Ida B. Wells: “Lynching: Our National Crime”

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 five younger brothers and sisters. Success as a freelance writer eventually led to a career as a newspaper journalist and editor. Through newspaper articles; lectures in England, Scotland, and Wales as well as the United States; and two pamphlets published in the 1890s—Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895)—she quickly gained public attention as a crusader against lynching.

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 brutally murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892 and Wells publicly denounced those lynchings, an angry white mob destroyed the newspaper office of the Memphis Free Speech, of which she was editor and part owner.

Philosophically, Wells disagreed with the accommodationist program advocated by Booker T. Washington and openly debated with him the proper course for black progress. 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 NAACP and was a founding member of that organization. Because of her reputation for being fiercely independent, Wells's relationship with the organizers of the conference proved to be problematic. Feeling slighted at being omitted from the Committee of Forty, a body charged with creating the new organization, Wells walked out of the meeting. Although she was later added to the executive committee of the NAACP, she would never play a significant role in its operation.

Offended by her treatment and distrustful of the predominantly white leadership that controlled the new body in its early days, she retreated to her home base in Chicago to focus on organizing civic programs that she could direct. Although she was never a black separatist, Wells 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. During a decade that saw a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, Wells became increasingly disillusioned with the state of race relations in America. 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 on March 25, 1931.