Holly Springs, and a Train to Memphis
Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in July 1862, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation, to parents who became active in Reconstruction politics. When a yellow fever epidemic swept the town in 1878 it killed her mother, her father and her infant brother in a matter of days. Sixteen years old, she lengthened her skirts, claimed to be eighteen, took a country teaching post and kept the surviving children together rather than allow them to be parcelled out among relatives.
In 1883 a conductor on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad ordered her out of the ladies' car and she refused, biting his hand as three men dragged her off to the applause of white passengers. She sued and won five hundred dollars in the local court, and the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the judgment in 1887. She began writing for Black church papers under the name Iola and by 1889 was part-owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech.
The Year Everything Changed
In March 1892 a white mob seized Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart from a Memphis jail and shot them. Their offence was owning the People's Grocery, a successful Black store competing with a white one nearby, and Moss was a close friend of Wells and godfather to her first child. The killing destroyed the assumption she had held with most of the country, that lynching was a savage response to actual crime, and it turned a journalist into an investigator.
She examined case after case in the white southern press itself and demonstrated that the accusation of assault on white women was raised in only a minority of lynchings, and that where relationships existed they were often consensual. Her editorial saying so in May 1892 brought a mob to the Free Speech office, which was wrecked while she was travelling in the North. Told she would be killed if she returned, she stayed away and published Southern Horrors that year and A Red Record in 1895.
Uncomfortable in Every Room
Wells took her evidence to Britain on two speaking tours in 1893 and 1894, where the resulting anti-lynching committees embarrassed American civic leaders into responding. She wrote a pamphlet with Frederick Douglass protesting the exclusion of Black Americans from the Chicago world's fair, settled in that city, married the lawyer Ferdinand Barnett and kept her own name alongside his. She founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913 and, at the suffrage parade in Washington that year, refused to walk at the rear and joined her state delegation.
She quarrelled with almost everyone eventually. She confronted the temperance leader Frances Willard over her indulgence of southern white opinion, rejected Booker T. Washington's accommodation with segregation, and though present at the founding of the NAACP was pushed to its margins as too militant for its strategy. She died in Chicago in 1931 and was buried in relative obscurity. In 2020 the Pulitzer board awarded her a posthumous special citation for her reporting. She spent her last decades in Chicago politics and ran for the state senate in 1930.
