My Hero

Ida B. Wells was born a daughter of slaves in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. She was educated at Rust University, a freedmen's school in her native Holly Springs, Mississippi. At age 14 Ida began teaching in a country school. When her parents and a younger brother died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1878, she accepted the first of several jobs as a rural schoolteacher to help support her six younger brothers and sisters. Accomplishments as a freelance writer ultimately led to a career as a newspaper journalist and editor. Through newspaper articles and lectures, she quickly expanded recognition as a crusader against lynching. In addition to many newspaper and magazine articles, Wells is known for two pamphlets published in the 1890s--Southern Horrors and The Red Record. After marrying Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a Chicago newspaperman and civil rights advocate in 1895, Wells devoted a considerable amount of her time to civic reform work. She also gained bad name as an investigator into the causes of race riots. Wells disagreed rationally with the accommodations program advocated by Booker T. Washington. Although she was a signer of "The Call," a document inviting prominent black and white Americans to a conference that led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and was a founding member of that organization, she found it too accommodating to whites. Ida Wells-Barnett died in Chicago of uremia on March 25, 1931.

Wells confronted a racially divided South on numerous occasions. While traveling to her job as a schoolteacher, she experienced segregation firsthand when a railway conductor ordered her to move to a car reserved for "colored" passengers even though she had purchased a first-class ticket. She took her case to court and won, only to have the Tennessee Supreme Court overturn that decision. She lost her teaching job in 1891 because she wrote articles criticizing the poor quality of education given to black children in segregated schools. When three friends of hers were lynched in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892 and Wells publicly denounced their murders, the newspaper office of the Memphis Free Speech, of which she was editor and part owner, was destroyed by an angry white mob.

After the Memphis event, Wells began a lifelong movement against lynching. Through newspaper articles in the New York Age and later in the Chicago Conservator and in lectures in the United States and Great Britain, she demanded that the United States oppose lynching, which she termed "our national crime." Her two major pamphlets, Southern Horrors and The Red Record, offered detailed statistical information on lynching as well as her own debatable explanation of the facts presented. As Wells continued her public movement against lynching, she started to investigate the underlying factors behind race riots that seemed to be on the rise in a number of the nation's