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Ida B. Wells was a Black woman activist, journalist, and anti-lynching crusader who was one of the most important civil rights pioneers during the post Civil War period early 20th century.
Ida B. Wells was a Black woman activist, journalist, and anti-lynching crusader who was one of the most important civil rights pioneers during the post Civil War period.
She was born into slavery in 1862. After the Civil War she was freed alongside her parents and became a teacher in Tennessee. In 1884 when she was 22, Ida B. Wells refused to give up her seat to a White woman on a railroad train and move to the Jim Crow car. She was thrown off the train and sued the railroad company.
This inspired Wells to quit her job as a teacher and become an activist. She started a newspaper called The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight or also known as Free Speech. Her articles were frank, inflammatory and reprinted all over the country. She began an anti-lynching campaign that toured all over the North.
She went abroad to Great Britain and organized an economic boycott of Southern cotton. She was also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (Meghan O'Rourke, April 2022)
She was 22 years-old in 1884 when she refused to give up her seat to a White man on a railroad train and move to the Jim Crow car.
Wells had paid for a first class ticket and was riding in the first class women's car, when a white woman came on board.
The conductor told Wells that she had to remove herself from the ladies car and move to the "colored" car. Wells refused - and when the conductor tried to force her, she bit him. She was thrown off the train, and sued the railroad company.
She won her case - the judge ruled that Wells was, in fact, a lady, and had the right to site in the ladies car.
Ida B. Wells at 1913 suffrage parade, in Chicago Daily Tribune May 1913
Starting a Newspaper
This began Wells' activism. She quit her job as a schoolteacher and began writing a newspaper called The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight - soon just known as the Free Speech.
Wells researched and wrote about lynching, determined to prove that it was a tool of white supremacy and not a form of justice.
Her articles were frank and inflammatory - "Nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare old lie that Negro men rape white women,” she wrote. “[Lynching is] an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘the n----- down.'"
Her articles were reprinted all over the country and abroad - and they often got her into trouble with local white authorities. On at least one occasion, Wells' newspaper office was razed and her printing press was destroyed. On other occasions, black friends warned Wells not to come back to Memphis, because she would almost certainly be killed by white men in town.
Wells began an anti-lynching campaign that toured all over the North. In 1898, she brought her campaign to the White House and pressured President William McKinley to make reforms. She also went abroad to Great Britain and organized an economic boycott of Southern cotton - urging the British to refuse to buy cotton from the United States because of lynching in the South.
Excerpt from a Britsh newspaper company, the Aberdeen Press and Journal from April 24, 1893.
Ida B. Wells is also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP, and the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Women.
Although, it is important to note that even though she was there when the NAACP was founded, she was not listed as an 'official' founder.
In both organizations, she was a fierce critic of her allies as well as her foes, and she cut ties from the NAACP, explaining that she felt the organization lacked action-based initiatives.
Click here to learn more about the NAACP's history.
Ida B. Wells has relatively overlooked by historians, but she was one of THE prominent figures in African American Civil Rights prior to the Civil Rights Movement.
For an overview of who Ida B. Wells was, including video check out: Ida B. Wells - Biography.com
For another look at Ida B. Wells and her most prominant work, look at The New York Times' Overlooked obituary on her, which focuses on historical figures who have been overlooked by historians.
Ida B. Wells Refused to Give Up Her Seat 
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