Ida B. Wells was an African-American journalist, suffragist, feminist, editor, sociologist, and one of the NAACP’s founders in 1909. Ida Bell Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to James and Elizabeth Wells. She was one of seven siblings. Her parents and one sibling died in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic when she was a child. She worked to support her family before relocating to Memphis in search of better teacher pay. She became involved in women’s suffrage and rights. She traveled all over the world to give lectures.
Ida B. Wells was born just months before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Spires Bolling, an architect, enslaved both of Ida B. Wells’ parents. In the Bolling-Gatewood House, her mother worked as a cook.
Ida B. Wells’ mother was religious and strict.
Ida B. Wells was a student at Shaw University until her parents and youngest sibling died of yellow fever. Her father once served on the board of directors of a school for newly freed slaves.
After shooting white men who attacked their store, Ida B. Wells’ friend and his two business partners were murdered by a lynch mob. This fueled her desire to continue her anti-lynching crusade.
Ida B. Wells led an anti-lynching crusade in the 1890s.
Ida B. Wells purchased a first-class train ticket to Nashville in 1884. She refused to move to the African American car, despite the crew’s orders. During a fight, she bit one of the men. She filed a lawsuit, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned her circuit court victory.
Under the pen name Lola, Ida B. Wells began writing about injustices. She was featured in a number of newspapers and magazines.
Ida B. Wells eventually became one of the owners of Free Speech, Memphis Free Speech, and Headlight.
Ida B. Wells was fired from her job as a teacher after she became vocal about the poor conditions of black students in Memphis schools.
Her writing in her newspaper once enraged so many of the city’s white residents that her office was destroyed. Her life would be jeopardized if she ever returned to Memphis.
Ida B. Wells remained in New York and wrote for the New York Age, a newspaper founded by a former slave.
Ida B. Wells married and became Ida B. Wells-Barnett in 1895. She and her husband had four children and she remained active in political and social change.
Ida B. Wells was the driving force behind the establishment of the first African-American kindergarten in her community.
Ida B. Wells began writing an autobiography in 1928, but she never finished it because her health began to fail.
Ida B. Wells died on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68, in Chicago, Illinois, of kidney failure.
Ida B. Wells has received numerous honors, including a postage stamp in the United States in 1990.
