These days, my great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, is referred to as a “badass” and a “boss.” She was an educator, a journalist, a feminist, a businesswoman, a newspaper owner, a public speaker, a suffragist, a civil rights activist, and a women’s club leader. She was a founder of the NAACP, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, a founder of the Alpha Suffrage Club, a founder of the Negro Fellowship League. She wrote, she spoke, she traveled, she challenged the racist and sexist norms of her time that often involved violence and terror. Although she endured enormous criticism and threats to her life, she never shut up. She never gave up. She fought for equality and justice for almost 50 years.
This phenomenal woman was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, and was 16 years old when she lost both of her parents and a younger brother in a yellow fever epidemic. She decided at that young age to take on the responsibility of taking care of her five remaining siblings and started her career as a teacher in rural Mississippi, then moved to Memphis, where she continued to teach. While teaching, she started her journalism career by writing for church newsletters. She wrote about social and political issues at the time and developed a following.
While riding a train from work one day in 1884 while in her early 20s, she was asked to move from the “ladies car” to the “colored car,” which doubled as the smoking car. She refused and was thrown off the train. Rather than cower to the powers that be, she wrote about the incident in the newspaper and sued the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad. She won the case and was awarded $500, though it was appealed all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Two years later, the ruling was overturned in favor of the railroad company, on the grounds that Wells was harassing the company.
While still teaching, she became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech newspaper. She expressed her frustration with separate and unequal school systems and wrote about it — then lost her teaching job. She got busy traveling around Mississippi selling subscriptions for the newspaper and built up a following as a writer.
My great-grandmother’s life completely changed on March 9, 1892. Three of her enterprising friends who owned a grocery store, which rivaled a white-owned store, were lynched. Ida B. Wells knew that her friends — Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart — were only guilty of being economic rivals to a white-owned business.
The common narrative to justify lynching was that black men violated white women, but she recognized that lynching had nothing to do with crime; it was a tool used to keep the black community in an economic and socially inferior position. The murder of her friends set her off, and she exposed the truth about why her friends were lynched, urging black people in Memphis to boycott streetcars and white-owned businesses and to pack up their stuff and head to Oklahoma (which was a territory at the time). She wrote, “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.”
