Ida B. Wells

Born into slavery, Ida B. Wells would in her lifetime become the most famous Black woman in the United States for her meticulous, data-driven reporting that exposed the systematic killing of Black men in the American South in the 1890s.

In doing so, she would set standards for both investigative journalism and civil rights activism that were decades ahead of their time and are still used today.

Early life

Ida Bell Wells was born an enslaved person in Mississippi in 1862. But Emancipation was just around the corner, and as she grew up her father (but not her mother) gained the right to vote; Black men represented them in the state legislature.

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In 1878, when she was just 16, her parents and a brother died of yellow fever; she was left to care for her six surviving siblings. She taught school to feed the family, continuing her own education at night. But even as she struggled with domestic issues, she became aware of how the country was changing. An 1883 Supreme Court ruling on a number of cases basically nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, ushering in the era of Jim Crow.

Ida B. Wells, a Black woman who stood just shy of five feet tall, was about to become a formidable force in late 19th-century America.

Activism and journalism

By 1884 Wells was attending college at Fisk University in Nashville while her sisters and brothers worked and lived with an aunt in Tennessee. She bought a first-class train ticket for a trip home, but when the train crew told her she must move to a car for only African Americans, she objected. As they forced her off the train, she bit one of the crew members. She sued Chesapeake & Ohio Southwestern Railroad, winning a $500 judgment that was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Wells began writing for Black newspapers in the South showcasing the disparity in education received by white and Black students. During these early days her work was published under the pen name Iola. While teaching at a segregated school in Memphis, she also bought a stake in the local Black newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Her positions on segregated education cost her her teaching job, and she turned her full attention to journalism. Soon she would earn the moniker—given to her by a fellow journalist—“Princess of the Press.”

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Lynching and Southern Horrors

In 1892 the deaths of Thomas Moss, who was a friend of Wells’s, and two of his business associates, Calvin McDowell and William Henry Stewart, at the hands of a white mob sparked Wells to begin a journalistic investigation into Southern lynchings. She spent months laboriously chronicling similar cases in which Black men were systematically targeted; she pored over arrest records, spoke to witnesses, and chronicled her findings in notebooks. Since many lynchings were justified by allegations of sexual abuse, she sought to disprove a myth of the day (one that would continue for decades) that there was only one reason why a Black man and a white woman would engage in sex, writing in the Free Speech in 1892: “Nobody in the South believes the old thread bare lie that negro men rape white women.”

Wells argued instead that many lynchings had little to do with criminal punishment but were instead meant to secure the tradition and institutions of white supremacy and intimidate Black communities.

Wells’s work gained her the attention of the prominent African American activist Frederick Douglass who compared his efforts to hers, writing to her in a letter: “I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison.” But she also stirred the fury of Tennessee whites, who stormed her newspaper offices, destroying them, in 1892. She was in New York at the time, which may have saved her life. Later that year she published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She followed up in 1895 with The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. With her meticulous and courageous work documenting and reporting on the horrors of lynching, she would come to be associated with a group of progressive journalists known as muckrakers. She stayed in the North for the rest of her life.

• Read Ida B. Wells’s article “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” published in The Independent, May 16, 1901.

Marriage and continued work

In 1895 she married a Chicago lawyer and civil rights activist Ferdinand Barnett. The couple had four children, but their marriage looked more like a late 20th-century (or early 21st-century) union than one typical of the 1890s. For one thing, Ida B. Wells did not take her husband’s name, instead becoming Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the hyphenation being radical for the time. Barnett also subjugated his career to hers, staying at home to care for their children while she traveled the country doing advocacy work, including a meeting with Pres. William McKinley in 1898 to encourage him to take up lynching reform.

Wells continued to devote her life to the work of civil rights for Black people and women. In 1909, in the wake of a horrific race riot in Springfield, Illinois, the previous year, Wells was part of a group including W.E.B. Du Bois and William English Walling that formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). But Wells disagreed frequently with the group’s white leadership, criticizing what she saw as their insufficiently radical positions. She broke ties with the NAACP in 1912.

In 1913 she founded what may have been the first Black women’s suffrage group, Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club, which identified and supported candidates who would serve the needs of the Black community. Wells and other members of the club were invited to join the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C. When parade organizers asked Wells and other Black women to march at the end of the parade so as not to offend Southern white suffragists, Wells—perhaps recalling being denied her seat on the train decades earlier—refused. Instead, she stood on the sidewalk as the parade passed, but when a contingent of Chicago white women walked past her, she joined and marched alongside them.

Legacy

Wells died of kidney disease in Chicago in 1931. She was 68 years old. As famous as she was in life, her story became more universally known with the 1970 publication of her autobiography Crusade for Justice. In 1990 she was featured on a U.S. postage stamp. The site of her former newspaper office in Memphis, Tennessee, was commemorated in 2015 with a plaque noting her bravery. In 2020 she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize; the citation read:

For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.

In 2021 a statue and plaque were erected on the South Side of Chicago to honor Wells’s life, and in 2025 she was featured on a U.S. quarter as part of the American Women Quarters Program. Her coin identifies her simply as: “journalist, suffragist, civil rights activist.”