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From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues

Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell (1862-1931)

Ida Wells-Barnett crusaded against lynching, worked in the black women’s club movement, and helped found the Alpha Suffrage Club, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Association of Colored Women. Born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells-Barnett taught school to help support her five brothers and sisters following the deaths of her parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. In 1883 and 1884, she attended Fisk University and the Lemoyne Institute.

Wells-Barnett’s protests against segregation began on a train trip from Memphis to Woodstock in 1884, when a railroad conductor ordered her to move to the smoking car. Having purchased a first-class ticket, she refused and was forcibly removed. She sued the railroad and won, but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision in 1887 and ruled against her.

From 1884 to 1891, she taught school in Memphis, Tennessee. Wells-Barnett became a reporter for and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1889 and gained a wide reputation for her militant opinions. She lost her teaching job in 1891 for writing articles critical of the education offered to African American children.

Following the lynching of three African American friends in 1892, Wells-Barnett began an editorial campaign against lynching. In one article she wrote: “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” After writing the article, Wells-Barnett left for Philadelphia. When the article appeared, a mob broke into the newspaper’s building and destroyed the presses. Wells-Barnett was warned not to return to Memphis.

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She moved to New York City and became a staff writer for New York Age, where she wrote and lectured about lynching. Wells-Barnett published two pamphlets on lynching, Southern Horrors in 1892 and A Red Record in 1895, a statistical account of lynchings from 1892 to 1894. She reported that African American men were accused of rape in less than one-third of the cases, and even fewer of the men were found guilty. She revealed that in some situations white women initiated consensual sex with African American men and that white men had raped African American women with apparent impunity. Wells-Barnett found that when African Americans resisted mobs by fighting back, the violence diminished. She wrote: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home. When the white man knows he runs as great a risk biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.”

Secretary of the National Afro-American Council from 1898 to 1902, Wells-Barnett helped organize a conference on African Americans, helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and served on its executive committee. She founded in 1910 and was president of the Negro Fellowship League, a settlement house and community center for Southern black migrants to Chicago. In 1913 she started the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first African American woman suffrage group, and led the club in the 1916 Chicago suffrage parade to the Republican National Convention. In 1930, she unsuccessfully ran on the Republican ticket for the Illinois Senate.

Wells-Barnett wrote Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), The Arkansas Race Riot (1920), and other books.

See also: Alpha Suffrage Club; Anti-lynching Movement; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Women in the; National Association of Colored Women

References: Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984); Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice (1970).

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell (1862-1931)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, edited by Suzanne O’Dea, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0978.
APA 7th
Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell (1862-1931). From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, In S. O’Dea (Ed.), Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0978.
CMOS 17th
"Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell (1862-1931)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, Edited by Suzanne O’Dea. Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0978.