Ida B. Wells and the campaign against lynching

Long before there was Rosa Parks, there was Ida B. Wells.

In 1883, Wells boarded a train on her way to her teaching job near Memphis. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 had been overturned by the Supreme Court, and post-Civil War Reconstruction had ended several years earlier. Wells had a first-class ticket for the “ladies car,” but the conductor asked her to move to the “smoking car,” where Black passengers sat.

Wells refused.

In her autobiography, Wells recounted the way the conductor and two other men forced her out of her seat and off the train as she fought back. She later sued the railroad company and won a $500 settlement, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict and charged Wells $200, claiming she was aiming to harass the company and that “her persistence was not in good faith.”

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Wells was undeterred. She would go on to become an activist, writer, editor, and a co-founder of the NAACP. A pioneer in investigative journalism, she developed data collection and interview techniques, single-handedly waging a nationwide anti-lynching campaign. Historians say she was the most famous Black woman in the U.S. during her lifetime.

Wells was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the oldest of seven children, to parents who were enslaved until the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1878, while visiting her grandmother, Wells’ parents and younger brother died of yellow fever. Although cautioned to stay away, she returned home and, at age 16, became the primary caretaker of her younger siblings with help from her grandmother and a friend of her mother’s. She dropped out of high school but earned a teaching certificate at night and on weekends. Eventually, relatives took in Wells’ brothers, and she and her two younger sisters moved to Memphis to live with an aunt. 

In Memphis, Wells began her journalism career freelancing for various Black publications. In 1885, at age 23, she became editor of The Evening Star, a “spicy journal” (in her words) run by a Memphis literary group. Her articles about Black life and racism became popular, appearing in many of the 200 Black newspapers in the U.S. at the time. In 1889, she was invited to join the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight as a reporter and co-owner — one of her conditions for taking the job.

A key moment in Wells’ life came in 1892 after a close friend, Thomas Moss, was murdered by a lynch mob. Moss, a mailman, was part owner of The People’s Grocery in south Memphis. A fight among Black and white kids shooting marbles escalated, and adults waded in. The next day, the white owner of a competing grocery store organized a ransacking of The People’s Grocery. Under assault, Moss and his two partners fired shots, wounding a sheriff’s deputy.

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Moss and his co-owners were arrested and jailed, and the Sunday paper described the successful grocery store as “a low dive in which drinking and gambling were carried on: a resort of thieves and thugs.” Soon after, a mob of 75 masked men came to the jail in the night, dragged the three Black men away and killed them. Their actual “crime” was taking business away from a white grocery store. 

Wells covered the murders extensively as editor of Free Speech, decrying the lynching, exposing the gaps in the official story and spotlighting prejudice as the cause. Five months later, while she was out of town, a white mob set fire to the newspaper building and destroyed the presses. Wells did not return to Memphis.

“Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.” – Ida B. Wells

With New York as her new home base, Wells took a reporting job at the New York Age, She began travelling through the South to document other lynchings, accumulating data on over 700 cases. Only a third of those she covered involved criminal allegations, dispelling the widely accepted myth in the white press that vigilante lynch mobs were somehow justified in killing Black men and boys. In October 1892, she published her famous pamphlet “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases.”

The next year, Wells moved to Chicago and protested the exclusion of Black Americans at the World’s Fair. In front of the Haitian exhibit hall, Wells handed out 10,000 copies of “The Reason Why The Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” The pamphlet was co-written by Frederick Douglass and Ferdinand Barnett, a civil rights activist, lawyer and newspaper editor who Wells married in 1895. Douglass was the only Black invitee to the World’s Fair – and he had been invited, not by the U.S., but by Haiti.

After the Fair, the Chicago Inter-Ocean hired Wells to go undercover to report further on lynching in the South. This work became the basis for her lectures in Great Britain in 1894, drawing international attention to lynching and racism in America.

After her marriage, Wells changed her name to Ida B. Wells-Barnett and had four children. She became editor of the Conservator, founded by Barnett as Chicago’s first Black paper, and Barnett often watched the kids when Wells was away on the lecture circuit.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett died in 1932 at age 68. More than eight decades later, the New York Times included her in its “Overlooked” obit series on historical figures whose deaths had gone unreported by the Times. In 2020, she received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Two years later, the Emmitt Till Antilynching Act finally passed, identifying lynching as a federal hate crime offense. The bill was named after a 14-year-old who was brutally murdered by two white men, both of whom were acquitted by an all-white jury. They later admitted to the murder and sold the story to a magazine. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral in Chicago, and the photos became an early catalyst for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote about the threats she faced throughout her life: “I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.”

To learn more about Ida B. Wells, read “Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells” and “Ida: A Sword Among Lions.”

Editor’s note: This was written by Richard Campbell, a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is also board secretary for the Oxford Free Press, a nonprofit newspaper serving Oxford and surrounding communities.