An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 8/27/2020
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"The appeal to the white man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience."
Born to enslaved parents in 1862 (just in time for the Emancipation Proclamation), Ida B. Wells would redefine the word brave. Educated at Shaw University (now Rust College) and then at Fisk University, several pivotal life events set Wells' life on a course of unrelenting activism. In her early twenties, she was travelling first class on a train from Memphis to Nashville, when she was abruptly ordered to move to a segregated car for African-Americans. When she refused, she was forcibly removed from the train, though not before she got in a bite on one of the crew's hands! She sued the railroad and won, though the settlement itself was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. From there her career in journalism was assured; she took a job with --and later bought a controlling interest in-- the Memphis Free Speech. Segregated schools were every bit as much a sore spot as segregated trains; one particularly scathing column on the subject got her fired from a teaching job.
But more than evey these events, it was the murder of two dear friends at the hands of a lynch mob that propelled her into a deep dive on the entire horrifying phenomenon of lynching --its roots, its purported causes, and its frequency (far greater than was ever reported). It was an in-depth editorial on this very subject that made herself a target --she chanced to be away in New York when the article was published, which was fortunate as a mob destroyed her office and threatened to kill her if she returned to Memphis. In 1895 she expanded her research into book form and published A Red Record, which ultimately caught the attention of the White House. Her lifelong anti-lynching crusade neatly dovetailed with women's suffrage and while Wells is considered a founding member of what would become the NAACP, she personally distanced herself from that organization. Wells died in 1930 --her final years marked by a stint as a probation officer for Chicago's municipal court, and finally an unsuccessful-but-no-less-courageous run for the Illinois State Senate.
Suggested reading: Crusade for Justice, the Ida B. Wells autobiography, published in 1970.
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