Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell

Impact on the world

After a mob lynched her friend Thomas Moss and two other Black businessmen in Memphis in 1892, Wells-Barnett turned her Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, which she part-owned, into a platform for investigating and exposing lynching as a tool of racial and economic terror rather than punishment for crime, a campaign that led a white mob to destroy her printing press while she was traveling; she continued the work from New York and Chicago, publishing the landmark statistical reports Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), the first documented data-driven studies of American lynching. She toured Britain twice to build international pressure against the practice, co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and the first Black women's suffrage organization, and in 2020 — 89 years after her death — received a special Pulitzer Prize citation “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”

Life & background

Born into slavery on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the eldest of eight children, Wells lost both parents and a younger sibling to a yellow fever epidemic in 1878 and supported her remaining siblings by working as a teacher while attending Rust College and later Fisk University summer sessions. In 1884, nearly seven decades before Rosa Parks, she sued a railroad company after being forcibly removed from a first-class ladies' car for refusing to move to the smoking car reserved for Black passengers, winning at the circuit court level before the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision. She married Chicago attorney and fellow journalist Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895, becoming one of the first married American women to keep her own name professionally alongside her husband's, and the couple raised four children together while both continued journalism and activism; she died of kidney disease in Chicago on March 25, 1931.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; National Park Service; White House Historical Association