Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was born a slave. After the Civil War, she attended college and moved to Memphis with other members of her family.
In 1884, a train conductor told her to give up her seat to a white man and move to another car. She refused to do it. The conductor then tried to drag her out of her seat, and she bit him. Wells was then forcefully removed from the train.
Wells hired an attorney and sued the railroad company. She won the lawsuit in circuit court, but it was overturned by the state supreme court.
Wells started writing about her experiences and condemning violence against African Americans in newspapers in Memphis and around the country.
In one editorial she stated that “The old Southern voice that was once heard and made the Negroes jump and run like rats to their holes is ‘shut up,’ or might well be, for the Negro of today is not the same as Negroes were thirty years ago, and it can’t be expected that the Negro of today will take what was forced upon him thirty years back.”
In 1892 three African Americans, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, were attacked by a mob in Memphis. They fought back, shooting one of the attackers. They were arrested, but then dragged from jail by a lynch mob and brutally killed. Wells claimed their real offense was that they were the owners of a grocery store that was taking black peoples’ business away from a nearby white-owned grocery store.
Moss was a friend of Wells, and she was outraged by the murders. She wrote “There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms…There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts.”
When Wells was out-of-town, a mob broke into her newspaper office and destroyed it. They warned her not to come back to Memphis. Wells took their advice and left town, eventually landing in Chicago, She established a newspaper there where she continued to actively campaign for civil rights, writing articles and pamphlets against lynching. She later was involved in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, although she later broke with the group over strategy.
Picture Credits:
- Photograph of Ida B. Wells. This photo was published in 1893. It was originally included in the work, Women of Distinction: Remarkable in works and invincible in character. New York Public Library.
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