Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells, (Holly Springs, Mississippi, July 16, 1862 – Chicago, Illinois, March 25, 1931), later known as Ida Wells-Barnett and "Ida B. Wells-Barnett", was an African American civil rights advocate and women's rights activist. A fearless anti-lynching advocate, Wells documented hundreds of lynchings.
Biography
Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her father (James Wells) was a carpenter and her mother (Elizabeth "Lizzie Bell" Warrenton Wells) was a professional cook. Her parents were slaves but the family achieved freedom in 1865. When Wells was 16 both her parents and an older brother died of yellow fever during an epidemic that swept the South. At a meeting following the funeral, friends and relatives decided that the five remaining Wells children should be farmed out to various aunts and uncles. Wells was devastated by the idea and, to keep the family together, dropped out of high school, and found employment as a teacher in a black school.
In 1880, Wells moved to Memphis with her siblings. The only one who didnt go was her 15 year old brother January Wells. When she moved here she got a summer job.During the summer sessions, she attended Fisk University in Nashville. Wells held strong political opinions and she upset many people with her views on women's rights. When she was 24, she wrote, "I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge."
Wells became a public figure in Memphis when in 1884 she led a campaign against segregation on the local railway. In 1884, she was asked by the conductor of the Chesapeake, Ohio & South Western Railroad Company to give up her seat on the train to a white man and ordered into the smoking or "Jim Crow" car, which was already crowded with other passengers. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 banning discrimination on the basis of race, creed or color, in theaters, hotels, transport and other public accommodations, had just been declared unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). So, several railroad companies defied this congressional mandate of the 1875 Act and racially segregated their passengers. Wells refused to give up her seat, 71 years before Rosa Parks, and the conductor, who was assisted by two other men, dragged her out of the car. When she returned to Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad. She won her case in the local circuit court, but the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, which reversed the lower court's ruling, in 1887.
During her participation in women's suffrage parades, her refusal to stand in the back because she was black resulted in the beginning of her media publicity. In 1889, she became co-owner and editor of an anti-segregationist newspaper based in Beale Street in Memphis. In 1892, however, she was forced to leave Memphis because her editorials in the paper, Free Speech, were seen as too agitating. 1892 was the same year that she published her famous pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In 1895, she published A Red Record, which documented her campaign against lynching.
In 1895, in Chicago, she married attorney Ferdinand Lee Barnett, who founded and edited the Chicago Conservator, the city's first black newspaper. The couple had four children.Their children were Charles, Ferdinand, Ida, and Alfreda. Although Wells tried to retire from public life to raise her children, she soon returned to her campaign for equal rights. In 1906, she joined with W.E.B. Du Bois to promote the Niagara Movement, a group which advocated full civil rights for Blacks. In 1910, Wells helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (the NAACP).
She never obtained a position of leadership within the NAACP, perhaps because she opposed Booker T. Washington's moderate position that blacks focus on economic gains rather than social and political equality with whites. Or perhaps it was because at this time women did not have such power. In 1913 she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, the first black suffrage organization, and from 1913 to 1916 she worked as a probation officer in Chicago. She was also a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and participated in a suffrage march in 1913. The poet Langston Hughes said her activities in the field of social work laid the groundwork for the Urban League.
In 1930, she ran for the Illinois state legislature, one of the first black women ever to run for public office. She died in Chicago, Illinois, where a public housing complex was later named in her honour. There is also a high school named after her, on Hayes Street in San Francisco, California.
After her retirement, Wells wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928). She died of uremia on March 25, 1931.
Throughout her life, Wells was militant in her demands for equality and justice for African-Americans, and insisted that the African-American community must win justice through its own efforts.
Constant Star
There is a play/musical about the life of Ida B. Wells, titled Constant Star by Tazewell Thompson. The play uses five actresses to play her as well as some of the other characters involved in her miraculous life. Although it is primarily a drama, it includes about 20 negro spiritual songs, sung by the actresses. The following is a quote from the director/playwrigh Tazewell Thompson:
- My first introduction to Ida B. Wells was the PBS documentary on her life. Her story gnawed at me. A woman born in slavery, she would grow to become one of the great pioneer activists of the Civil Rights movement. A precursor of Rosa Parks, she was a suffragette, newspaper editor and publisher, investigative journalist, co-founder of the NAACP, political candidate, mother, wife, and the single most powerful leader in the anti-lynching campaign in America. A dynamic, controversial, temperamental, uncompromising race woman, she broke bread and crossed swords with some of the movers and shakers of her time: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, President McKinley. By any fair assessment, she was a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America.
- On her passing in 1931, Ida B. Wells was interred in the Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago. Her formidable contributions to the Civil Rights movement have, until most recently, been under-appreciated. Until now; almost, but not quite, an historical footnote.
- This play with song is my attempt to let her story breathe freely on stage - to give it a symphonic expression - to give her extraordinary persona an audience, something she always craved.
She died from uremia at the age of 69 in Chicago, Illinois on March 25, 1931.
Significant quotes
"I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge."
“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.”
“One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”
"Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense."
"Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob."
"The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense."
"There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms."
"The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give."
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