Ida B. Wells: An Early Rosa Parks and a Progressive Journalist

Born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, Ida B. Wells certainly came a long way during the course of her life and proved to be an incredibly important journalist and figurehead of movements for both blacks and women.

From the start of her life, Ida was taking on big things. Her parents, a famous cook and a carpenter, both died of Yellow Fever when she was 16 years old, and, the oldest of eight, she had to step up and make a living for her younger siblings. She went to the local Rust College to expand her education so she could work at a higher paying job, and in the meantime was a teacher. Once she gained some financial stability and got her education, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to help her aunt raise the rest of her brothers and sisters.

When Ida was 22, she purchased a first class ticket on a train in Memphis, and sat down in the first class section. Soon after she sat down, the conductor ordered her to give up her seat so that a white man could sit there. She refused, citing the 14th Amendment, and he tried to forcefully remove her. In her autobiography, Ida recounts how the conductor "tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand." The conductor fetched two more train workers to help drag her off of the train.

Immediately, she went and hired an attorney, suing the train company. Her case won in the lower courts, but the railroad, not wanting to admit defeat, took the case to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, where it was appealed.

In response to her encounter, papers began asking her to tell her story, and in doing so, she developed a love for journalism. She began to write more regularly, and eventually became a partner in Free Speech and Headlight, a paper in Memphis. No topic was off-limits to Ida, and she boldly wrote her opinions about lynchings, segregation, and other social issues under the pseudonym Iola.

Following the lynching of Tom Wells, murdered by whites because his grocery store was creating economic competition with them and they felt he was too successful for a black man, Ida urged her fellow blacks to free from Memphis in her final editorial from Free Speech. Whites destroyed her office while she was away, and she could no longer stay in Memphis.

Joining the Great Migration she helped to stimulate, Ida moved to Chicago, where she continued to write her muckrakers and exposes on injustice. She also helped to found multiple organizations for blacks and women. Additionally, she and Jane Addams convinced the Chicago schools to remain unsegregated, preventing at least some of the horrors she had experienced in the South.

Her battle for justice was never over. Next, she marched on DC in the 1913 suffrage march, and after that, she joined with W. E. B. Dubois and other prominent blacks to form the N.A.A.C.P. She was one of two women founders. She also joined Dubois in his opposition of Booker T. Washington, as she felt social justice had to be taken in the present or nothing would ever get done.

In 1930, agitated by the lack of political action happening around her, Ida ran for Illinois state legislature, which she unfortunately lost. She died in 1931.

Ida B. Wells was a true crusader for social justice, using the words of her journalism and the power of her actions to fight for the rights of blacks and women.

http://idabwellsmuseum.org/ida-b-wells-barnett/

http://people.duke.edu/~ldbaker/classes/aaih/caaih/ibwells/ibwbkgrd.html

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people_wells.html