Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (around 1893)

Ida Bell Wells (later Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, born July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs , Mississippi ; died March 25, 1931 in Chicago , Illinois ) was an American journalist and civil and women's rights activist . She was the co-founder of several organizations, including the NAACP and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), and campaigned prominently against the then widespread lynching of African Americans . With her work, she significantly influenced the civil rights movement in the USA.

Life

Ida B. Wells was born a slave six months before the Emancipation Proclamation was written . She later attended Rust College, founded in 1866 . Her parents and youngest brother died of a yellow fever epidemic when she was 16, leaving her to take care of her five younger siblings. To support the family, she accepted a job as a teacher , although she was not yet 18 . At the invitation of an aunt, she moved with two younger sisters to the vicinity of Memphis in 1882 , where she again got a job and also began to write for various newspapers. In the summer she attended Fisk University in Nashville . On the way to Nashville in 1884, she made the experience of not being allowed to sit in a women's compartment of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway despite a first-class ticket . Instead, she was forcibly taken to the colored compartment. She sued the railroad and received $ 500 in compensation, but the verdict was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1887. She then turned to journalism even more and became a shareholder in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper . She consistently criticized the continuing oppression of the black population in the southern states , whereby she also propagated violence in the sense of self-defense against the oppressors. An article directed against the school system there led to her dismissal as a teacher in 1891.

In particular, lynch justice , the preferred means of terrorizing blacks, received a lot of attention from Ida B. Wells and was part of numerous articles and speeches of her in which she exposed, for example, the often cited rape of white women as a myth . She saw a change in legislation as the only possibility of future prevention, in which "the strong arm of the government [...] had to extend beyond the borders of the federal states". Wells kept precise statistics on lynchings committed and their alleged causes. She herself had been confronted with this crime: the father of her goddaughter and two other blacks, who were in direct competition with whites with a grocery store, were lynched in 1892. Wells thereupon called in her articles to boycott the businesses of the whites or to emigrate to the areas in Oklahoma that were recently approved for settlement (→ Oklahoma Land Run ), which actually happened. In response, a mob destroyed the building where their newspaper was produced. At the time, on her way to New York City , she received death threats from numerous southerners who forbade her to return to Memphis. She then stayed in New York and became a partner in the New York Age . In 1893 she went to Great Britain for a year . Her speeches there led to the founding of the British Anti-Lynching Society . Upon her return, she moved to Chicago , where she worked with Frederick Douglass and the lawyer and founder of the newspaper Conservator Ferdinand Barnett, whom she married in 1895. The couple had four children, in addition to two from a previous relationship with Barnett. Between 1898 and 1902 Wells-Barnett served as the secretary of one of the first civil rights organizations, the National Afro-American Council . In 1909 she was involved in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , but later resigned from the association, which she considered not militant enough, and founded other organizations. She continued to take care of the black community of Chicago with various programs, such as the building of a kindergarten, and also tried to introduce full women's suffrage in the USA, for which she took part in a 1913 parade of the National American Woman Suffrage Association .

In 1924 Wells-Barnett stood for election as president of the National Association of Colored Women, which she co-founded in 1896, but lost to Mary McLeod Bethune . She suffered the same fate in 1930 while trying to be elected to the Illinois Senate. The following year she died of kidney failure . In 1970, her daughter Alfreda Duster Wells-Barnetts published the autobiography Crusade for Justice . In 1988 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame . Your house is now a landmark of the city of Chicago as well as a National Historic Landmark and in the National Register of Historic Places listed.

Ida B. Wells was included in the Daughters of Africa anthology published in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York.

Honors

At the ceremony of the Pulitzer Prizes in May 2020 Ida B. Wells was "For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching." With a Special Citation appreciated.

See also

• Muckraker

literature

• Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell , in: June Hannam, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Katherine Holden: International encyclopedia of women's suffrage . Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 2000, ISBN 1-57607-064-6 , pp. 315-317

Web links

Commons : Ida B. Wells  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Collection of websites about Ida B. Wells on About.com
• Another website about Ida B. Wells

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wells' speech at the first annual meeting of the NAACP on May 8, 1909
   Excerpts in German in absolute black beats . Orange Press, Freiburg, 2003. ISBN 3-936086-15-X
   
2. ↑ Announcement of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners , pulitzer.org, May 4, 2020, accessed May 5, 2020.
3. ↑ Morgan Greene, Ida B. Wells receives Pulitzer Prize citation: 'The only thing she really had was the truth' , Chicago Tribune, May 4, 2020.