Ida B. Wells-Barnett: A Biography PDF

# 14 Ida B. Wells-Barnett July 16, 1862 - March 25, 1931 ## The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. Ida Bell Wells had to grow up fast. At the age of sixteen, she and her five younger siblings were orphaned. Her father, mother, and baby brother died in a yellow fever epid...

# 14 Ida B. Wells-Barnett July 16, 1862 - March 25, 1931 ## The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. Ida Bell Wells had to grow up fast. At the age of sixteen, she and her five younger siblings were orphaned. Her father, mother, and baby brother died in a yellow fever epidemic that raged through Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1878. Ida had been born a slave. Her father was of mixed ancestry - his mother was a slave and his father was her white owner. Her mother was part African American, part Native American. But when Ida was six months old, she and her family were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Her mother became a cook and her father was a carpenter who helped start a university for freed slaves. It was while she was a student at the college that Ida's parents died. "After being a light-hearted school girl, I suddenly found myself at the head of a family," she said. Without consulting Ida, family friends decided to divide the children among different homes and send Ida's disabled sister to an institution. But Ida had other ideas. She convinced a school six miles out of town that she was eighteen and could teach. It was a hard life - she commuted by mule - but she kept her family together for two years. Tragedy struck again when her grandmother, who helped with childcare, had a stroke, and Ida and her sisters went to live with an aunt in Memphis. In Memphis, Ida encountered real racism. One day in 1884, she boarded a train to Nashville, Tennessee. At only five feet tall, she was a tiny woman. She was dressed fashionably in a full-length corseted dress, a hat, and gloves. She carried an overnight bag and a parasol. She had a thirty-five-cent ticket for the first-class ladies' car, and she settled into her seat. But the railroad had segregated cars, and the conductor insisted she ride in the "colored car" at the back of the train. Ida refused. The conductor and several passengers dragged Ida kicking and screaming down the aisle. Pulling at her arm, the conductor tore a sleeve off her dress. "The moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand," she said. Still, they managed to haul her off the train. But Ida didn't back down - she sued the railroad and won! Ida's life of activism started on that train. She began writing articles about the treatment of African Americans for local newspapers. While still holding down a teaching job, she became a contributor to The Evening Star, a black-owned newspaper in Washington, DC. Nothing could have suited her better. "It was through journalism that I found the real me," she said. Through her reporting, Ida began battling racial injustices, such as the poor condition of black schools and Jim Crow segregation laws in the South. For Ida, there was only one way to erase bias: "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them." In 1888, as the editor and co-owner of The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, she zeroed in on the injustice that most outraged her - lynching. At a lynching, racist mobs kidnapped, tortured, and shot or hanged African Americans, often in front of jeering crowds. Three friends of Ida's had been brutally lynched after defending their grocery store from a mob of white men. Her outspokenness in Memphis put her life in danger. She received death threats and was stalked on her way to and from work. In 1892, a gang of while men burned down the office of the Memphis Free Speech. It was time for Ida to leave - she first moved to New York and the next year to Chicago. There, she continued to write, and in 1895, married attorney Ferdinand Barnett. The couple had four children, but her busy home life didn't keep Ida from her activism - she added suffrage to her crusade against lynching. In 1913, Illinois granted women the right to vote in national elections. But, seeing that African American women in Chicago weren't becoming involved in the national suffrage fight, she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first black women's suffrage association. On March 3, 1913, suffragists staged a massive parade in Washington, DC, and women poured in from around the country. The Alpha Suffrage Club sent a delegation. Shockingly, organizers told Ida that black women had to march at the back of the parade. They worried that their cause would be hurt if people saw black and white women walking together. They thought lawmakers would resist suffrage if it meant boundaries separating the races would be erased. When the parade began, Ida was nowhere to be found. Her friends and colleagues wondered whether she'd gone home. But as the women paraded down the street, Ida popped out from the crowd of onlookers. Calmly, she fell in line with the white Illinois delegation. No one dared drag her away this time. After the governor of Illinois signed the bill granting women in Ida's adopted state the right to vote, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt said that "suffrage sentiment doubled overnight." National suffrage was still seven years away, but through her activism, Ida had moved the needle. Ida's protest on the train in Memphis, Tennessee, took place seventy-one years before Rosa Parks refused to give her seat on a bus to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama.