“Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), wearing “Martyred Negro Soldiers” button, between 1917–1919.”

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Ida B. Wells was a writer, suffragist, and civil rights activist who contributed significantly to movements against racial injustice and lynching in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through her standing as a writer and editor, she aided in exposing the brutal realities of racial violence and was a fierce advocate for women’s suffrage.

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Section One: A Brief Biography

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was born on July 16th, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Like Mary Church Terrell’s parents, Wells-Barnett’s parents were both enslaved. In her autobiography, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, Wells-Barnett explains that her father, James Wells, known by Jim, was the son of his slave owner and an enslaved woman who remains unnamed in her autobiography (7). He was also a talented carpenter. Wells-Barnett’s mother, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Warrenton, was sold into slavery with two of her sisters when they were young, first in Virginia and then in Mississippi. Warrenton, Wells-Barnett writes, was also “a famous cook” (7). Ida herself was not conscious of having been labeled as property because she was legally freed from slavery by the Emancipation Proclamation when she was six months old. Following their legal emancipation, Jim Wells moved the family off the property of his former enslaver and rented a house of their own (9). As Ida grew up, her mother recounted what she witnessed during and her experience of enslavement, informing Wells-Barnett’s understanding of race relations at an early age. Wells-Barnett writes that “[the] only thing I remember about my father’s reference to slave days was when his mother came to town on one of her annual visits,” when his mother asked him to visit his old slave mistress, which he always refused to answer (9-10). Rather than teaching her about his time while enslaved, Jim Wells was interested in politics and taught Ida to read and write at a young age, as well as exposing her to matters of racial injustice as her mother did.

“…I heard the words Klu Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant.”

from Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, p. 8

Wells-Barnett and her siblings attended school at what was then called Shaw University (later to become Rust College) in Holly Springs, Mississippi (Wells-Barnett 9). She explains, “My father was one of the trustees and my mother went along to school with us until she learned to read the Bible” (9). When Wells was sixteen years old, both of her parents died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, as did one of her siblings. Having been away from home when her parents and sibling passed, doctors advised her not to return home. However, Wells-Barnett explains, “when I thought of my crippled sister, of the smaller children all down to the nine-month-old baby brother, the conviction grew within me that I ought to be with them” (11-12). Her sister, Eugenia, had an issue with her backbone; Wells-Barnett explains that “her spinal column began to bend outward” when she was about 10-years-old (15). Her lower-body was paralyzed son after. After the yellow fever epidemic, only six of the eight Wells children were alive, including Ida. She took on the responsibility of raising her younger siblings, leading her to drop out of school. Instead, she obtained a teaching position at about sixteen-years-old to support her family (16-17). She explains that, “[after] one term, [in 1884] I went to Memphis on the invitation of my aunt who lived there” (18). She brought two of her sisters with her, while another aunt cared for Eugenia and allowed her brothers to work on their farm (18). She resumed teaching at a school in Shelby County, Memphis, “and began studying for the examination for city school teacher which meant an even larger increase in salary” (18). Memphis was also where she was first introduced to the A.M.E. church, with which she would work for the rest of her life.

Section Two: Wells’ Teaching Background

While teaching, Wells-Barnett used the railroad freely, sitting on the ladies’ coach
because “[there] were no jim crow cars then” (18). However, during one of these trips, the
conductor attempted to force Wells-Barnett physically to another car at the request of the white folks on the ladies’ coach. She explains,

He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened
my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat and was holding to
the back, and as he had already been badly bitten, he didn’t try it again by himself. He
went forward and got the baggage-man and another man to help him and of course they
succeeded. (18-19)

Due to the illegal segregation and physical force these train workers used on Wells-Barnett, she hired a lawyer named Judge Greer to sue the railroad (19). She won the trial, and was “awarded[…]damages of five hundred dollars” (19). However, she writes, “The railroad appealed the case to the state’s supreme court, which reversed the findings of the lower court, and I had to pay the costs” (19-20). Ostensibly a small case, it turns out that the Chesapeake and Ohio
Railroad were so invested in the case because “it was the first case in which a colored plaintiff in the South had appealed to a state court since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill by the United States Supreme Court,” which asserted that citizens were “not wards of the nation” but of “individual states” (20). Wells-Barnett explains that “[the] success of [her] case would have set a precedent” which would have caused others to sue railroads that discriminated by race.
Throughout the trial, Wells-Barnett used the money earned from her teaching salary to pay the costs leveled against her (21). Due to the wide-scale effects of her trial, teaching served as a way to financially support her public activism for Black rights through this trial and her other activist work.

Wells-Barnett recounts that she got her start in journalism through a lyceum of public
school teachers that met every Friday afternoon in the Vance Street Christian Church in Memphis (22-23). The group conducted literary exercises, always closing with a reading of the
journal, the Evening Star, which Wells-Barnett explains was “a spicy journal prepared and read by the editor” (23). When the editor of the Evening Star moved to Washington, Wells was elected his replacement (23). Drawn by her work, a local pastor recruited her to write weekly letters in his paper, the Living Way. About this attention, Wells-Barnett writes,

All of this, although gratifying, surprised me very much, for I had had no training except
what the work on the Evening Star had given me, and no literary gifts and graces. But I
had observed and thought much about conditions as I had seen them in the country
schools and churches…so…I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things which
concerned our people. Knowing that their education was limited, I never used a word of
two syllables where one would serve the purpose. I signed these articles “Iola.” (23-24)

As such, it seems Wells-Barnett’s journalist career originally took off because of her intimate understanding of her community, their concerns, and their literacy levels. Her work as “Iola” soon spread beyond Memphis, and Wells-Barnett “received letters from other editors [of Black newspapers] inviting [her] to write for them” (24)

She spent the next three years teaching and writing for different newspapers and
attending press conventions; this was the first time she was paid for her work as a journalist.
During one of these conventions in Washington DC, Wells-Barnett “was elected secretary to the National Press Association” (32). She explains that she “witnessed [her] first inauguration while there. [She also] saw for the first time Frederick Douglass, Bishop Turner, Senator B.K. Bruce [the commissioner of the Colored Department at the New Orleans Fair] and other important men of [their] race” (32). Her activism work increased as she continued to write. She bought one-third ownership of a Memphis paper titled Free Speech and Headlight, of which she also became editor. Still teaching, Wells-Barnett recounts writing an “article [that] was a protest against the few and utterly inadequate buildings for colored children. [She] also spoke of the poor teachers given [them], whose mental and moral character was not of the best” (36). Believing that she would receive support for her critiques, when the article was published, Wells-Barnett lost her teaching position. The board of education explained “that no fault was found with [Ida’s] ability as a teacher or with [her] character, but the board had a copy of the Free Speech on file in the office showing criticism of them. They didn’t care to employ a teacher who had done this” (37). She asserts learning an important lesson from this situation: “Up to that time I had felt that any fight made in the interest of the race would have its support. I learned then that I could not count on that” (37). In other words, Wells-Barnett learned the wide range of opinions within the Black community about the Black community and the lack of support which can come with those differences in opinions. Although she would no longer be a teacher, Wells-Barnett continued her activist work through her journalism and working with women’s clubs

“The article in the Chicago Daily Tribune about Wells winning her case at the trial level”

Section Three: The National Association of Colored Women

Ida B. Wells-Barnett fought for many causes, but the majority of her activism focused on
fighting lynch law and white racial terrorism. Scholar Schecter explains that Wells-Barnett’s
activism challenging lynch laws led to “scores of local anti-lynching committees and the
founding of the National Associated of Colored Women [(NACW)],” in 1896, which was
renamed the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC) in 1904 (276). In the
NACW, she served alongside Frances E. W. Harper, Mary Church Terrell, and numerous other influential Black women activists.

“Banner with motto of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs”

Wells-Barnett recalls the formation of the NACWC in her autobiography. While she was
getting married, and after giving birth to her first child, Wells-Barnett explains, “Strange as it
may seem…there arose a united protest from my people. They seemed to feel that I had deserted the cause, and some of them censured me rather severely in their newspapers for having done so” (241). Those who thought Wells-Barnett had abandoned the cause seemed to believe she had chosen to be a wife and mother rather than an activist–a belief which ignores that she could be both. Wells-Barnett relates a feeling of deep tiredness, which kept her from answering Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s call for a meeting of women in Boston that year. Although she was not present, the meeting, Wells-Barnett writes, was “to issue a protest against one Mr. Jacks, who, in his capacity as president of the Missouri Press Association, in his annual address, had libeled not only me, but the Negro womanhood of the country through me” (242). They met in response to the protests against Wells-Barnett. She writes, “They sent out to the country a unanimous endorsement of the course I had pursued in my agitation against lynching” (242). Also at this meeting, these women formed the National Organization of Colored Women’s Clubs, later to be named the NACWC (232).

Having decided to meet for the first official NACWC Convention in Washington the next
year, when the day came for the meeting of the NACWC, Wells-Barnett attended, leaving her
four-month-old son in the care of a nurse (243). About the meeting, she writes, “It was a famous gathering of famous women… Mrs. Terrell, a graduate of Oberlin College who had been a teacher in Washington High School for a number of years, herself being the wife of a prominent attorney in Washington and believed to be the most highly educated woman we had in the race, was chosen president of the consolidated organization” (Wells 204-205). After this meeting, Wells-Barnett traveled across the country to give speeches on “why [women] should organize their forces” and pay attention to political issues; she brought her baby along with her (245). Simultaneously, she worked as the editor of the Conservator and as president of the Ida B. Wells Club (247).

In 1903, Wells-Barnett was invited by Celia Parker Wooley to work with the Frederick
Douglass Center, “a center in which white and colored persons could meet and get to know each other better” established by Wooley (279). Fannie Barrier Williams, a close friend of Wooley’s, also took part in the Frederick Douglass Center. Wells-Barnett helped raise money for Wooley to rent out a building for the center, assisted with electing the president of the attached women’s club, and was elected herself as vice president of the women’s club. Wells-Barnett worked alongside the white president, only named Mrs. Plummer in Wells-Barnett’s autobiography, until the Atlanta riot occurred. After hearing about more murders of Black folks, Plummer suggested to the Black women of the club “to drive the criminals out from among you,” affirming the essentialisms about Black men as criminals which Wells-Barnett had protested so vehemently in her anti-lynch law papers. Although Wells-Barnett challenged Plummer, Plummer did not drop her beliefs about Black men. Plummer then refused to run for president again, and Wells-Barnett was nominated as president. However, Wells-Barnett declined that position because Wooley seemed to be adamantly in opposition to her being president. As a result, another woman named Fannie Emmanuel was elected president of the Douglass Center Women’s Club (287). This meeting was the last Wells-Barnett presided over, leaving the club afterwards “never to return” (287). After leaving the Frederick Douglass Center, Wells-Barnett continued her club work, anti-lynching activism, and worked as a Bible school teacher in Chicago where she started the Negro Fellowship League.

While teaching in Chicago, the 1908 “riot broke out in Springfield, Illinois, and raged there for three days.” Three Black men, uninvolved in the riot, were lynched by white mobs.
Wells-Barnett brought the issue to her Sunday class, asserting that they should be organizing groups “to consider such matters” as lynchings (300). Three out of thirty men responded to her invitation to meet and discuss the lynchings; This was, Wells-Barnett explains, “the beginning of what was afterward to be known as the Negro Fellowship League” in which they “discussed matters affecting the race and invited prominent persons who might be in the city to address [them]” (300). Wells-Barnett took her knowledge of women’s clubs and advised these Black men from Chicago on how to start a club of their own. As the League grew, Wells-Barnett and its members organized to assist Black folks wrongly accused of murder, rape, or theft, as well as holding local governments accountable for brutal lynchings of Black folks.

In 1914, Wells-Barnett established the Alpha Suffrage Club to increase interest in
suffrage among Black women. She writes, “The women who joined were extremely interested
when I showed them that we could use our vote for the advantage of ourselves and our race”
(345). When Wells-Barnett organized what she calls “the block system” to advocate for women’s suffrage, the women who participated “said that the men jeered at them and told them they ought to be at home taking care of the babies. Others insisted that the women were trying to take the place of men…” (346). In response, Wells-Barnett “urged each one of the workers to go back and tell the women that we wanted them to register so that they could help put a colored man in the city council” (346). This strategy proved beneficial; while the independent candidate they voted for did not win, he came closer to winning than an independent candidate had before because of the women’s votes. Afterwards, male politicians came to urge the women to vote for them. They decided to back William Hale Thompson for mayor. After he won, however, he “proceeded to ignore those of us who had helped make it possible for him to realize his ambition” (353). While the Alpha Suffrage Club suffered due to lack of support from the
politicians they helped get into office, Wells-Barnett continued her work with the Negro
Fellowship League into the 1920s.

Section Four: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893

Ida B. Wells approached several Black newspapers to raise money for the publication of her pamphlet, which would inform international visitors about the exclusion Black creators and intellectuals faced from government and Chicago fair officials. This pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, was made available in German, French, and Spanish for maximized exposure across its intended international audience.

“These three clerical positions constitute[d] the best representation accorded the colored people during the entire Exposition period.”

The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, p. 129

It included an introduction by revered statesman, Frederick Douglass; a chapter by Virginia educator, Irvine Garland Penn; a chapter by Wells-Barnett herself on the subject of lynching; and the final chapter was written by lawyer and newspaper publisher, Ferdinand Lee Barnett, who would become Wells-Barnett’s husband two years later. Due to unsteady fundraising efforts, the pamphlet did not appear until several months after the Fair opened, unfortunately rendering remedies for the situation even more unlikely.

Wells-Barnett supported boycotting the Fair, and introduced a resolution “disapproving
of the designation of August 25 as Colored People’s Day, or Jubilee Day” (Paddon, Turner 31).
Paddon and Turner explain that “A Puck cartoon parodied the day with grotesque caricatures of half-dressed, watermelon-eating paraders portrayed in costumes ranging from tribal dress to that of a bellhop and carrying musical instruments and spears,” recalling vaudeville performances which essentialized and slandered Black folks through racist caricatures (31-32). Wells-Barnett was attuned to this, arguing “that the image of blacks with crescents of watermelon would result in a demeaning racial stereotype” (32). Even though she did not attend, she does admit later that “the speeches and events of the day ‘had done more to bring our cause to the attention of the American people than anything else that had happened during the fair’” (32).

The work of Wells-Barnett and other activists (including the protest of The Congress of
Colored Women, which included figures such as Mary Church Terrell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Fannie Barrier Williams as they championed the recognition of Black women at the Chicago World’s Fair continued in numerous movements that challenged gender and racial inequity (Bertuca et. al).

Section Five: Anti-Lynching and Literary Works

In 1892, Wells-Barnett experienced the loss of a dear friend to a lynching, which ultimately
propelled her to publish a litany of speeches and articles challenging southern lynch laws. The
most well-known of these articles are “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” “A Red
Record,” and “Mob Rule in New Orleans.” In her autobiography, she claims, “While I was thus
carrying on the work of my newspaper…there came the lynching in Memphis which changed the
whole course of my life” (47). This lynching was of three men: Thomas Moss, Calvin
McDowell, and Henry Stewart–the same lynching which affected Mary Church Terrell so deeply
during her third pregnancy due to her friendship with Thomas Moss. Like Terrell, Wells-Barnett knew Thomas Moss intimately; she relates, “Everybody in town knew and loved Tommie[…]he was married and the father of one little girl, Maurine, whose godmother I was. He and his wife Betty were the best friends I had in town. And he believed, with me, that we should defend the cause of right and fight wrong wherever we saw it” (47). Over the course of about eight months, this lynching and hundreds of others occurred, Wells-Barnett left Memphis, was threatened with death if she returned to Memphis, and published some of her most well-known anti-lynching arguments.

Wells-Barnett recounts the lynching of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart and its effects in
her autobiography and in her first anti-lynch law article, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Originally publishing the article in the New York Age, of which she had become a one- fourth owner, she later gave it as an address in Lyric Hall in New York City in October of 1892, seven months after the three men were murdered (Campbell 395). In her autobiography, she explains Moss, McDowell, and Stewart had opened a grocery store, the People’s Grocery Company, on the same block as the white men who later murdered them. Both Terrell and Wells-Barnett theorize that tensions had been rising between the white and Black storekeepers because the white men felt the People’s Grocery Company was taking their clientele (Terrell, 105) (Wells-Barnett 48). Wells-Barnett published and gave her speech seven months after the
lynching of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart to challenge lynch law by deconstructing the notion that Black men almost always raped white women rather than having consensual relationships with them. Although not the case in the lynching of the three Black Memphians, most lynchings were justified by accusations of rape against the Black men murdered; accusations which were more often than not proven false. In “Southern Horrors,” Wells-Barnett attributes the mass
lynchings and legalization of Jim Crow cars on railroads to “the well-known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race…The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box, and the Civil Rights Law” rather than a rape epidemic (Campbell 399).
The murder of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart can be explained by the same reasoning,
particularly because tensions between the white and Black storekeepers started due to the progress of the Black men’s grocery store.

In her autobiography, Wells-Barnett explains that the murder of Moss, McDowell, and
Stewart began with a verbal altercation between Black and white adolescents over a game of marbles in March of 1892. When the Black children won the altercation, Wells-Barnett recounts,

The father of the white boys whipped the victorious colored boy, whose father and
friends pitched in to avenge the grown white man’s flogging of a colored boy. The
colored men won the fight, whereupon the white father and grocery keeper swore out a
warrant for arrest of the colored victors. Of course the colored grocery keepers had been
drawn into the dispute. But the case was dismissed with nominal fines. (Wells-Barnett
48)

While the case was dismissed, the white men and grocers issued a threat that they would attack the People’s Grocery Company that Saturday night. She writes,

Knowing this, the owners of the company consulted a lawyer and were told that as they
were outside the city limits and beyond police protection, they would be justified in
protecting themselves if attacked. Accordingly the grocery company armed several men and stationed them in the rear of the store on that fatal Saturday night, not to attack but to repel a threatened attack. (48)

At the time of the attack, Moss and McDowell were working in the store. Wells-Barnett relates,
“The men stationed [in the back of the store] had seen several white men stealing through the rear door and fired on them without a moment’s pause. Three of these men were wounded, and others fled and gave the alarm” (49). The following Sunday, white Memphis newspapers criminalized the Black store owners, referring to their shop as “‘a low dive in which drinking and gambling were carried on: a resort of thieves and thugs’” (49). More than a hundred Black men were arrested as a result of the wounded white men, even though the white men were the original aggressors. Tensions increased as newspapers continued their verbal assault on Black Memphians, and white folks gathered around town “to discuss the awful crime of Negroes shooting white men” (49). While Black men from Memphis guarded the Black men who were
imprisoned, worried about an attack from white folks, after the men who had been shot were released from the hospital, these Black men left their guard. That night, a group of white men were let into the jail and took McDowell, Moss, and Stewart and murdered them brutally using firearms. Days after the attack, Wells-Barnett recounts, Black folks gathered by the grocery
store, outraged at the murders, “but they offered no violence” (51). Still, a judge issued “an order…to ‘take a hundred men, go out to the Curve [where the grocery store was located] at once, and shoot down on sight any Negro who appears to be making trouble’” (51). White men did as ordered, although not many Black folks were killed due to “the forbearance of the colored men,” who “submitted to outrages and insults for the sake of those depending on them” (51).
Even so, the white mob ransacked the People’s Grocery Company, which was closed and sold shortly thereafter.

Some of Thomas Moss’ last words, Wells-Barnett writes, were “tell my people to go
West–there is no justice for them here” (51). Likewise, the Black newspaper owned partially by Wells-Barnett, the Free Speech, wrote in an article, “There is therefore only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons” (52). Wells-Barnett explains that both Moss’ and the Free Speech’s advice were the overwhelming sentiment among Black Memphians, causing hundreds of Black folks to leave Memphis. In the following months, Wells-Barnett joined them, and left for Kansas City.
While white newspapers in Memphis had published articles “telling of the starvation, and of hostile Indians…and urging the colored people who were still in Memphis to stay among friends where there were no such dangers,” Wells-Barnett took her opportunity while out West to write letters back to the Free Speech that recounted tales of opportunity that was widely available,
challenging the misleading articles from white newspapers (57-58). Wells-Barnett writes, “Those letters drew people from Memphis, Arkansas, Mississippi, and other sections of Tennessee, so that ten weeks after the lynching the colored people of Memphis were as unsettled as the first week and still leaving town” (58). Effectively, Black folks organized a sort of boycott of Memphis, not only required to do so by the real danger of attack, but inspired also by Wells-Barnett’s letters of safety and opportunity in the West.

The year before the lynching in Memphis, Frances E.W. Harper had invited Wells- Barnett to attend an A.M.E. conference in Philadelphia in May. After the conference, Wells- Barnett moved to New York City. Upon moving to New York, she was shown an article which threatened death to anyone who tried to publish the Free Speech, and listed her as an owner of the paper. She decided she would not return home, for fear of being murdered herself. Shortly thereafter, she published “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law and All Its Phases.” While studying the lynchings which took place across the South, Wells-Barnett “found that in order to justify these horrible atrocities to the world, the Negro was being branded as a race of rapists, who were especially mad after white women” (Wells-Barnett 71). Her speech focused on deconstructing this false label placed by white folks on all Black men. In May, the Free Speech had published an article, stating, “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women” (Campbell 389-390). Many white newspapers responded to the Free Speech’s publication, threatening torture and castration “if the negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay” to what white southerners assumed was a rape epidemic (391). A meeting was held in the Cotton Exchange Building in Memphis to discuss lynchings. However, the meeting turned into an angry mob that chased Mr. Fleming, “the business manager and [owner of] a half interest [in] the Free Speech,” out of town. This resulted in the demise of the newspaper.

Beginning her deconstruction of racist ideologies which assume Black men almost always rape white women, in “Southern Horrors,” Wells-Barnett “asserts […] that there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law” (392). At this time, miscegenation laws made it illegal to marry or have sexual relationships between races; however, due to power dynamics, white men were not attacked when they had sex with Black women. These miscegenation laws targeted Black men who had sexual relationships with white women. Wells-Barnett provides case after case of white women entering into consensual relationships with Black men, only to either report a rape so as to save their reputation, be accused of miscegenation by law, or otherwise be judged and assumed to have been raped even when relationships were clearly consensual (393-396). While some of these cases ended in saving Black men’s lives, Wells-Barnett reports hundreds of similar circumstances in which “Southern white men in insatiate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of the law upon the Afro-Americans who consort with their women” (394). She presents examples of Black men with evidence that these relationships were consensual, but were still murdered or saved from murder due to Black folks’ protection: “Frank Weems of Chattanooga who was not lynched in May only because the prominent citizens became his body guard…had letters in his pockets from the white woman in the case, making the appointment with him. Edward Coy, who was burned alive in Texarkana…died protesting his innocence” (397). It was later discovered that Coy and the white woman had been in a relationship for about a year (397). She writes, “Hundreds of such cases might be cited, but enough have been given to prove the assertion that there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American’s company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women” (399). This being the case, Wells-Barnett asserts, “The utterances of the leading white men show that with them it is not the crime but the class” (399). While white southerners attempted to use rape as a righteous reason to murder Black men, Wells-Barnett argues that overwhelming evidence of Black men and white women entering consensual relationships proved that their real issue is with the race of the men, not the crime.

Later in her article, Wells-Barnett recounts the lynching of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart and the resulting exodus of Black Memphians. She relates that the white mobs which resulted from the aforementioned murders did not stop until the Free Speech was “silenced” and its owners were exiled from Memphis (410-411). Stressing the violence incurred by the mobs, Wells-Barnett asserts, “The result is a growing disregard for human life. Lynch law has spread its insidious [sic] influence till men in New York State, Pennsylvania, and on the Western plains feel they can take the law in their own hands with impunity, especially where an Afro-American is concerned” (411). The South’s enforcement of lynch law and use of mob violence set a bloody precedent for the rest of the country in cases involving Black men. Furthermore, Wells-Barnett argues, “The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages are[…]accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilt with the actual law breakers…” (414). She demands the law “must be brought to bear upon lynchers in severe punishment,” but argues this cannot be accomplished unless people organize and protest lynchings (413). Her accusations that bystanders against lynch law are equally as guilty as those who commit lynchings is a call to action, to no longer stand by and allow Black men to be murdered en masse. She writes, “the Afro-American can do for himself what no one else can do for him” (414). In other words, lynchings will not stop without a community of people who are against it; and Black Americans cannot depend on help from white folks, who are more often than not loyal to their own race. She urges Black folks to arm themselves because “the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky., and prevented it” (416). She believes that if white men feel as threatened by death as the Black men they attempt to lynch, then numbers of lynchings may drop. Without the help of the law, Black folks arming themselves became a last-resort. Wells-Barnett concludes, “Nothing is more definitely settled than [that] he must act for himself. I have shown how he may employ the boycott, emigration and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all these agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law…” (419).

Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching speech was one of the first which deconstructed lynch law
to such a degree, and provided advice for how to protest lynchings. Many Black folks in the
South did not protest lynchings originally because the reason for the lynching was such a deplorable act as rape. Wells-Barnett recounts,

Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea
meant to be conveyed–that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and
order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps
the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life. (64)

However, it was the lynching of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart that “opened [her] eyes” to the reality of lynchings; that most lynchings were committed because of the race of the men rather than because of some crime committed (64). She relates, “The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income. The federal laws for Negro protection[…]had been made a mockery by the white South where it has not secured their repeal” (70-71). After publishing “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law and All Its Phases,” Frederick Douglass came to Wells-Barnett “to tell [her] what a revelation of existing conditions this article had been to him” (72). Wells-Barnett’s article caused other Black activists to realize the real threat lynching posed to all Black Americans; this recognition is also what led to her giving the article as an address in New York to a group of over two-hundred women. Although she explains that no one in the crowd seemed to notice, while giving the speech, “a feeling of loneliness and homesickness for the days and the friends that were gone came over [her] and [she] felt the tears coming” (79). She remembers this as “the only time in all those trying months that [she] had so yielded to personal feelings” (80). While Wells-Barnett saw her emotions as a weakness, “the women didn’t feel that [she] had spoiled things[…]They seemed to think that it made an impression on the audience favorable to the cause and to [her]” (80). The speech resulted in “the real beginning of the club movement among colored women in this country” and Wells-Barnett’s ventures into public speaking (81). Wells-Barnett was a part of many Black women’s clubs, including her own club, the Ida B. Wells Club, the Frederick Douglass Center, the National Associated of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), the Alpha Suffrage Club, and the Black men’s club she started in Chicago, the Negro Fellowship League.

Section Six: Further Reading

Some of the best evidence of Wells-Barnett’s scarcely documented personal life dates
from the 1880s. In particular, her diary, dating from December 1885 to September 1887,
provides details of her life during this Some of the best evidence of Wells-Barnett’s scarcely documented personal life dates from the 1880s. In particular, her diary, dating from December 1885 to September 1887, provides details of her life during this period and expresses her anger at the racial violence and injustice directed at Black communities nationwide. Furthermore, the book On Lynchings acts as a collection of Wells-Barnett’s most well-known anti-lynch law papers, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” “A Red Record,” and “Mob Rule in New Orleans.”period and expresses her anger at the racial violence and
injustice directed at Black communities nationwide. Furthermore, the book On Lynchings acts as
a collection of Wells-Barnett’s most well-known anti-lynch law papers, “Southern Horrors:
Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” “A Red Record,” and “Mob Rule in New Orleans.”

Written in 1895, “A Red Record” provides a historical account of lynchings from the
nineteenth through the early twentieth-century, criticizes governments across the nation for their inability to protect Black Americans or hold those involved in the murders accountable, and
instructs its reader on ways to fight lynch law and the violence it incurs.

“The student of American sociology will find the year 1894 marked by a pronounced awakening of the public conscience to a system of anarchy and outlawry which had grown during a series of ten years to be so common, that scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments of the people of our land.”

–Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “The Red Record,” pg. 57 of On Lynchings

In the first chapter, “The Case Stated,” she traces the beginnings of lynch law from enslavement through emancipation to construct the case of lynchings, the charges she brings to bear against those culpable in the lynchings, and her defense. During enslavement, she argues, “the white owner rarely permitted his anger to go so far as to take a life, which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars. The slave was rarely killed, he was too valuable” (57). However, “Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white man in the Negro’s body were lost…with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scoured; he was killed” (57). Using statistics kept by white folks, Wells-Barnett writes that ten-thousand Black folks have been killed since emancipation. She explains the reasons white folks enacted this brutality across the decades: “From 1865 to 1872, hundreds of colored men and women were mercilessly murdered…[for allegedly participating] in an insurrection or riot. But this story at last wore itself out” (58). Post-1872, during the age of reconstruction, Black folks were franchised and Black men were given the right to vote through the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, respectively However, in the South, Wells-Barnett recounts, “‘No Negro domination’ became the new legend…and under it rode the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless mobs, which for any cause chose to murder one man or a dozen as suited their purpose best” (59). The white supremacist groups majorly targeted Black folks who attempted to vote, and the government provided them no protection. Eventually forcing Black folks to live in fear of murder kept them from voting; and still, these groups murdered Black folks. However, their cause evolved into “the third excuse– that Negros had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon [white] women,” a cause which Wells- Barnett’s “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” deconstructs as a facade for the real reason white folks murdered scores of Black men: their race (60). She constructs a similar argument in “The Red Record,” exposing each of the three reasons white folks lynched Black Americans as false, reiterating race as the true cause for this violence. Wells-Barnett makes it clear that she does not mean to criminalize all white women in these charges. There were many cases of southern white women accusing Black men of rape even after consenting to intercourse with them. However, there were also many in which the white woman had a consensual relationship with a Black man, which the white community then labeled as rape. Further, Wells-Barnett provides examples of northern women coming down to teach Black folks, and being greeted by slurs from white southerners, but still continuing to work. In part, she uses these northern women and the southern white men’s treatment of them as an example of white men’s false chivalry. She writes, “They were ‘N****r teachers’ –unpardonable offenders in the social ethics of the South, and were insulted, persecuted and ostracised, not by Negroes, but by the white manhood which boasts of its chivalry towards women” (63). At the end of the chapter, she provides the intent of “The Red Record:” “The purpose of the pages which follow shall be to give the record which has been made, not by colored men, but that which is the result of compilations made by white men, of reports sent over the civilized world by white men of the South. Out of their own mouths shall the murderers be condemned” (64).

The following chapter, “Lynch-Law Statistics” lists names, dates, places, and reasons for the lynchings of the named Black folks, all of which she gathers the Chicago Tribune. The next few chapters provide in-depth examples of lynchings across the country, a majority of which were committed against innocents. In chapter three “Lynching Imbeciles,” Wells-Barnett demonstrates the lawlessness of lynch law by explaining insanity under U.S. law. She writes, “So thoroughly is [the] principle [that if a criminal is mentally unstable, he cannot be given capital punishment] grounded in the law, that all civilized society surrounds human life with a safeguard, which prevents the execution of a criminal who is insane, even if sane at the time of his criminal act” (73). However, this same rule is not applied in lynch law, which assumes “for itself an absolute supremacy over the law of the land” (73). In chapter four, “Lynching of Innocent Men (Lynched on Account of Relationship),” Wells-Barnett provides examples of mobs murdering Black men for their relationships with white women, all of which were consensual. In chapter five, “Lynched for Anthing or Nothing (Lynched for Wife Beating),” she provides examples of Black folks murdered for beating his own wife, stealing pigs, no offense at all, being “saucy to white people” (95), small verbal altercations, and attempted assault. In chapter six, “History of Some Cases of Rape,” Wells-Barnett investigates and deconstructs cases in which the Black men murdered were accused of rape.

In chapter seven, “The Crusade Justified (Appeal from America to the World,)” Wells-
Barnett writes, “it is the desire of this pamphlet to urge that the crusade [against lynch law] started and thus far continued has not been useless, but has been blessed with the most salutary results,” effectively calling for further action in the fight against lynch law (On Lynchings 121). Those results, she writes, are that “governors of states, newspapers, senators, and representatives and bishops of churches have been compelled to take cognizance of the prevalence of this crime and to speak in one way or another in defense of the charge against this barbarism in the United States” (122). She then recounts lynchings which have taken place in the years 1894 and 1895 while she was writing “The Red Record.” Still, she argues “there is now an awakened conscience throughout the land, and Lynch Law can not flourish in the future as it has in the past” (125).

In chapter eight, “Miss Willard’s Attitude,” Wells-Barnett criticizes the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for their lack of support and sympathy in the fight against lynch law and racial injustice. She specifically criticizes Frances Willard for an address she made at an annual WCTU Convention. On Miss Willard’s address, Wells-Barnett writes, “Miss Willard protests against lynching in one paragraph and then, in the next, deliberately misrepresents my position in order that she may criticize a movement, whose only purpose is to protect our oppressed race from vindictive slander and Lynch Law” (130). In her address, Willard confuses “statements made by Miss Wells concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless acts between the races” as an accusation from Wells-Barnett that white women are the main perpetrators of injustices in lynching cases (129). However, as Wells- Barnett makes clear in this chapter, “colored men have been lynched for assault upon women, when the facts were plain that the relationship between the victim lynched and the alleged victim of his assault was voluntary, clandestine and illicit” (130). Wells-Barnett details further letters of offense from Willard, and deconstructs racist and essentializing notions in each. Chapter nine lists statistics of lynchings that have taken place in 1894, and chapter ten, “The Remedy” provides ways for the reader to fight lynch law. While “A Red Record” marks the awakening of America’s consciousness to the barbarism which controls the nation, mob rule continued over the next couple of decades. As a result, Wells-Barnett, while working in various clubs and leagues, wrote “Mob Rule in New Orleans” about an extremely bloody week in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1900.In chapter eight, “Miss Willard’s Attitude,” Wells-Barnett criticizes the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for their lack of support and sympathy in the fight against lynch law and racial injustice. She specifically criticizes Frances Willard for an address she made at an annual WCTU Convention. On Miss Willard’s address, Wells-Barnett writes, “Miss Willard protests against lynching in one paragraph and then, in the next, deliberately misrepresents my position in order that she may criticize a movement, whose only purpose is to protect our oppressed race from vindictive slander and Lynch Law” (130). In her address, Willard confuses “statements made by Miss Wells concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless acts between the races” as an accusation from Wells-Barnett that white women are the main perpetrators of injustices in lynching cases (129). However, as Wells- Barnett makes clear in this chapter, “colored men have been lynched for assault upon women, when the facts were plain that the relationship between the victim lynched and the alleged victim of his assault was voluntary, clandestine and illicit” (130). Wells-Barnett details further letters of offense from Willard, and deconstructs racist and essentializing notions in each. Chapter nine lists statistics of lynchings that have taken place in 1894, and chapter ten, “The Remedy” provides ways for the reader to fight lynch law. While “A Red Record” marks the awakening of America’s consciousness to the barbarism which controls the nation, mob rule continued over the next couple of decades. As a result, Wells-Barnett, while working in various clubs and leagues, wrote “Mob Rule in New Orleans” about an extremely bloody week in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1900.

Written in 1904, “Mob Rule in New Orleans” discusses the white mob in New Orleans which, over the course of a week, “[searched] for colored men and women whom they beat, shot and killed at will” (155). This mob took place the week of July 24, beginning with two police officers, Mora and Cantrelle’s, unwarranted attack of Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce. Charles and Pierce, Wells-Barnett recounts, were sitting on a set of stairs near the officers. The officers attempted to arrest the pair; Pierce did not resist and was arrested. Charles, however, was beaten by Officer Mora who “then drew a gun and tried to kill Charles” (155). Both men fired their weapons, leaving Mora wounded on the street while Charles escaped, although he was also shot. Both the New Orleans Picayune and Times-Democrat “at once declared that both Pierce and Charles were desperadoes, that they were contemplating burglary and that they began the assault upon the policemen,” thus criminalizing Pierce and Charles and inciting white mob violence (156). Wells-Barnett cites these papers and Mora’s official statement, both of which, in her opinion, show “proof of the fact that the officers accosted the two colored men and without any warrant or other justification attempted to arrest them” (159). A reward was put in place for whoever found and killed Charles, which led to officers attacking Charles at his home; however, after killing two officers with his own firearm, Charles escaped. The officers then called on citizens to help; this turned into a violent mob. Officers arrested dozens of Black men, some of whom were beaten brutally by a mob waiting at the jail. Across the city, as Wells-Barnett recounts, the mob murdered multiple Black folks until Charles was killed that Friday. She provides in-depth descriptions of the brutalities incurred by the white mob and police officers over the course of a week to conclude with her anti-lynch law sentiments.

For further reading, the Ida B. Wells Barnett Papers provides a highly useful and informative source of information about Wells’ life and work as well. It consists of Wells’ correspondence, the manuscript of her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, diaries, copies of articles and speeches by Wells, articles and accounts about Wells, newspaper clippings, and photographs (Black Woman’s Suffrage). Following are examples and descriptions of some of her articles included in the Ida B. Wells Barnett Papers’ collection. In this collection, there appear a few articles she published in the New York Age, of which she was a one-fourth owner and the editor.

Wells-Barnett wrote and published “Marriage Bells” in the New York Age in November
of 1892, eight months following the lynchings of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. She announces
the wedding of Dr. Elbert to Miss Cooper, Moss’s sister-in-law. As she explains, Dr. Elbert
barely escaped the lynching that killed Moss, McDowell, and Stewart, only able to do so when warned by a woman who said she overheard a group of white men planning to kill Dr. Elbert.
Even while announcing an upcoming wedding, due to the state of lynch laws in the South at the time, Wells-Barnett actively challenged and criticized lynch law.

Wells-Barnett published “Afro-Americans and Africa” in The A.M.E. Church Review in July 1892, providing her opinion on whether Black folks would or should return to Africa. While she first argues that Black folks returning to Africa “would not be true to the race if we conceded for a moment that any other race, the Anglo-Saxon not excepted, had more right to claim this country as home than the Afro-American race. The blood he has shed for liberty’s sake, the toil he has given for improvement’s sake, and the sacrifices he has made for the cause of progress, give him supreme right of American citizenships” (40). However, noting that not all Black folks wish to stay in America, she spends the next four pages deconstructing reasons given for why Black folks should not return to Africa such as no organized government, disease, and lack of work. She exposes these reasons as essentialisms which could be applied to the United States as easily as they have been applied to countries in Africa. In conclusion, she argues that Black Americans should be able to return to Africa if they so wish, and will be met with great opportunity there.

Wells-Barnett also published “The Reign of Mob Law: Iola’s Opinion of Doings in the
Southern Field” in the New York Age, February 18, 1893 and “The Lynchers Wince” in the New
York Age, September 19, 1891, both of which continue to challenge lynch law, particularly as it reigned over the South.

In June 1910, Wells-Barnett published “How Enfrachisement Stops Lynching” in the Original Rights Magazine. In this piece, Wells-Barnett explains that, in the southern states, “The right to vote is denied and abridged…, on account of race, color, and previous condition of servitude…This in spite of the fifteenth amendment, which declares that no state shall do this” (43). She refers to the ballot as “the only protection to [Black] citizenship” (44). She writes,

He was advised that if he gave up trying to vote, minded his own business, acquired
property and educated his children, he could get along in the South without molestation.
But the more lands and houses he acquired, the more rapidly discriminating laws have
been passed against him by those who control the ballot, and less protection is given by the law makers for his life, liberty and property. (44)

White folks suggested that if Black folks were to stay away from voting, they could live in the South peacefully. As Wells-Barnett demonstrates, this resulted in the opposite: southern states increased segregation in education, work places, and general public spaces and continued violence against Black folks. Wells-Barnett writes, “With no sacredness in the ballot there can be no sacredness of human life itself. For if the strong can take the weak man’s ballot when it suits his purpose to do so, he will take his life also” (45). She recounts numbers of lynchings, which increased from fifty-two in 1882, to two hundred and fifty in 1892 (45). To prove the ability of the vote, Wells-Barnett explains that Black folks of Illinois elected Governor Deneen, a Black man, to office in 1904. While in office, he passed a bill

which provided for the suppression of mob violence, not only by punishment of those
who incited lynchings, but provided damages against the City and County permitting
lynchings. The Bill goes further and provides that if any person shall be taken from the
custody of the Sherriff or his deputy and lynched, it shall be prima facie evidence of
failure on the part of the Sheriff to do his duty. (46)

Exemplifying this law being put into effect, Wells-Barnett explains a lynching that took place in Cairo, Illinois; while the Sheriff attempted to flee and hide with the Black man, James, who white mobs meant to lynch, the mob found them and they murdered James. Following this, Governor Deneen removed the Sheriff from office because he did not follow protocol in protecting James from the lynching. A new Sheriff was voted into office, and he prevented the next lynching from occurring by following protocol. Wells-Barnett ends this paper with a call to action: “In this work all may aid. Individuals, organizations,press, and pulpit should unite in vigorous denunciation of all forms of lawlessness and earnest, constant demand for the rigid enforcement of the law of the land” (52).

Wells-Barnett spent a majority of her life exposing the brutalities of lynch law, fighting white racial oppression, and advocating for enfranchisement most often using her pen as her weapon. While working with various clubs and leagues, she was a wife and mother to two children. Her work exemplifies the radical projects taken on by Black women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries and their long-lasting effects.

Works Cited

“Banner with motto of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.” Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.

Kautz, Malissa. “Ida B. Wells-Barnett.” First Wave Feminisms, 12 Apr. 2019. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023. sites.uw.edu/twomn347/2019/12/04/ida-b-wells-barnett/.

Paddon, Anna R., and Sally Turner. “African Americans and the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Illinois Historical Journal, vol. 88, no. 1, 1995, pp. 19–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40192873. Accessed 7 May 2023.

Schechter, Patricia A. “Wells-Barnett, Ida B.: (1862–1931) Journalist and Social Activist.” The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 24: Race, edited by Thomas E. Holt et al., University of North Carolina Press, 2013, pp. 274–76. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469607245_holt.93. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.

“Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), wearing “Martyred Negro Soldiers” button, between 1917–1919. Facsimile. Ida B. Wells Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library (061.03.00).” Library of Congress. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023. http://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation-1890-1915/new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/ida-b-wells-barnett-holds-her-ground/.

“The article in the Chicago Daily Tribune about Wells winning her case at the trial level.” TN History for Kids. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023. http://www.tnhistoryforkids.org/history/in-search-of/ida-b-wells/.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1862-1931. Crusade for Justice: the Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. University of Chicago Press, 1972. Print.