Ida B. Wells was a Black person born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Ida B. Wells-Barnett died in 1931 in Chicago, Illinois. If you know anything about U.S. history you can see how amazing her place and time is for our country. (Slavery –> Civil War–>Reconstruction –> Jim Crow –> Great Migration –> WW1 –> women’s suffrage.)

Also, Ida was a superhero. Her superpowers are self esteem and journalism.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s life cannot be summarized. But I will try, with a list and two stories, and some resources so you can learn more. Let me start with the stories.

Story 1.
Ida’s father, Jim, was the only son of his enslaver, Morgan Wells, by his enslaved mother, Peggy. Morgan cared for his son enough to apprentice him to a carpenter, but not enough to set him free, apparently. Ida said that Jim was the “comfort and companion” of his white father. Morgan’s wife, Margaret, had no children herself. When Morgan died, Margaret had Peggy (Ida’s grandmother) “stripped and whipped.” Later, during the Civil War when many Southerners had little to eat, Margaret was starving. And Peggy saved Margaret’s life. 

When I first read this story I thought, what a compassionate and moral person Peggy was! After reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson I thought, maybe it was Stockholm syndrome? Now I’m thinking it’s all of that, but mostly, it is so complicated. 

Story 2.
At the beginning of 1913 Ida started a Black women’s suffrage club in Chicago. She was assisted by two white suffragists, Virginia Brooks and Belle Squire. One of the first things the club did was raise money so that Ida could represent them by joining the Illinois contingent at the spectacular suffrage procession in Washington D.C. (a brain child of perSISTER Alice Paul). When this group was mustering for the parade, they were told that Black women would have to march at the back so that they would not offend the Southern white women, who had threatened to leave the procession. Ida eloquently refused, and Brooks and Squire tried to support their friend and promised to march with Ida elsewhere in the parade. As the procession started they could not find Ida. They started marching with their contingent and Ida came forth from the sidelines and linked arms with her friends and marched with the Illinois group and no one tried to stop her. This was reported, along with a photograph, in the Chicago Tribune of March 5, 1913.

These stories show the struggle for feminism to be inclusive, and thus are at the hub of how to understand Female Power.

Following is a  list of some of my favorite things about Ida B. Wells-Barnett and some things I learned while researching her. There are many more amazing things to learn about Ida.

• Ida’s first memory is of reading the newspaper out loud to her father’s admiring friends.

• At 16, Ida became responsible for her 5 surviving siblings when her parents died in a Yellow Fever epidemic.

• Ida loved to dress well and regretted spending rent money on a new hat. She called anger her consuming sin.

• Ida bit the conductor’s hand when he dragged her out of her seat in the first class ladies train car. She sued the train company and won the case but lost on appeal. She knew she deserved to be treated like a lady. There were not equal first class accommodations for Black people.

• She started out earning money as a school teacher. Then she started in journalism by writing letters to the papers and editing the publication of the lyceum cultural group she was a part of. There was a thriving African-American press with many newspapers, many published by churches. She made a name for herself, exhorting her people to improve themselves, and criticizing shortcomings, and soon she was being paid for her writing. She agreed to be the editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in exchange for an ownership share. She later worked hard to increase circulation around the region and printed the newspaper on pink stock so that people could find it easily on the newsstand.

• She lost her teaching job when she exposed poor conditions in the schools, corruption on the school board, and the questionable morals of some teachers. She exposed a philandering Christian minister and the community of ministers who closed ranks to protect him. When they threatened to attack her livelihood by telling their congregations to stop buying the Free Speech, she exposed their threats and they backed down and the misbehaving minister was penalized.

• When her close friends were lynched in Memphis she investigated the crime. She showed that they had been tortured and murdered because they were successfully competing with a white-run business.

• There used to be about the same number of lynchings targeting whites and Blacks.

• She started looking in to the rising number of lynchings of Black people. Until she started reporting on these, lynchings had been accepted by people, both white and Black people as the lynching victim’s fault. She found that Black economic success prompted white retribution. She also found that most of the so-called rapes of white women were really consensual sexual relationships. Because of sexual and racial politics, there was hardly any way for a white woman and a Black man to legally love each other.

• She riled things up in Memphis when she encouraged Black people to withhold their labor, to stop spending money at white businesses, and to just move away, because they were not safe there. She maintained that Black people deserve the protection of the laws. 

• Six thousand Black people left for Kansas and Oklahoma after Ida wrote her articles on the Memphis lynching. White businesses suffered from this loss. Black people stopped riding the streetcars and the streetcar owners came to Ida to ask her to assure the Black riders that the newly electrified cars were safe. Ida wrote about this visit and told her people to keep up the boycott.

• She started carrying a pistol in her purse. She writes: “I’d already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.”

• On May 21, 1892, Wells published an editorial in the Free Speech refuting what she called “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women. If Southern men are not careful, … a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” She had many examples of consensual relationships between white women and Black men. Shortly afterward a mob destroyed her newspaper and office equipment and white people made it clear that Ida herself would be murdered if she returned to Memphis from her trip to New York. She never returned to Memphis.

• The white press would often slander her. She looked into suing some of them, and her lawyer recommended another lawyer, Ferdinand Barnett, to investigate Ida to see if any of the slander could be true. He couldn’t find anything bad but she decided it wouldn’t be worth her time and money to go forward with the suit. She later ended up marrying Ferdinand Barnett. He knew well what he was getting into. From what I have read he supported her 100%.

• She did more than anybody else during her lifetime to elucidate and fight the rising tide of organized extrajudicial violence against Black people. It worked.

• She worked hard to develop organizations for Black women and Black people so that there would be some persuasive authority to defend the rights of African-Americans. She worked to establish the NAACP but in a sneaky and confusing move, W.E.B. De Bois excluded her from the first board and she later regretted leaving in a huff.

• She would speak to mayors and governors, complete with Shakespearian references, and sometimes get them to do the right thing.

• She researched and investigated, sometimes incognito. She wrote clearly and simply. She was a persuasive public speaker. She understood the power of words, and through words she had power. She was smart. She was tough. She was prudish, but probably not more than any other higher-than-working-class Victorian. She cared deeply about Black people and women and working people. She had a passion for justice. She appreciated beautiful things. She didn’t believe that Black people should accept inferior status. She knew her worth. She knew that Black lives matter.

DESIGN NOTE

I’ve chosen to work from this photograph of Ida because she is looking directly at the camera. The more iconic images of her when she was younger have her looking off to the side, perhaps it is a  Victorian style of feminine depictions. I prefer the image to confront us directly. 

Photo: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Ida B. Wells, journalist and civil rights activist” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1920 – 1929. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/87aada9f-45f3-e71c-e040-e00a180662cd

RESOURCES

Wikipedia, of course. I just sent them some $$.

IDA A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching by Paula J. Giddings

Crusade for Justice by Ida B. Wells (her unfinished autobiography), edited by Alfreda M. Duster

Ida B. Wells: A Passion For Justice: The Pioneering African American Journalist & Activist documentary by William Greaves from 1989, available through public libraries via Kanopy. Especially wonderful is Toni Morrison reading some of the fiercer bits from Crusade for Justice.

Works by Ida B. Wells at Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5765