Ida B. Wells: “Eight Men Lynched”

About the Author

Ida B. Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. When her parents and a younger brother died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1878, she accepted the first of several jobs as a rural schoolteacher to help support her six younger brothers and sisters. Success as a freelance writer eventually led to a career as a newspaper journalist and editor. Through newspaper articles and lectures, she quickly gained fame as a crusader against lynching. In addition to numerous newspaper and magazine articles, Wells is known for two pamphlets published in the 1890s—Southern Horrors and The Red Record. After marrying Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a Chicago newspaperman and civil rights advocate in 1895, Wells devoted much of her time to civic reform work. She also gained notoriety as an investigator into the causes of race riots. Wells disagreed philosophically with the accommodationist program advocated by Booker T. Washington. Although she was a signer of “The Call,” a document inviting prominent black and white Americans to a conference that led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and was a founding member of that organization, she found it too accommodating to whites. Ida Wells-Barnett died in Chicago of uremia on March 25, 1931.

Wells confronted a racially divided South on numerous occasions. While traveling to her job as a schoolteacher, she experienced segregation firsthand when a railway conductor ordered her to move to a car reserved for “colored” passengers even though she had purchased a first-class ticket. She took her case to court and won, only to have the Tennessee Supreme Court overturn that decision. She lost her teaching job in 1891 because she wrote articles criticizing the poor quality of education given to black children in segregated schools. When three friends of hers were lynched in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892 and Wells publicly denounced their murders, the newspaper office of the Memphis Free Speech, of which she was editor and part owner, was destroyed by an angry white mob.

After the Memphis incident, Wells began a lifelong crusade against lynching. Through newspaper articles in the New York Age and later in the Chicago Conservator and in lectures in the United States and Great Britain, she demanded that the United States confront lynching, which she termed “our national crime.” Her two major pamphlets, Southern Horrors and The Red Record, offered detailed statistical information on lynching as well as her own controversial interpretation of the data presented. As Wells continued her public crusade against lynching, she began to investigate the causal factors behind race riots that seemed to be on the rise in a number of the nation's major cities. She also began to devote much of her time to civic reform in Chicago and worked to persuade black women to become directly involved in organizational work for racial justice.

Defiant and confrontational throughout her life, Wells challenged the racial policies of both the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, openly debated Booker T. Washington on the proper course for black progress, and withdrew from the NAACP because she was not comfortable with its liberal white leadership. During the 1920s, a decade that saw a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, Wells became increasingly disillusioned with the state of race relations in America. Never a black separatist, she was drawn to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association during the 1920s because of his call for black self-help and economic independence and for instilling a new racial consciousness among African Americans. Feeling that she had lost her influence as a spokesperson for racial issues, Wells began writing her Autobiography. She was at work on the project when she died.