Britain to drum up international outrage. 

Wells-Barnett relocated to Chicago in 1893, where she published a pamphlet titled "The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition," which denounced the exclusion of Blacks from the acclaimed World's Fair. Two years later, she married the founder of the Chicago Conservator newspaper, attorney Ferdinand Barnett, with the intention of settling into a quiet family life. They nurtured four children, but Wells-Barnett could not turn her back on the critical social issues of the time: the oppression of American Blacks and women. She and Jane Addams prevented the creation of segregated schools in Chicago. Wells-Barnett openly opposed Booker T. Washington's practices of accommodation, such as limiting Black education to trade courses. 

This tireless crusader helped form and worked with many important groups, including the Ida B. Wells Club and the Negro Fellowship League. Wells-Barnett was also instrumental in creating the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and making antilynching legislation its focus. She may have been unable to save her three friends in Memphis from a mob, but she dedicated her life to bringing the racial holocaust to a stop. In the case of Steve Green, she personally saved him from extradition to Arkansas where a lynching probably awaited him.
 

Wells-Barnett supported existing organizations for women's suffrage. Yet, she had no qualms about holding those groups to proper standards of racial equality. During a march in Washington, D.C., organized by the National American Women Suffrage Association in 1913, she would not walk in the rear where Black delegates were assigned. In addition to forging beneficial relationships with feminist groups, she assisted in founding the National Association of Colored Women as well as the Alpha Suffrage Club for Black women, the first suffrage organization in the nation. 

In 1930, Wells-Barnett ran for the Illinois State legislature, becoming one of the first women to run for political office in America. Her powerful voice was silenced on March 25, 1931, when she died of uremic poisoning. She remains a jewel in the crown of the struggle for equality.

From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.