Woman
in the Wings / February 2006
Woman in the Wings is a monthly feature about a woman who lives her life not in the spotlight, but behind the scenes, where the applause never seems to reach. Women in the Wings shine as brightly as any star; they just don’t take center stage. Long before Rosa Parks took her seat on a Montgomery bus, black women were entrenched in the battle for equal treatment. Little known and rarely remembered, they remain heroines of the highest order. Meet a woman whose name may not be familiar but whose spirit blazed a trail walked proudly today.
Life In Bold Type
 Ida. B. Wells-Barnett
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A teacher, journalist and activist, Ida. B. Wells-Barnett was one of the earliest, most fearless proponents of civil rights. Born in 1862, a former slave who became part owner of a newspaper, Ida Wells never stopped fighting discrimination, and she led virtually a one-woman crusade to end its most violent expression, lynching.
In May of 1884, Wells purchased a first-class train ticket for a trip to Nashville, Tennessee, where she was attending classes at Fisk University. On boarding the train, the conductor told her to move back to the smoking car. Wells refused. When he tried to force her from her seat, she bit him. The baggageman and conductor ushered her out of the car while many passengers cheered. At the next stop, Wells got off the train, returned to Memphis and filed suit against the railway company. She won her circuit court case but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision on grounds that her intention had been to cause difficulty for the railway.
Discouraged, but not defeated, she began writing articles for black publications about race and politics. Eventually, Wells purchased partial interest in a black newspaper and became an editor. In addition to writing, she continued to teach, traveling the South in the summers to solicit subscribers and hire correspondents.
When she wrote critically about separate but unequal schools in Memphis, describing rundown buildings and teachers with little more education than their students, it cost Wells her teaching job.
But, free to dedicate herself full time to the newspaper, she was soon earning enough to purchase a half-share of its ownership. Wells was in Mississippi when she received news that her goddaughter’s father had been lynched. His apparent crime had been successfully competing with a white grocer. He and his partners were murdered. In a series of scathing editorials about lynchings, not as punishment for crime, but as a violent form of racial prejudice, Wells urged African Americans to boycott the city’s streetcars or move. Black families left Memphis by the hundreds. Those who stayed, boycotted white businesses and public transportation.
For two months after the murders, Wells traveled from Texas to Virginia, distilling fact from rumor, investigating lynchings. Margaret Truman wrote in Women of Courage, “To call this dangerous work is an understatement. Imagine a lone black woman in some small town in Alabama or Mississippi, asking questions no one wanted to answer about a crime that half the whites in the town had committed.”
Wells learned that lynching was ostensibly punishment only for rape or murder, but black men had been lynched for a multitude of perceived social infractions, including “being saucy”. Her articles caused a furor.
A mob marched on the newspaper, demolished the printing press and set fire to the building. In telegrams and letters from friends begging her not to return, Wells was told there were instructions to kill her on sight.
Rather than return to Memphis, she went to New York, where one of her first stories was a front-page spread detailing names and dates of dozens of lynchings. The issue sold 10,000 copies, but reached a predominantly black audience, not the white progressives she needed. So, in 1893, intrepid Ida Wells set out for Europe on a speaking tour to share what she had learned about lynchings. Back home, American newspapers attacked her as the “slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress.”
Following her tour, Wells moved to Chicago to work for a black newspaper founded and edited by Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer. When African Americans were banned from participating in Chicago’s World’s Exposition, Wells, Barnett and Frederick Douglass wrote and distributed ten thousand copies of a booklet presenting the injustice. Wells also published A Red Record, recounting three years of American lynchings.
At 33, Wells married Barnett and began raising their four children. She continued to crusade against lynching but also promoted the women’s club movement, encouraging African American women in civic affairs. She helped establish the first kindergarten in Chicago’s black district and joined reformer Jane Addams in a successful protest against segregating city schools.
Wells-Barnett never gave up. She denounced restrictions on buses and in theaters, protested black exclusion from organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and revealed segregationist policies of the YMCA. She founded the first African American women’s suffrage organization and went all the way to the White House with her concerns-twice. In 1898 she led a delegation to President McKinley to protest the lynching of a black postmaster. In 1913, representing the National Equal Rights League, she asked President Wilson to end discrimination in government jobs. At 50, she went to work as an adult probation officer and at age 68, ran for state senator.
Ida Wells-Barnett would never know how her fearless battles against discrimination would affect the civil rights movement decades later. She died in 1931 of kidney disease at the age of sixty-nine.
She is rightfully honored as a woman who lived her life, and risked her life, so that justice would be served. PL
Copyright © 2007 A Woman's View. All rights reserved.
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