Ida B. Wells

Her father was the son of the man who owned him, hired out at 18 as a carpenter's apprentice with his wages going to his enslaver. Her mother had been taken from a Virginia plantation as a child and spent years after the war looking for her family. Wells was born on their enslaver's place at Holly Springs, Mississippi, in July 1862, and grew up in a household where her father sat as a trustee of a new freedmen's college and refused to vote Democratic. A yellow fever epidemic in September 1878 killed both parents and one of her brothers while she was at her grandmother's farm. Relatives proposed splitting up the five surviving children. Wells, 16, took a country teaching post to keep them together.

She wrote on the side as Iola until the Memphis Board of Education fired her in 1891 for what she printed about its Black schools. After that, writing was the whole job. Two lecture tours of Britain in 1893 and 1894 produced a standing anti-lynching committee there and turned British opinion into leverage at home. In Chicago she founded a settlement house and the Alpha Suffrage Club, and in 1921 went south for the first time in almost 30 years to investigate the Elaine massacre. The pamphlets and the Memphis killings behind them are BriefHistory's ground. What follows is what the work cost her.

She never lived in Memphis again. Frederick Douglass backed her, and after he died in 1895 the men who inherited national Black leadership, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois alike, found her too radical to work with. Her name is absent from the original list of NAACP founders, and the two accounts do not agree: Du Bois wrote that she chose to be left off, and she wrote that he left her off. She toured with a nursing infant, and Susan B. Anthony, who admired her, said she seemed distracted. During the First World War the federal government put her under surveillance as a dangerous race agitator. She lost the presidency of the National Association of Colored Women to Mary McLeod Bethune in 1924 and lost a run for the Illinois Senate in 1930.

She died of kidney disease in Chicago in March 1931 with her autobiography unfinished. Her daughter Alfreda Duster edited it and got it published in 1970, 39 years later, and the modern interest in Wells dates roughly from then. Chicago named a housing project for her in 1941 and demolished it in 2011. In 2018 The New York Times ran her obituary at last, in a series acknowledging that its death notices had been dominated by white men, and the city renamed Congress Parkway as Ida B. Wells Drive. Richard Hunt's monument went up in Bronzeville in 2021, Memphis put a statue beside the church where she printed Free Speech, and in 2025 she went onto a quarter.

Ida B. Wells's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Free Speech and Headlight other
  The Memphis weekly she co-owned and edited, run out of the Beale Street Baptist Church 1889
• Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases book
  The pamphlet that made her name and cost her the South 1892
• A Red Record book
  A statistical account of three years of lynching, with a chapter on Frances Willard 1895
• Negro Fellowship League company
  A settlement house and reading room for Black men arriving in Chicago 1908
• Alpha Suffrage Club company
  Its organizing helped elect Chicago's first Black alderman two years later 1913
• Crusade for Justice book
  The autobiography she never finished, edited and published by her daughter 1970

• September 1878 aged 16 Yellow fever kills her parents and one brother in a single epidemic She was 16, and visiting her grandmother's farm when it swept Holly Springs.
• September 15, 1883 aged 21 Refuses to leave the first-class ladies car and is dragged out by three men The Supreme Court had struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 earlier that year.
• December 24, 1884 aged 22 Wins 500 dollars from the railroad in circuit court
• 1887 aged ~25 The Tennessee Supreme Court reverses and orders her to pay costs The court held that her purpose had been to harass with a view to this suit.
• 1891 aged ~29 The Memphis Board of Education fires her over her columns on Black schools
• June 27, 1895 aged 32 Marries the attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett in Chicago She kept her own name in front of his, which was then almost unheard of.
• March 3, 1913 aged 50 Told to march at the back of the suffrage parade, she waits and steps into the Illinois delegation Two white colleagues linked arms with her for the rest of the route.
• 1921 aged ~59 Returns to the South for the first time in almost 30 years to investigate the Elaine massacre
• March 25, 1931 aged 68 Dies of kidney disease in Chicago at 68 Her autobiography broke off unfinished and stayed unpublished for 39 years.

• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. mentor and defender
• Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906
  Suffragist and civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. uneasy ally
• Alice Paul 1885–1977
  Strategist of the final campaign for women's suffrage and author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. organized the parade she refused to march at the back of
• Toni Morrison 1931–2019
  Nobel laureate whose novels, including Beloved, explored the African American experience with profound lyricism. read her memoirs on film
• Nikole Hannah-Jones b. 1976
  Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who created The 1619 Project for The New York Times Magazine. named her reporting society after her