The Forum

An Innovator Who Challenged Everything and Answered No One 

“One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”- Ida B. Wells 

Born in 1862 to parents who were slaves in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida Bell Wells would enter her childhood, a young lady liberated from servitude after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the 13th Amendment of 1865 freed slaves in the Confederate states of the South and abolished slavery throughout the United States. 

Ida was one of eight children but lost one brother to spinal meningitis during her childhood. She lost another younger 2-month-old brother to an outbreak of yellow fever which had spread rapidly through Holly Springs in 1878 when Ida was sixteen. The same epidemic also killed both of Wells’ parents. Soon after, Ida took on the role of matriarch in her family and committed herself to raising her five younger surviving siblings. Ida defied the wishes of all her surviving family and friends in Mississippi by refusing to allow her siblings to be separated and sent to foster homes. With the help of her father's fraternal organization, the Masons, Ida found a job and began teaching at a black elementary school in a rural area outside of Holly Springs. Through the help of the Masons and by teaching, Wells managed to support herself and her young family. Later she took her siblings and moved to Memphis, Tennessee with the help of her Aunt Fannie Butler. In Memphis Ida was placed in a higher paid position for the Shelby County School System. She was also invited to write for a local Black-owned publication, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, of which she would become editor and co-owner. She and her business partner J. L. Fleming later shortened the paper’s name to simply, The Free Speech.

Wells’ most distinguished accomplishment came as the result of her commitment to reporting about structural racism throughout the South. Wells had already established herself as a well-known journalist while teaching and writing for the Free Speech in Memphis. Her articles challenging discrimination and pushing for equality for blacks were increasingly becoming central to the regional and national debates about racial injustice. An inci dent which involved her dear friend would catapult Wells onto the international stage as the world’s foremost advocate against lynchings, which were proliferating across the South and beyond. 

Lynching refers to the killing of a person by a mob using extreme and brutal torture. Victims were most often beaten, shot, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, dismembered, dragged behind horses or vehicles, stoned, hanged and various other forms of severe torture before ultimately being murdered. The fundamental aspect of lynching is the illegal, extrajudicial involvement of groups of people that form mobs to publicly torture and eventually execute individuals. The goals of these activities were to menace and terrorize other groups in order to establish and maintain social control. In the United States lynchings were mostly targeted at blacks during slavery and escalated after slavery was abolished when blacks were freed from the control of their white counterparts. Photos were often taken as souvenirs. Announcements were sent out inviting people to attend the events. Families gathered around to celebrate with picnic baskets. A popular postcard industry flourished throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s featuring images of dozens, to hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people standing cheerfully around the mutilated, burned and often hung bodies of their victims. Many of these photos are available online today. 

In March of 1892, Thomas Moss had been co-owner of a very successful Black-owned grocery cooperative located in a diverse district of Memphis, Tennessee commonly known as "The Curve." Along with his two other business partners Calvin McDowell and Henry “Will” Stewart, Moss operated The People's Grocery which had grown to become the largest competitor of a White-owned grocery store in the same district. 

Moss, also a letter carrier, was a well-known and respected family man and community leader in the multiracial district along with McDowell and Stewart. When a fight between white and black children escalated to involve their parents, a large confrontation between white and black residents began near The People's Grocery. The incident was used by a group of whites which included local business owners and deputies as an excuse to begin a campaign to shutdown The People’s Grocery. When a group of armed men began to attack the grocery store, Moss and his co-owners took up arms and defended themselves and their business. After wounding several of the white attackers, which included a number of local deputies, Moss, McDowell and Stewart were arrested and held at the local jail. 

White-owned local newspapers exploited the situation and spread race triggering misinformation. Several nights later while Moss, McDowell and Stewart were still being detained at the jail, a mob of at least 75 masked white men took over the jail and abducted the three men. The men were then taken to an abandoned railroad yard outside of Memphis, tortured, mutilated, and then shot to death by the mob.

Shocked by the grisly murders of the men, and in particular, the death of her dear friend Thomas Moss, Wells began investigating the circumstances surrounding the lynchings at the Curve as well as other lynching that had recently taken place. When she published her findings in the Free Speech with editorial commentary questioning the commonly accepted justifications precipitating lynchings, a white mob attacked the building that housed the newspaper. Wells’ business partner J. L. Fleming was run out of town, barely escaping the violence after being warned ahead of the mob that intentions were to destroy the newspaper and end the lives of the publication’s proprietors. Fleming shared this message from the town’s people with Wells and advised along with all her other friends and family that she never return to Memphis. The Free Speech printing presses had been destroyed, and it was well known that many residents, including business owners and community leaders of The Curve were planning to see to the death of Ida B. Wells upon her return to the town. 

Wells never returned to Memphis. She continued traveling and writing to expose the truth behind lynchings across the United States, reporting for other publications. She also traveled throughout Europe and shared her experiences of the racism and brutality that were so commonly accepted throughout southern states in the U.S.

In 1895 Wells moved to Chicago where she continued her activism. She later married attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett, settled into the Windy City and began raising a family. Wells founded the first Black settlement house, the Negro Fellowship League (NFL) in 1908 in Chicago. She also founded the first women’s suffrage organization for black women, The Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913 in Chicago. 

Wells’ mission to challenge and end racial discrimination included trips to our region here in St Louis which resulted in one of her most well-known publications. The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of a Century (1917) was written during Well’s investigation of a series of attacks perpetrated by mobs of white residents of East St Louis against the city’s black residents. Racial hatred for blacks grew in the late 1800s and early 1900s in regions across the U. S. as African Americans migrated from the South in search of a better life. In the year 1917 white residents of the mostly white city of East St. Louis rioted for three days between July 1st to July 3rd, attacking hundreds of black residents of the community known as Black Valley. The small but crowded community was put under siege as multiple groups of white residents, often with the support of law enforcement and the Illinois State Guard roamed the streets attacking black residents. Attackers reportedly assaulted people on the street, pulled people off of streetcars, entered homes and business attacking people and killed dozens of people as victims were beaten, shot, hung, stoned to death and burned alive. 

Wells arrived in East St Louis on the morning of July 5th to investigate the incident. She arrived by train and collected firsthand, sworn testimonies of survivors of the massacre. Wells began collecting information as soon as she arrived at the train station. Amid the extensive destruction, Wells documented the looted, vandalized homes which were frequently torched and left unhabitable. More than 300 homes and businesses were destroyed, and more than 6,000 residents were displaced.

Through her investigation Wells’ accounts from survivors exposed the complicity of local authorities and the state guard who were repeatedly reported to have stopped black residents and taken any weapons they might have had before turning them over to the mobs. Local law enforcement and Illinois State Guard personnel were reported in multiple accounts to have systematically rendered black residents defenseless and left without so much as even a pocketknife before the authorities would then stand aside to witness dozens of attacks on completely helpless victims by mobs of their white neighbors. Reports consistently referenced white residents robbing black residents of their valuables before committing group acts of extreme violence against them up to and including murder. Most of those who survived did so by escaping across the Eads Bridge to St Louis. Thousands of survivors fled on foot with only the clothes on their backs, often with children in tow. Many people were reported to have drowned as they attempted to cross the Mississippi river after police eventually closed off the bridge to prevent East St Louis residents from escaping. 

National outrage due to Wells’ comprehensive reporting of the destruction in East St Louis prompted a Congressional Investigation which was still considered by many to undercut the full scale of the destruction and loss of life. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) estimated the possibility of up to 200 people reported to have been killed during the attacks as opposed to the Congressional investigation’s tally of only 39 victims. Wells’ investigation and subsequent reporting provided more than several testimonies which indicated the authority’s intentional misrepresentation of destruction and loss of life during the three days of attacks. Many accounts include reports of bodies being buried in mass graves, dumped into the Cahokia Creek and burned beyond recognition, which made accurate accounting of casualties highly implausible. Property damage was estimated at the time to cost approximately $400,000, which would be estimated at a cost of $10,882,931 today.

Wells raised money and awareness through her speaking tours to keep her publications operating. She often hired private investigators to help gather details around the lynchings which she also investigated personally, gathering information from multiple angles and leveraging her relationships with people of different races and cultures to help cover the varied perspectives around incidents. Wells cultivated a network of supporters and informants throughout the south who helped gather evidence, coordinated and arranged for interviews, and advised her on various concerns when she bravely traveled, often alone to complete her investigations of lynchings. 

Her principled and meticulous approach to gathering information and validating details helped to establish tenets of reporting that are central to modern investigative journalism today. Through her dogged and often dangerous reporting, Wells singlehandedly deconstructed the widely accepted narratives that lynchings were punishment for crimes such as the raping of white women. Wells’ firsthand, sworn testimonies provided the first recorded statistical evidence that lynchings were mostly targeted towards upwardly mobile and influential blacks as a way to terrorize the black population and keep blacks subordinated. A significant number of lynching Wells investigated were found to be the local public’s racist and violent reactions to consensual interracial inter actions and relationships. Her publications Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All It’s Phases (1892) and A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States (1899) were game changing works that used some of the first known data journalism in the United States to expose the epic scale of lynchings throughout the south and the true motivations behind them.

Publications like the Free Speech and her other works were instrumental in motivating the United State government into passing anti-lynching laws and helped to draw the era of lynching in this country to a close. She interacted often with other great minds of her time such as Frederick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony, W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Adams, and Booker T. Washington. She was the first black women in the United States to be paid by a white owned news paper and one of the first black women to run for public office in the U.S. Ida B Wells was also active in the women’s suffrage and early social welfare movements. She advocated not only for women to have equality and the right to vote, but for the suffrage movement to also begin prioritizing the empowerment of black women along with all other women. In addition, she was also an unsung cofounder of the NAACP. She was later distanced from both movements due to sexism, racism and the perceptions of other movement leaders of the times that she was too radical. 

Ida B. Wells-Barnett died March 25, 1931, in Chicago, Illinois after a battle with kidney disease. Her legacy consists of countless accomplishments, including her implementation of groundbreaking techniques in journalism. While photography was in its infancy in the mid-19th century, Wells began during her investigations to regularly integrate validated first-hand witness accounts with photographic evidence of crime scenes and supporting evidence from lynching cases. Her methods have become cannon for investigative journalists today. 

Though her name is less often heard in comparison to many of her male counterparts of the early Civil Rights Movement, Wells’ contributions to the movement cannot be overlooked. Much of her work helped to establish the foundation upon which many later efforts addressing racial inequality have been built. 

Wells persisted from a very early age and throughout her life in overcoming monumental resistance while maintaining a kind and inquisitive soul. Her spirit and determination established her as a catalyst for influencing systemic change. She was a pioneer, an advocate, an innovator and an all-round badass. Though many of her accomplishments have only recently begun coming to light, it is indisputable that her influences have always been there, indelibly stitched throughout the fabric of justice and equality.