Our Summer Salute to Ida B. Wells is our featured story this month celebrating women past and present.
The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 granted all American women the right to vote, but in reality, many African Americans were kept from voting by state laws requiring poll taxes and literacy testing. Ida B. Wells-Barnett fought against this injustice.
Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. At the age of 16, she got a job and became the head of the family when her parents died. A few years later, Ida moved the family to Memphis, Tennessee, and obtained a teaching position. While she was teaching, she also wrote articles for several newspapers, including one that she co-owned. In 1891, she was fired from her teaching job for writing articles about the appalling conditions in black schools.
After the unjust murder of a friend in 1892, Wells investigated lynchings. When her newspaper office was burned to the ground because of an article about black men falsely accused of rape, Wells moved to Chicago where she met and married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer and activist.
Wells was active in the national Women’s Club movement and also worked with Frederick Douglass as a cofounder of the NAACP. In 1913, she and her white colleague Belle Squire founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, the first black suffrage organization in Illinois.
In 1913, Wells traveled to D.C. to march in the suffrage parade. When Alice Paul asked the black women’s clubs to march at the back of the parade, Ida B. Wells dropped out and refused. As the Illinois group marched by her, she fell in and joined arms with two of her white colleagues.
Wells has received many posthumous awards including a Pulitzer Prize special citation on May 4, 2020, for her reporting on the horrific violence and lynchings against African Americans.
Sources:
Retrieved from Women’s History.org Biography.com Wikipedia.org
Book:
Wells, Ida B.; Duster, Alfreda, ed. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).