Ida B. Wells

The thing that stands out about Ms. Ida B. Wells is that she was a one man or should I say one woman wrecking crew when it came to crusading journalism. Especially when it came to equal rights, racism and lynching in her time.

Wells was born in Mississippi in 1862 to two slave parents. She was the oldest of her seven siblings. At the time that Wells was born Abraham Lincoln had just passed the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared, \"that all persons held as slaves\" within the rebellious states \"are, and henceforward shall be free". So when she was growing up although the south was still very racist, she and her siblings were able to go to school. It was very important to Wells' parents that their children got an education. That is where her foundation for being a journalist began. Tragedy struck in 1878 when the yellow fever epidemic killed her parents and her youngest sibling. At age sixteen Wells became responsible for her younger siblings. She took a job as a teacher and did other jobs on the weekends to support herself and her brothers and sisters.

Wells attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. One day while taking a train to school, she was told by the conductor to move to the back of the train to a smoking car. She would not move and as a result of him trying to move her she bit him. The conductor eventually got help and moved her to the back of the train. At the next stop she got of the train and went back to Memphis. She filed a lawsuit against the railroad company. She ended up winning her case in court and was given a five hundred dollar settlement, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision claiming that her intension was to cause trouble on the train. These experiences of injustice are what sparked Wells to take a stand and write about these things so that people of color at the time would try to make changes and fight for their equal rights. "I firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when you appealed to it, give us justice. I felt shorn of the belief and utterly discouraged."

Wells began to write in black publications as an author of articles that were about race an politics in the South, she wrote under the alias Iola. Wells had a great start because of her determination to fight injustice. In 1887 she attended the National Afro-American Press Convention and was given the honor of being named the most prominent journalist for the American Black Press.

Wells eventually got into the newspaper business by purchasing half of a black newspaper in Memphis called the Free Speech. She was part owner and editor. Wells was very involved in the school system even though she was running a newspaper she continued to teach. One of the stories that sparked her career was an article that she wrote about the school system in Memphis. She wrote about the fact that the school buildings were in terrible condition and teachers had only a little more education than the students the were teaching. She wrote the article and left it anonymous. Everyone who knew her and knew she ran the Fee Speech knew that it was Wells that wrote the article. It created such a stir that it cost her job as a teacher. Wells had all her free time to dedicate to the newspaper and started to focus in on writing about controversial issues in the South, whether the dealt with blacks or whites. Her main crusade was against lynching.

Ida B. Wells referred to the act of lynching "as a horrific form of racial prejudice that no decent human being could ignore or justify." At the time lynching was a method of imposing a penalty for a claim of wrong doing. Lynching was being used in the South very frequently especially after the Civil War. The practice of lynching was a means of punishing criminals of any color, but soon turned into an act of mob violence toward African Americans. Wells use the press to try and fight this epidemic by any means necessary.

While in Mississippi, Wells found out that her friend Tom Moss was lynched. Moss did not commit and crimes but was lynched because he was having success with his grocery store, mor success than the white grocer who was his competition. For the reason the white grocer had Moss and his partners lynched. This outraged Wells and in a series of articles in the Free Speech she tried to convince African Americans to boycott Memphis' new street car line and to move out of the South. Many African Americans listened and started to move out West.