Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a tireless advocate for African American rights, spearheading the antilynching movement in the turbulent decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Her indefatigable efforts extended to education, social services, and women's suffrage, alongside her crusade against racial violence. Ida B. Wells's life was marked by her tenacity and her unyielding fight against injustice.

Early Life

Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in 1862, the eldest of eight children. Her parents, both of mixed racial heritage, had learned trades during slavery, which they continued after the Civil War. A devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1878 claimed the lives of her parents and youngest sibling, thrusting the sixteen-year-old Ida into the role of breadwinner for her family. She refused offers to separate her siblings among relatives and instead became a schoolteacher, having been educated at the Freedmen’s School in Holly Springs, now known as Rust College. Despite her young age, Ida successfully passed the teacher's exam for rural county schools by pretending to be eighteen. She worked tirelessly, teaching during the week and making the six-mile journey home on weekends. Her teaching career later took her to Memphis, where she secured a better-paying position, and eventually to California and Missouri in 1886.

Ida’s activism was sparked in 1884 when she was forcibly removed from the ladies’ car of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad for refusing to sit in the racially segregated smoking car. She sued the railroad and initially won $500 in damages, only to have the decision overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which also ordered her to pay court costs.

Rise to Activism

While in Memphis, Wells engaged in a weekly lyceum with fellow black schoolteachers, discussing the black newspaper The Evening Star. Her passion for journalism grew, resulting in her popular weekly column signed “Iola,” which circulated widely. In 1889, she invested in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, leaving her teaching job to focus on organizing, writing, and promoting the newspaper within black communities.

Life's Work: The Crusade Against Lynching

The brutal lynching of three black men in Memphis in 1892 who owned a successful grocery store that competed with a white-owned store galvanized Wells’s antilynching campaign. She not only denounced the lynching in her newspaper but also encouraged black citizens to leave Memphis and migrate west, advice that was heeded by thousands. Her influence was profound, even encouraging a boycott of Memphis's streetcar system decades before the more famous Montgomery bus boycott.

After relocating due to threats from angry whites who destroyed her office and threatened her life, Wells was employed by the New York Age to gather lynching statistics and expose the myth that the victims were primarily guilty of raping white women. Her investigations revealed that only a quarter of those lynched were accused of such crimes; lynchings were often economically motivated, aiming to suppress black economic progress. Her findings were published in a pamphlet, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” which meticulously documented each lynching case.

International Advocacy and Wider Influence

Facing limited coverage in the North, Wells sought international support by traveling to England in 1893 and 1894. Her efforts were well-received by former abolitionists, and her work was disseminated through mainstream press articles and lectures. She founded the first antilynching organizations, and her strategy gained significant traction when American newspapers began reporting on her European successes. Her public criticisms of prominent figures like Frances Willard and Dwight L. Moody for not condemning racial violence further fueled international awareness.

In collaboration with Frederick Douglass and future husband Ferdinand Barnett, Wells protested the exclusion...