Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,938

This is the grave of Ida B. Wells.

I am going to do something a little different today. August 12, just a few days from now, marks the publication of my new book, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice. In fact, many of the choices for this book happened because I had previously profiled them in the grave series. But one I had not profiled before is Ida B. Wells. So I am republishing an early version (there may still be a few editorial mistakes in this version, but I don’t have an easily cut and paste option for the completed manuscript here) of my chapter on Wells. This makes it longer, more complete, and filled with citations. I hope you enjoy it.

Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Wells entered life a slave. Her father was the son of a white man and his female slave and became a carpenter. When his former owner ordered him to vote for a Democrat after emancipation, he refused and voted for the Republican. So he locked Wells’ blacksmith shop and stole his tools. Her father simply walked away from the plantation. Wells’ parents fought hard for Black political rights in Reconstruction and passed these values down to their daughter. That included armed self-defense and resistance to the Ku Klux Klan.[1]

Wells’ parents believed strongly in education. Freed people fought hard for education, sacrificing to pay for teachers in their communities. About 5 percent of slaves could read in 1865 and they knew literacy meant power.[2] Wells enrolled at Rust College in Holly Springs, at the age of 16. Sadly, her parents soon died of yellow fever, a mosquito-borne illness still common at this time. Her extended family thought the younger siblings should be farmed out to various family members or apprenticed to whites for work.  Although young, Ida refused to see her family split apart. She would not let her siblings down. She left college and went to work.[3]

Soon after, Wells moved with her sisters to Memphis. Thousands of freed slaves moved to Memphis after emancipation, seeking opportunities unavailable to them in rural areas and hoping to avoid the violent racism of the plantations. In response, Memphis whites went on a rampage in 1866 destroying most of the Black side of town and killing forty-six people. However, the city also had a strong tradition of Black activism and that community would fight to keep their freedom.[4]

Wells got a job at a school in the town of Woodstock, north of Memphis. She worked hard to get more education as well, taking courses as Lemoyne-Owen College in Memphis and Fisk University in Nashville. In 1883, she bought a first class ticket to Woodstock on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. The conductor ordered her back into the third-class car, a dirty, smoky coach where men smoked and often harassed women. She refused. Whites physically threw her off the train. She sued. The C&O bought off her African American lawyer. She fired him and hired a white lawyer. A local court ruled in her favor, showing that not every white southerner had embraced segregation. But the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned that in 1887. She wrote in her diary, “O God, is there no … justice in this land for us?” The answer to that question was no, but rather than give up, she dedicated herself to changing that.[5]

Wells wrote to alert people to the South’s violence. For that, she nearly paid with her life. While still teaching, she began to write in the Black newspapers of Memphis. Mostly, she used a pen name. Attacking Jim Crow could get you killed and while we think of lynching impacting men, plenty of women were lynched too. In 1889, Wells and a journalist named J.L. Fleming, an Arkansas newspaperman who fled his home to avoid a lynching, bought a newspaper they called the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, and Wells published most of her work there. This led to the county firing Wells in 1891 for daring to criticize segregation, comparing her classroom to those of white teachers after a colleague of hers committed suicide.[6]

Also in 1889, Thomas Moss opened a grocery store in a Black neighborhood of Memphis. He called it “The People’s Grocery” to remind the neighborhood that this was a Black owned business serving Black people. This challenged the white owned store across the street. The owner of that store stewed for three years until one day in 1892, a fight erupted. The white grocer pulled a gun. One of the employees of the People’s Grocery named Calvin McDowell took it from him and fired. He missed and the police broke it up. Three days later, a group of whites got their revenge. They marched to the store. A pitched battle broke out. Moss, McDowell, and William Stewart, another employee, were arrested. That night, a group of seventy-five whites took them from prison and lynched them. These were three of the more than 4,000 African Americans lynched by white mobs in the South between 1877 and 1950.[7]

Wells was godmother to Moss’ daughter. She responded the only way she knew how—exposing the crime. Since whites believed racist depictions of Black people by 1892, most stories about lynching blamed the victim. The frequently stated reason for lynching was Black men raping white women. This was a total lie, as Wells exposed. Wells wrote about frequency of consensual sex between Black men and white women that threatened a man when the public found out. For example, she wrote of one case in Tunica, Mississippi, where a white man got a mob together to kill a Black man after he discovered a consensual sexual relationship between his daughter and that man. Wells wrote of “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” Moreover, she noted that only 30 percent of lynchings even named rape as a reason. Whites used this lie to keep Black people in their place.[8]

Wells led a boycott of the Memphis streetcar lines in protest of the white community’s murderous ways. This and talking about sex with white women was too far for Memphis whites, who called for a lynch party to kill Wells. The Daily Commercial, Memphis’ leading white paper, ran an editorial urging her murder. While she was out of town, a mob ransacked the offices of her newspaper. She knew what awaited her if she returned to Memphis. She happened to be in New York. She stayed there, took a job with the New York Age, and never returned to Memphis.[9]

Wells kept up her fight against lynching and violence from New York. Later in 1892, she published her influential pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. The culmination of her research on lynching, she painted lynching victims as brave men standing up to degraded, vicious, uncivilized whites, reversing how whites justified lynching. She demonstrated the lies about Black sexual assault. Rather, like her friends in Memphis, she asserted that lynching usually happened because Black people dared make money. She argued that whites feared Black economic progress and, like the violence that underpinned slavery, they would murder to maintain their dominance.[10]

Wells moved to Chicago and just kept going. She formed the Ida B. Wells Club to promote the Republican Party and Black political engagement in 1894. Most African Americans voted for Republicans, as the Party of Lincoln that ended slavery.[11] In 1895, she published The Red Record, a brilliant piece of journalism exploring lynching since the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. She told the stories of lynched victims in often excruciating detail. She then put it into historical context, noting the mass murders during slavery and Reconstruction. Through her journalism, Wells hoped to at least get northern whites to care about Black rights, as they did briefly after the Civil War. She recognized that lynching built white solidarity between the white working class and the upper classes, a populist move that deflected class based critiques and making it nearly impossible for cross-racial alliances to form. As such, for Wells, lynching was a former of both racial and class propaganda effectively used by the southern white power structure to maintain itself.[12]

Wells became the successor of Frederick Douglass as the voice of Black America who could travel and give speeches to sympathetic audiences to raise awareness and money. Douglass suggested his friends in England invite her. She received a warm reception in Europe. White American newspapers responded with disgust. The press, using vicious racial stereotypes, attacked Wells for making the U.S. look bad. For example, the New York Times, called her “a slanderous and nasty Mulatress,” demonstrating that racism was far from a southern problem.[13] Wells spent much of the 1890s and into the twentieth century on lecture tours around the North, organizing at the local level, and using her knowledge and fame to build Black resistance to injustice.[14]

Wells also called for armed self-defense, a long tradition in the Black community, as the upcoming chapter on Robert Williams will demonstrate. She stated in The Red Record “A Winchester Rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” Wells’ promotion of armed self-defense also attacked the complacent Black leadership of the era coming from Booker T. Washington and his Atlanta Compromise. Washington told whites that Black southerners would give up on civil rights and political activism and instead learn to work hard within the white supremacist system. Whites lauded him as the reasonable voice of Black America. There was no room for armed self-defense in Washington’s world. Wells had no time for Washington’s politics of compromise. People were dying. Wells had barely escaped the rope herself. She would shoot back if necessary.[15]

In 1895, Wells married Ferdinand Barrett, a civil rights attorney and journalist. They had four children and he had two from a previous marriage. It was a full house filled with two activist parents who continued with their work. Balancing organizing and parenting remains very difficult today and so it was for Wells, who found herself doing most of the parenting while trying to maintain her struggle for justice. One way she did that was to create the first Black kindergarten in Chicago, for her children and so many others who lacked that basic early education.[16]

Wells also built Black women’s political and social power in Chicago. This was the era of the woman’s club movement, an expression of political organizing from middle class women. They believed in a duty to bring their moral power as women into politics to create reform. They responded to the extreme inequality and political corruption of the Gilded Age. It led to women such as Jane Addams opening settlement houses to provide immigrants social spaces in impoverished immigrant neighborhoods. It led Florence Kelley to become a national leader in the fight against child labor. It led other women to fight against alcohol use and for education.[17]

While white women started the club movement, Black women such as Wells quickly built on the idea. Wells became not only the movement’s leader in Chicago, but arguably the most important Black club leader nationally, along with women such as Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell. She organized Jane Addams on racial issues and they became friends in the fight for broad-based justice movements in Chicago. They also both helped cofound the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1905.[18] Wells cofounded the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and spent much of the early twentieth century building up the institutional power of Black women in this country. She also opened her own settlement house to provide social services for the Black community in Chicago, the Negro Fellowship League, which took much of her time in the early 1910s.[19]

Too often, we think of racism as a southern problem. As Wells could tell you, racism was a southern thing. But southern attitudes had plenty of support in the North. She took on fights against attempts to segregate schools in the North and against anti-Black violence. Much of her work consisted of convincing Black leaders in their communities to fight this violence instead of cowering in front of it. Wells led a huge and successful fight in Cairo, Illinois to activate the city’s Black community after a 1909 lynching, one of the biggest wins in her career after the city sheriff was fired for doing nothing.[20]

Wells had a multifaceted analysis of oppression. She firmly believed that women of all races also faced oppression from patriarchal domination. Black women faced greater oppression, yes, but all women need to unite to fight for their rights. She knew that Black men often ruled their wives as patriarchs and created their own injustice in the home. Thus, she became a strong and passionate activist for women’s suffrage as the best way for Black women to organize along both gendered and racial lines. At the same time, she understood the obstacles she faced and even showed interest in encouraging Black Americans to move to Africa to live in a land she believed not infected by Anglo-Saxon domination.[21]

Many white suffragists wanted nothing to do with Black women in their movement. The women’s suffrage and anti-slavery movements had evolved together in the two decades before the Civil War. But when Black men received the vote in 1869 with the Fifteenth Amendment, many anti-slavery women became angry that ex-slaves would get the vote before they did. Their speeches asked how Black men, who they increasingly defined as uneducated, savage, and sexual predators, could vote instead of them. Moreover, as the suffrage movement spread tentatively to the South during the late 19^th century, southern white suffragists became particularly touchy about being associated with Black voting to not discredit the already radical notion of women voting.[22]

What this meant is that many white suffragists preferred to act as if Ida Wells did not exist. She did not let them. She spoke in England at the same time in 1894 that Women’s Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard did the same thing. The WCTU led the fight to limit drinking, which eventually became the Eighteenth Amendment, creating Prohibition, in 1919. Willard supported women’s suffrage as a tool to cleanse the nation’s politics of booze. But Willard also was a racist. She believed in lynching and blamed Black people for temperance failing in the South, using highly racist language to do so, as if they could they vote in most of the region. Wells challenged her publicly, calling her out on the racism and infuriating the WCTU.[23]

Wells did have white allies. In 1913, shortly after Illinois granted women the vote, she and Belle Squire, a white woman famous for refusing to pay taxes if she could not vote, created the Alpha Suffrage Club, a Black women’s suffrage organization. The National American Woman Suffrage Association refused to allow Black members so they needed an alternative organization to fight for women in politics. Again, the radicalism of many white women stopped at the color line. But the suffrage movement included Native, Asian, and Latina women too. The suffrage movement has far more diversity than we usually think and these activists forced white suffragists to respond to charges of racism.[24]  

Also in 1913, NAWSA held a giant women’s suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. They told Wells she and her comrades were unwelcome. Wells found this unacceptable. She and sixty-five members of the Alpha Suffrage Club traveled to Washington. NAWSA offered to have the Black delegation at the very end of the parade. Wells would not accept this either. So when the Illinois delegation marched by, Wells just hopped out of the crowd and marched with them, desegregating the march, going arm-in-arm with Squire and another white ally, Virginia Brooks. This became one of the iconic moments of her amazing life.[25]

By demanding equality, Wells challenged the power structure. During the repression of radicals in World War I, the federal government called her a “race agitator” and put her under surveillance. She knew it but just kept on working. When East St. Louis, Illinois whites started a horrible race riot in 1917, Wells went there to report on it for the Chicago Defender, the most important Black-owned newspaper in the country. She used her investigatory powers to fight for justice after the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. She returned to the South for the first time since she fled in 1892 to report on the horrors of the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas, when the governor of Arkansas ordered the state militia to destroy the organizing of sharecroppers and they murdered at least 200 and perhaps up to 500 sharecroppers.[26]

In 1924, Wells ran for the presidency of the National Association of Colored Women, but lost to Mary McLeod Bethune, another legend of the Black freedom struggle. She got more involved in electoral politics later in her life as well, working to form a Black women’s political club to support candidates and running as an independent for a state senate seat in 1930, largely as a challenge to how the Republican Party had turned its back on Black voters. She also worked on the conditions Black prisoners faced in the state of Illinois.[27]

Wells died in 1931, in Chicago. In 1970, her daughter edited and published her incomplete autobiography and Crusade for Justice is one of the greatest books about the freedom struggle ever written. She did not live to see most of the change she demanded. Southern senators still used the filibuster to stop anti-lynching legislation. Yes, Black women could vote in the North and she won that battle, but they could not vote in the South and racism still ran through many reform movements. I don’t imagine that when Wells died, her last thoughts were of all the political victories in her life. But if Wells woke up today, she would perhaps be both amazed at the progress we have made as a society and frustrated and angry at all the work we still need to do.

Maybe this is the lesson to take from Wells. We can’t necessarily expect to see immediate change or even positive change in our lifetimes. We just have to fight like hell to try. What happens in history depends so much on forces much larger than ourselves. At the time I am writing this, I am 50 years old. I’ve been around long enough to feel good about some of the positive changes I’ve seen in my life. But I also see all the horrible things about our world that have only gotten worse in my lifetime. I can by no means say that I when I die, the world will be a better place than when I entered it. But what I can say is that by keeping the story of Ida Wells front and center in my head, knowing she laid the groundwork for so much radical change that transformed America, I can shut out that despair and get to work myself.

Others take more concrete lessons. The reparations movement, to pay Black Americans for the sins of slavery and racism, takes inspiration from Wells’ ideas that connected the racism of the past to the racism of the present and demand real accountability from the nation and from the world on both time frames. Moreover, modern intersectionality activists find Wells so powerful because of her early understanding of interlocking oppressions and the need to address them all to defeat any of them. Mostly, she advocated for action. She loathed indifference, including in the Black community. She demanded accountability, including from herself, and wanted people to fight for justice.[28]

What more do we want from a historical figure to inspire us to live her vision?  

[1] Beth Kruse, Rhondalyn K. Peairs, Jodi Skipper, and Shennette Garrett-Scott, “Remembering Ida, Ida Remembering: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Black Political Culture in Reconstruction-Era Mississippi,” Southern Cultures 26, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 20-41.

[2] Hilary Green, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 1988)

[3] James West Davidson, They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Question of Race (Oxford University Press, 2008), 34-52.

[4] Stephen V. Ash, A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot that Shook the Nation One Year after the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2013); Brian D. Page, “’In the Hands of the Lord’: Migrants and Community Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Adam Goudsouzian and Charles W. McKinney, Jr., eds., An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 13-38.

[5] Davidson, They Say, 64-75; Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 71-72.

[6] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 59-63, 71-75; Davidson, They Say, 100-23.

[7] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 75-79; Davidson, They Say, 124-36; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1993); Terence Finnegan, A Deed so Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881-1940 (University of Virginia Press, 2013); Charles Seguin and David Rigby, “National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States, 1883 to 1941,” Socius 5 (2019), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023119841780.

[8] Quoted in Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron de Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Judy Tzu-Chin Wu eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford University Press, 2016), 323-29. Also, see Davidson, They Say, 137-50; Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 81-85.

[9] Davidson, They Say, 151-58.

[10] Davidson, They Say, 159-67.

[11] Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 27-59.

[12] Rebecca Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 117-28; Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 81-88, 112-20.

[13] Sarah Silkey, Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism (University of Georgia Press, 2015).

[14] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 103-10.

[15] Davidson, They Say, 171-73; Robert J. Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Harvard University Press, 2009).

[16] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 174-82.

[17] Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (Oxford University Press, 1991); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley & the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (Yale University Press, 1995).

[18] Chaebong Nam, “Civic Friendship in the Wild: A Historic Example of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jane Addams,” Schools 20, no. 2 (September 2023): 448-68; Wanda A. Hendricks, Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (Indiana University Press, 1998).

[19] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 186-214.

[20] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 138-41.

[21] Michelle Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 48, 52, 75.

[22] Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (Oxford University Press, 2011).

[23] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 102-03, 110-12.

[24] Hendricks, Gender, Race and Politics in the Midwest, 79-95; Cathleen D. Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Labor Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[25] Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Harvard University Press, 2019), 99-110.

[26] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 149-68; “Elaine Massacre,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/elaine-massacre-of-1919-1102/.

[27] Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 215-46.

[28] Lawrie Balfour, “Ida B. Wells and ‘Color Line Justice’: Rethinking Reparations in Feminist Terms,” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 3 (September 2015): 680-96.

If you would like this series to visit American organizers profiled in Organizing America, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Oakes is in Stewarts Point, California and Yuri Kochiyama is in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.