WOMEN’S HISTORY ✞ IDA BELL WELLS (16 July 1862 – 25 March 1931)
Ida Bell Wells (more commonly known as “Ida B. Wells”) was born a slave in 1862. After gaining their freedom, her father became a carpenter and prominent of the Union League whereas her mother became a cook. Ida attended Shaw University (now Rust College), but was expelled. In 1878, her parents and younger brother died of yellow fever. She and her five other siblings were going to be split up and sent to foster homes, but instead she found work teaching elementary school to keep her family together.
In 1883, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee and continued teaching school while attending classes at Fisk University during the summers. She later began writing articles for the Evening Star under a pen name. In 1889, a friend hers named Thomas Moss opened a grocery store and ran into trouble when his store began competing with a white-owned store. While he was out of town, a White mob invaded his grocery store and started a riot in which three White men were injured. Moss and two other Black men were arrested, but before they could be tried, a White mob stormed the jail and lynched Moss and the other two men.
In response, Wells advocated that Blacks should leave Memphis and became interested in documenting lynching in the United States and its causes. She came to the conclusion that lynching was a way of keeping Blacks “in their place” and began an anti-lynching campaign. In 1893 and 1895, she took tours of Europe to promote her causes. Around that time, she came into conflict with Frances Willard, the co-founder of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, over Willard’s silence on the issue of lynching and her organization’s habit of portraying Black males as violent, drunken brutes.
Wells spent the rest of her life in Chicago, advocating for feminism, urban reform, and civil rights. She died in 1931, in the middle of writing her autobiography.
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