In January, the Mattel Toy Company announced it was creating a doll to honor Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). Perhaps this will trigger more interest in Wells, an under 5-foot-tall teacher, journalist, suffragist and fearless civil rights activist.

Born into Mississippi slavery during the second year of the Civil War, Wells was introduced to hardship at age 16 when her parents and infant brother died in a yellow-fever epidemic. Convincing a school administrator that she was 18, Wells worked as a teacher and cared for her five younger siblings.

Wells moved to Memphis and became a journalist. Her activist career began in 1884 when she was ordered to move from a first-class ladies’ car to a smokers’ car (for Black people) despite having a first-class ticket. When she refused to leave, the conductor forcibly removed her as she fastened her teeth to the back of his hand. Wells sued the railroad and was awarded $500 by a circuit court, a local newspaper headline reading: “Darky damsel gets damages.” The decision was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Wells began writing about race and politics in the South, often using the pseudonym “Lola.” As part owner of two Memphis newspapers, Wells began a systematic study of lynching — the public killing of individuals who have not received due process. As a consequence of her outspoken editorials, The Journalist, a mainstream trade publication covering the media, called Wells “The Princess of the Press.” The New York Times was not as kind, referring to Wells in August 1894 as “a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress.” Her well-written, hard-hitting articles appeared in over 200 African American weeklies in the U.S. and newspapers abroad.

Wells challenged the stereotype used to justify lynching, that Black men were sexually assaulting and raping white women. In the first ever systemic study of these brutal murders, she found that in two-thirds of the cases, the victims were not accused of raping white females and in numerous instances, there had been a consensual interracial relationship.

Wells viewed lynching as a violent form of subjugation — “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘the n***** down.'” In the introduction to “Southern Horrors,” her groundbreaking work on lynching, Wells stated: “Somebody must show that the African American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen to me to do so.”

This view of lynching was influenced by an especially repulsive Memphis incident. A party of six White men (including a deputy sheriff) was greeted by a volley of bullets as they moved upon a Black-owned grocery store — the “Peoples Grocery” — that was successfully competing with a nearby white-owned business. Over 100 white men were deputized to put down what a local newspaper called a rebellion by armed Black people.

The three Black men who owned and worked at the store were arrested and jailed pending a trial. In the early morning hours of March 9, 1892, a mob took the jailed men from their cells to a rail yard north of the city and shot them dead.

After Wells wrote a series of scathing articles condemning the Memphis lynching, a mob stormed her newspaper and destroyed the printing equipment. Had Wells been present, she would undoubtedly have been wounded or killed. In 1895, she published the “Red Record,” the first statistical record of lynching in this country.

Wells was disappointed and angry that churches ignored the horror of lynching. In her autobiography, “Crusade For Justice,” she wrote that “American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of Black ones from burning in fires kindled by white Christians.”

By age 31 in 1893, Wells was lecturing in cities across the country (outside the South), at times sharing the stage with Susan B. Anthony and the elderly Frederick Douglass. Her presentations were well received, one newspaper reporting that Wells “spoke for two hours, without manuscript, holding the undivided attention of her audience.”

With a Jim Crow racial caste system in the South, Supreme Court-sanctioned segregation nationwide and a violent Ku Klux Klan, Wells was a frequent target of racist taunts and threats. A Chicago newspaper she was affiliated with received the following letter: “Lee Walker; colored man, accused of raping a white woman, in jail here, will be taken out and burned tonight. Can you send Miss Ida Wells to write it up?”

Pursued by a long list of suitors, Wells married Ferdinand Barnett, a Chicago lawyer and newspaper owner in 1895. In an atypical marital arrangement of that time, Ferdinand often cooked dinner and cared for their four children while Ida was making speeches and organizing events.

Although Wells helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, she is not listed as an official founder. Wells was critical of the new organization’s white and elite African-American leadership and its moderate stance on race issues. After the NAACP voted down her motion to make lobbying for anti-lynching laws a priority she severed ties with the organization.

In 1913, Wells was invited to march in a Washington D.C. suffrage parade along with other members of Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club, an organization of Black women she founded. Because the National American Woman Suffrage Association feared alienating southern white women, Wells was told she would have to march at the tail-end of the parade with other Black suffragists. She refused and waited on the sidewalk until the Chicago contingent of white suffragists appeared and joined them.

Wells’s philosophy of life is aptly summarized in a statement related to her anti-lynching crusade: “One had better die fighting for justice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.” In 2020, Ida B. Wells was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on … violence against African Americans during the age of lynching.”

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George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale.

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Sources:

Dickerson, D. (2018) “Ida B. Wells” New York Times, www.nytimes.com

Giddings, P. (accessed 2022) “A Noble Endeavor: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Suffrage,” National Parks Service, www.nps.gov

Gore-Schiff, K. (2005) Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed America, Hyperion: New York

“Ida B. Wells” (accessed 2022) National Parks Service, www.nps.gov

Jackson, A. (2020) “The Alpha Suffrage Club and Black women’s fight for the vote,” September 8, Jstor Daily, www.dailyjstor.org

McElvaine, R. (2020) “Outrageous slurs against women of color have a long history,” August 15, Daily Kos, www.dailykos.com

Northwood, A. (2017) “Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” National Women’s History Museum,

www.womenshistory.org

Smith, D. (2018) “Ida B. Wells: the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement, April 27, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com

Wells, I. (1970) Crusade for Justice, University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London

“What are lynchings?” (accessed 2022) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, https://naacp.org