We must lift up the legacies of Black
women who preceded us, and praise trailblazers
such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett. A journalist,
civil rights activist, NAACP founder and
educator who spoke out loudly against the
injustices of her day without compromise, she
remains a role model for Black journalists and
racial justice activists nearly a century
after her death.
Born into slavery in Mississippi during
the Civil War, Wells-Barnett came of age
during Reconstruction - a pivotal moment for liberated
Black people struggling for their rights. And
she was a champion for civil rights and Black
women’s suffrage who fought against the
injustices of Jim Crow.
For example, in 1891 Wells-Barnett was
fired from her job as a teacher in a
segregated Memphis public school after openly
criticizing the conditions of the city’s Black
schools.
Further, while traveling from Memphis to
Nashville in May 1884, Wells-Barnett was removed
from a train for refusing to sit in the
Blacks-only car after purchasing a first-class
ticket, biting the hand of one of the men who
ejected her from the train. She subsequently
sued the railroad company, winning $500 in a
lower court case before the state supreme
court overturned the judgement. The experience
was a turning point, prompting Wells-Barnett
to pursue writing.
At a time when Black America faced a
reign of terror and racial violence from the
white mob, this dynamic Black woman used
journalism as a weapon to wage a one-woman
campaign against lynching. Through her
articles in Black-owned publications, and
subsequently as the owner of two newspapers, The
Memphis Free Speech and
Headlight
and Free Speech, Wells-Barnett laid bare the
brutality of the Jim Crow South and the
violence against Black bodies. Her writings
eviscerated the claims that Black
men were lynched for raping white women. In
contrast, rape was not alleged in two-thirds
of lynchings, while in some cases white women
attempted to cover up a consensual
relationship with a Black man.
“In slave times the Negro was kept
subservient and submissive by the frequency
and severity of the scourging, but, with
freedom, a new system of intimidation came
into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and
scourged; he was killed,” Wells-Barnett wrote in The Red
Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged
Causes of Lynching in the United States. “The white
man’s victory soon became complete by fraud,
violence, intimidation and murder.”
When a white lynch mob in 1892
murdered three Black men for owning a
grocery store that took business away
from a white business, Wells-Barnett
wrote about it. Her commentaries
infuriated local white folks, as a mob
burned down her press and threatened
to kill her, forcing
her to leave
Memphis and move to Chicago.
This was the intended role of the Black
press - as a change agent illuminating Black
suffering and empowering its voices, which Ida
B. Wells-Barnett embodied. Ida brought that
smoke. Given that Black people are just as
embattled now, fighting for their lives as
they were back then, this shero provides a
roadmap to follow.
