Ida B. Wells (1862–1931,) fully Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, née Wells, was an American investigative journalist, educator, and social reformer. A pioneer in the civil rights movement, she was a prominent suffragist and anti-lynching activist. She used her platform as a newspaper editor to decry racial inequality in the late 19th century.
Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to slave parents, she became a teacher before turning to journalism, writing for black-owned newspapers under the pseudonym Iola. In 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court rescinded a Circuit Court verdict. It ruled against Wells in litigation she had brought against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for being removed from her seat after declining to give it up for a seat in a “colored only” car.
Wells led an anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s. In 1895, she married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, the editor of the Chicago Conservator. She was an active campaigner against lynching and chronicled crimes in a pamphlet entitled Southern Horrors (1892.)
Wells was one of two women who signed a demand to institute the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP.) On her own, she founded the Negro Fellowship League (1910,) which assisted newly arrived migrants from the South. Her Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago (1813) was the first black woman suffrage organization.
Wells’s autobiography is Crusade for Justice (1970.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ida B. Wells
One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.
—Ida B. Wells
Topics: Justice
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