Black History Snippet--Ida B. Wells

Black History Profile:

Ida. B. Wells (1862-1931)

--though born in slavery and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation AND the 13th Amendment, living in Mississippi was extremely harsh due to the Black Codes all southern (and some northern) states enacted

--Wells received her schooling at Shaw University as a child, but dropped out at 16 when both her parents and one sibling died of yellow fever; she obtained a job teaching--claiming she was 18

--at 22, on a train ride to Nashville, even though she'd bought a first-class ticket, she was forcibly removed and thrown into the "black car"--she bit the hand of one of the men who threw her off the train; she sued and won $500, but the win was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court--ordering her to pay court costs

--this sparked her to write about the injustices of race in the south; eventually becoming the owner of three Memphis newspapers

--while campaigning against the squalid conditions in black schools, she was fired from several teaching jobs for her stances

--in 1892, three African-American men—Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart—set up a grocery store in Memphis. Their new business drew customers away from a white-owned store in the neighborhood, and the white store owner and his supporters clashed with the three men on a few occasions. One night, Moss and the others guarded their store against attack and ended up shooting several of the white vandals. They were arrested and brought to jail, but they didn't have a chance to defend themselves against the charges—a lynch mob took them from their cells and murdered them

--the Memphis police refused to investigate and Ida's pleas fell on deaf ears, so she went on a crusade to bring attention to lynching deaths, cataloging them and publishing them in her newspaper; after she published the stories AND the names of the lynch-men, a mob stormed her offices, destroying them and threatened her death if she returned to Memphis

--In 1898, Wells brought her anti-lynching campaign to the White House, leading a protest in Washington, D.C., and calling for President William McKinley to make reforms--showing proof that most lynching were a direct result of blacks competing with whites, rather than being based on criminal acts

--lynching became her platform and she documented every known case she could find--discovering around 3500 known cases in 33 years

--called out numerous racist women's organizations, including the Women's Temperance Christian Union (a 200,000 member "anti-racism" suffrage group) for the comments made about black people and their fight to gain white women suffrage, but not black women

--considered a founding member of the NAACP, she left because she felt the organization lacked action-based initiatives--and was deliberately excluded by W.E.B. DuBois

--as part of her work with the National Equal Rights League, called for President Woodrow Wilson to put an end to discriminatory hiring practices for government jobs and was a fierce advocate of women's suffrage

--a leading proponent of the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill, which proposed fines and jail-time for offenders--it failed along with 200 other attempts to stop lynching

--after a lifetime of fighting, Ida B. Well died mid-sentence while writing her autobiography; succumbing to kidney failure

--"I'd rather go down in history as one lone negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking back what I said."

Ida. B Wells