Constitutional Voices: Ida B. Wells
On May 27, 1892, an angry mob of white Memphis residents descended on Beale Street, the vibrant center of the city’s Black community. Their target was the office of The Free Speech and Headlight, a Black-owned newspaper. After locating the office, the mob broke the paper’s printing press, trashed the building, and left a threat for its editor and co-owner, Ida B. Wells, that they would “bleed [her] face and hang [her] in front of the court house” if she ever returned. Wells, who was fortunately traveling on the East Coast at the time, never returned to her home again.
The impetus for this mob violence was Wells’ fearless journalism, which challenged the lawlessness and hypocrisy of the Southern lynch mob. Through her unrelenting activism, Wells brought the horrors of the South’s “lynch law” to a national—and indeed, international—audience.
Yet, in a sobering reflection during her later years, Wells remained concerned that she “had nothing to show for all those years of toil and labor.” A child of the Civil War, Wells had lived through the broken promises of Reconstruction and the terror of southern Redemption. She bore witness to the entrenchment of Jim Crow and the lynching of more than 3,000 Black men, women, and children between 1882 and 1930. When she died in 1931, it would be another three decades before the Civil Rights Movement ended de jure discrimination against Black Americans. It would be another 90 years until the 117th U.S. Congress passed the first-ever national anti-lynching legislation, designating lynching as a federal hate crime.
As we reflect on Ida B. Wells’ life, we must equally celebrate her groundbreaking achievements while remembering that there is still work to be done to fully realize her dreams.
Early Life
Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862 to enslaved parents, James and Elisabeth Wells. After emancipation in 1865, they placed a premium on educating their children, determined to provide opportunities they themselves had been denied during slavery. Their commitment led Ida and her siblings to attend Rust College, where she developed a love of literature through reading the works of Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and the Brontë sisters.
Wells’ happy childhood was abruptly ended in 1878, when a yellow fever outbreak claimed the lives of both James and Elisabeth, as well as Ida’s baby brother, Stanley. Upon receiving the news of her parents’ deaths, a 16-year-old Ida, who had been away visiting her grandparents, made the decision to return to Holly Springs and care for her five remaining siblings.
To support the family, Wells worked as a schoolteacher, traveling miles by mule throughout rural Mississippi to find work. Her experiences in these rural communities pressed Wells to reflect on what she could do to improve the lives of millions of Black Southerners who had been freed from bondage but had little access to social, political, or economic opportunities. Wells left Mississippi for Memphis in 1881, but these questions would continue to shape her trajectory as she evolved from schoolteacher to renowned journalist and activist.
Memphis Years
Even before Wells began writing for newspapers, earning the honorific “princess of the press,” her early years in Memphis foreshadowed her later advocacy for racial justice. Within two years of her arrival, Wells filed two lawsuits against the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad for discrimination. A conductor had refused to accept Wells’s first-class ticket and attempted to force her into the second-class car. Wells refused to move, gripping onto the seat and biting the conductor’s hand in defiance. A year later, Wells again sued the company after being denied first-class accommodations on a subsequent journey. While Wells won her cases in the local circuit court, the Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately ruled against her on appeal in 1887. As historian and Wells biographer Mia Bay observes, Wells’ case “was one of the many state-level stops on the road to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).”
As these cases progressed through the courts, Wells increasingly turned to journalism as an outlet. Under the pseudonym “Iola,” she gained notoriety for her incisive commentary on race and gender. By the late 1880s, Wells had established herself as one of the nation’s leading Black journalists, and in 1889 she purchased a one-third share of The Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, becoming the first woman to own and edit a Black newspaper in America.
Anti-Lynching Activism
While Wells’ journalism always addressed social issues, her crusade against lynching that would make her a national figure began with the murders of her friend Thomas Moss and his business partners, Calvin McDowell and William Stewart, in March 1892.
On the night of March 2, a scuffle broke out between a group of Black and white boys playing marbles outside of People’s Grocery, a recently opened grocery store owned by Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. The fighting soon escalated as adults joined the fray. In the days that followed, W.H. Barrett, the white owner of a neighboring grocery store, allegedly exploited the incident to undermine a successful competitor. Having grown resentful of the Black-owned business, he conspired to have Moss, McDowell and Stewart arrested, rallying a group of plainclothes police officers to the store. A fight ensued, and three officers were shot before Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were taken to jail.
However, the three men never stood trial. On March 9, a white mob descended on the county jail, dragged the three men from the cell, and murdered them.
The deaths of her friends inspired Wells to expose the inhumane practice of lynching in her column for The Free Speech. Contrary to the prevailing narrative, which described these extrajudicial murders as retributive justice for the sexual assault of white women by Black men, Wells demonstrated that most cases had nothing to do with sexual assault.
Instead, when Wells researched the circumstances that preceded lynchings, she found the Black men were frequently lynched for perceived slights against white people, for challenging the socioeconomic status quo (as did People’s Grocery), or––most often–– for engaging in consensual relationships with white women––a practice deemed immoral by southern anti-miscegenation laws.
It was for publishing these accusations that Wells’ office on Beale Street were destroyed.
Wells Moves North
Yet her exile from Memphis did not dampen her spirits. After moving north, Wells published what would become her most famous anti-lynching tract, Southern Horrors. In this pamphlet, Wells dismantled the myth of the sexually rapacious Black man used to justify extrajudicial murder. She also highlighted the hypocrisy of how sexual assault by white men on Black women—a practice dating back to slavery—continued to go largely unpunished.
Like the abolitionists of previous generations, Wells too went abroad to bolster support for her message. Between 1893 and 1894, she embarked on two speaking tours of the United Kingdom, inspiring the founding of the British Anti-Lynching Committee.
And yet, despite her growing fame across the Anglo-American world, Wells never became a national leader or “voice for Black America” in the vein of her friend and mentor Frederick Douglass. Her uncompromising message and her unpopularity even among liberal, northern whites made her a difficult figure to build a national movement around. As Bay writes, Wells was “most politically effective as an agitator rather than as an established race leader.” That role would be first filled by Booker T. Washington, and later by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Her uncompromising nature meant that, even as she inspired the creation of national organizations, she rarely felt at home within them. For example, Wells was instrumental in the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), yet was never elected to any national leadership within the organization. Likewise, Wells was a founding member of the NAACP, yet she chafed under the organization’s more conservative approach toward activism and soon separated.
Chicago Years and Motherhood
In 1895, Wells settled in Chicago, marrying Ferdinand Barnett, an attorney and newspaper editor. Thereafter, she changed her name to Ida B. Wells-Barnett. She and Ferdinand had four children, whom they raised alongside two children from his previous marriage.
Gender and the societal expectations of both her peers and detractors, always loomed over Wells-Barnett’s life and work. As a young, unmarried woman in Memphis, she was targeted several times with unflattering rumors about her relationships with men—a taboo in an era defined by Victorian morality. Even when praising Wells-Barnett, her contemporaries often viewed her through the lens of gender. Fellow journalist T. Thomas Fortune wrote that “If Iola [Wells’ nom de plume] were a man, she would be a humming independent in politics.”
In this context, then, it is unsurprising that her marriage drew attention. Some of her friends, particularly those in the suffrage movement, were sharply critical of her decision to marry. Susan B. Anthony believed that marriage was inappropriate for “women like [Wells] with a special call to do special work.”
And indeed, Wells-Barnett’s own views towards marriage and motherhood shifted over time. In her own words, she came to see having children as “one of the most glorious advantages in the development of [one’s] own womanhood.” While she never relinquished her activist spirit, Wells-Barnett stepped back from national politics, choosing to focus on improving the local community where her children would learn and grow.
In Chicago, she founded the Negro Fellowship League (NFL), petitioned to establish a kindergarten for Black children, and protested the race riots that erupted across Illinois in the years following World War I.
In 1920, Wells-Barnett resolved to chronicle her life’s work. The impetus for this autobiographical project was a chance interaction that she had with a young Black woman months prior, who wanted to understand better Wells-Barnett’s connection to the anti-lynching movement. As Wells-Barnett recalls in the book’s preface, the young woman had been asked by her white peers at the local YWCA to name a female heroine, akin to Joan of Arc. When she named Wells-Barnett, the incredulous group asked her what Wells-Barnett had done to merit such distinction. While the young woman had “heard [Wells-Barnett] mentioned so often,” she was unable to recall anything that Wells-Barnett had actually done. She thus implored Wells-Barnett to “please tell me what it was you did, so the next time I am asked such a question I can give an intelligent answer?”
Ida B. Wells-Barnett was never able to fully answer this woman’s question. Her autobiography remained unfinished at her death in 1931—it stops abruptly mid-thought, indeed, mid-sentence, as she recalls an episode of anti-Black discrimination at Chicago’s Drake Hotel.
But in many ways, the unfinished nature of Wells-Barnett’s autobiography speaks to the life of incessant and unrelenting activism that she led. To her death, Wells-Barnett was never content to sit back and reflect on her past successes, when there was still justice work to be done.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett died on March 25, 1931 at the age of 68.
Trey Sullivan is a Content Fellow at the National Constitution Center and a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Marshall Scholar.