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The Story of Civil Rights Activist Ida B. Wells-Lynn Kellogg

February 22, 2021

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Recognizing Black History Month, and so many efforts in play to raise awareness of racial injustice and inspire action, my mind went to Ida B. Wells. One Christmas my husband gave me the book “Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America”. The lead story was about Ida B. Wells.

This column is lifted from the many historical stories and biographies focused on her efforts. Research her if you haven’t before, her accomplishments came at a dizzying pace.

She was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi to enslaved parents, James and Lizzie Wells. They were decreed free by the Emancipation Proclamation about six months after Ida’s birth. Living in Mississippi, they faced racial prejudices and restrictions by discriminatory rules and practices.

Wells’ parents were active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction. Her father James was involved with the Freedman’s Aid Society and helped start Shaw University, a school for newly freed enslaved people. It was at Shaw that Wells received her early schooling.

At the age of 16, yellow fever took both parents and a baby brother. The oldest of the seven remaining Wells children, Ida was left to care for her siblings. Ever resourceful, she convinced a nearby country school administrator that she was 18 and got a job as a teacher.

In 1882, she moved with her sisters to Memphis to live with an aunt and continued her education at Fisk University in Nashville.

As Wells began to write about issues of race and politics in the South, a number of her articles were published in black newspapers and periodicals. She eventually became owner  of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight covering incidents of racial segregation and inequality.

It was on a fateful train ride from Memphis to Nashville, in 1883 or 1884, I’ve read both, she reached a personal turning point that resulted in her activism.

She’d purchased a ticket in the first-class ladies’ car. Shortly after leaving Memphis, the conductor told her she’d have to move to the crowded, dirty smoking car, which also served as the “Negro car”. She refused, referencing her ticket.

The conductor went to get two other men and they succeeded in dragging her out with vocal support from the white ladies. She sued the railroad, winning a $500 settlement in circuit court which was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court.

A subsequent lynching in Memphis further incensed Wells. Three Black men had set up a grocery which drew customers away from a white-owned store in the neighborhood. The three men were lynched.

Wells began writing more articles. Putting her own life at risk, she spent two months traveling the South, gathering information on other lynching incidents. When out of town, a mob stormed her newspaper and destroyed all equipment. She was warned she’d be killed if she returned.

In 1893, Wells published “A Red Record”, a personal examination of lynchings in America. Wells saidmost Americans outside the south didn’t realize the growing rate of violence during Reconstruction. She lectured abroad  to drum up support for her cause among reform-minded white people.

Her efforts were funded and supported by famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass and lawyer and editor Ferdinand Barnett. She married Ferdinand Barnett in 1895 and moved to Chicago where Barnett founded The Chicago Conservator,the first black newspaper in Chicago. Ida became editor.

They had four children of their own, in addition to two from Barnett’s first marriage. Their daughter, Alfreda, said the two had “like interests” and that their journalist careers were “intertwined”.

Wells went on to establish several civil rights organizations and is considered a founding member of the NAACP. Her establishment of Chicago’s first kindergarten prioritizing Black children shows how her public activism and personal life connected.

 Her great-great granddaughter Michelle Duster notes, “When her older children started getting of school age, then she realized that black children did not have the same kind of educational opportunities…And so, her attitude was, ‘Well since it doesn’t exist, we’ll create it ourselves.’”

Wells shared the stage with speakers of repute Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. Douglass called her “Brave woman!”.

In her words, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them….Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”.  

Amen.

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