Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an investigative journalist, civil rights advocate, and feminist who led the nation’s first anti-lynching campaign from Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892. She was one of the earliest women to co-own a newspaper in a major city; was a cofounder of the NAACP; and was a founder of the first Black women’s suffrage organization in Chicago, which made her a force in politics.

Born into slavery in Mississippi, Wells moved to Memphis where she worked as a teacher. Her activist and journalistic career began in 1883 when she refused to leave the first-class “Ladies Car” of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. Forcibly extricated from the car, Wells sued the railroad, winning in the lower courts. Later fired for criticizing the school system, Wells took the opportunity to throw herself fully into newspaper work. By 1889 she was known as “The Princess of the Press” and co-owned the Memphis Free Speech newspaper, but after investigating the rise in lynchings a mob destroyed her newspaper office and she was threatened with death.

Subsequently, Wells crisscrossed the country and traveled twice to the British Isles, lecturing, writing, and organizing anti-lynching committees to mobilize citizens and pressure leaders and government officials. In 1895, she published A Red Record, which was a detailed analysis and documentation of lynching. In 1909, she was a founder of the NAACP, which she pushed to fight for a national anti-lynching law. In 1910, Wells-Barnett founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League, a settlement house for Black migrants from the South. In 1913, she founded the first Black women’s suffrage organization in Chicago, the Alpha Suffrage Club, which was instrumental in the election of the first Black alderman in that city. From 1913 to 1916, she served as a probation officer of the Chicago municipal court. In 1930, a year before her death, Wells-Barnett ran, unsuccessfully, as an independent for an Illinois state senate seat.