Photo: Adam Cuerden, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Her parents died in a yellow fever epidemic when she was 16, and she became a teacher to support her siblings.
In 1884, on a train near Memphis, she refused to leave the first-class ladies’ car. She sued the railroad and won in a lower court, but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision.
The Memphis lynching
Wells became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In 1892 three Black grocers, including her friend Thomas Moss, were lynched in Memphis. She wrote about it and urged Black residents to leave the city.
While she was out of town, a mob destroyed her newspaper office. She did not go back.
Reporting the facts
Wells published “Southern Horrors” in 1892 and “The Red Record” in 1895. She used newspaper reports to show how often lynchings followed no crime at all. She lectured in Britain to build pressure on American leaders.
She settled in Chicago, married lawyer Ferdinand Barnett and helped found the NAACP. She died in 1931. In 2020 she received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize special citation.
