IDA .B. WELLS
July 16, 1862, Holly Springs, MS – March 25, 1931, Chicago, IL
Education : Rusk College and Fisk University
NAACP founder, Civil rights, and Social Activist . she was the founder of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1896 and also co-founded the National Afro-American Council. Ida was the Founder of the Negro Fellowship League in Chicago in 1910. In 1913, Ms. Wells started the first black kindergarten in Chicago. She also created the Alpha Suffrage Club (these Ida B. Wells clubs still exist today throughout the country) to support a constitutional amendment allowing women to vote and many other organizations. Ida was a journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, and Georgist.
Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil War. At the age of 14 she lost both her parents and her infant brother in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. She went to work and kept the rest of the family together with the help of her grandmother. Later, moving with some of her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee, Wells found better pay as a teacher. Soon, Wells co-owned and wrote for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper. Her reporting in the newspaper covered incidents of racial segregation and inequality.
In the 1890s, Wells documented lynching in the United States in articles and through her pamphlets called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases, and The Red Record, investigating frequent claims of whites that lynchings were reserved for Black criminals only. Wells exposed lynching as a barbaric practice used by whites in the South to intimidate and oppress African Americans who created economic and political competition—and a subsequent threat of loss of power—for whites. Wells’s pamphlet set out to tell the truth behind the rising violence in the South against African Americans. At this time, the white press continued to paint the African Americans involved in such incidents as villains and whites as innocent victims. Ida B. Wells was a respected voice in the African-American community in the South that people listened to. Thus, Wells’s pamphlet was needed to show people the truth about this violence and advocate for justice for African Americans in the South. A white mob destroyed her newspaper office and presses as her investigative reporting was carried nationally in Black-owned newspapers. Subjected to continued threats, Wells left Memphis for Chicago, Illinois. She married Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895 and had a family while continuing her work writing, speaking, and organizing for civil rights and the women’s movement for the rest of her life.
Wells was outspoken regarding her beliefs as a Black female activist and faced regular public disapproval, sometimes including from other leaders within the civil rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement. She was active in women’s rights and the women’s suffrage movement, establishing several notable women’s organizations. A skilled and persuasive speaker, Wells traveled nationally and internationally on lecture tours.
Wells died of kidney disease on March 25, 1931, in Chicago, and in 2020 was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize special citation “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”
Early life.
PICS mary garrity GOGGLE ART RESTORATION.