Sixty years before the traditional beginning of the “Civil Rights Movement” there was a courageous and effective civil rights leader who forged the early foundations for the movement. Her name was Ida B. Wells, and her story begins with a lynching in Memphis, Tennessee.
Thomas Moss, an African American man, opened a successful grocery store in the south part of Memphis in 1889. He called it the "People’s Grocery.” A White-owned grocery store across the street, Barrett's Grocery, was owned by William Russell Barrett and of course, they were competitors.
On March 2, 1892, a young Black male named Armour Harris was playing a game of marbles with a young white male named Cornelius Hurst in front of the People's Grocery. The two male youths got into an argument during the game and then began to fight. The white boy’s father rushed to defend his son and began to “thrash” the young Black boy. A couple of employees at the People’s Grocery rushed out to defend the Black boy, and soon a complete riot ensued with whites fighting blacks.
The fight was broken up, but there were continued altercations and tension between the two groups over the next few days. On March 6, the Sheriff and a few white deputies approached the People’s Grocery but were shot at, and soon hundreds of whites were deputized on the spot. Eventually, Thomas Moss, the owner of the People's Grocery, was named as a conspirator along with two other Black employees. The three men were arrested and jailed pending trial.
Around 2:30 a.m. on the morning of March 9, 1892, 75 men wearing black masks took Moss and the two other inmates from their jail cells at the Shelby County Jail to a Chesapeake and Ohio rail yard one mile north of the city and shot them dead. The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche reports: Just before he was killed, Moss said to the mob: "Tell my people to go west, there is no justice here."
Ida Wells was a friend of Thomas Moss, and when she heard about the lynching, she began her investigations into not only that lynching but others across the South. She began to interview people associated with lynchings, including a lynching in Tunica, Mississippi, in 1892 where she concluded that the father of a young White woman had implored a lynch mob to kill a Black man with whom his daughter was having a sexual relationship, under a pretense "to save the reputation of his daughter".
Wells was a reporter for the Free Speech newspaper, a Black publication in Memphis, the only one of its kind. On May 21, 1892, Wells published an editorial refuting what she called "that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."
A White mob ransacked the Free Speech office, destroying the building and its contents. James L. Fleming, co-owner with Wells and business manager, was forced to flee Memphis; and, reportedly, the trains were being watched for Wells' return. Wells had quietly left town.
This event was the beginning of the public crusade of Ida Wells to expose the practice of lynching which was common in the South (and some Northern states) in the late 1800s and into the 20th century. She was an investigative journalist, an advocate against lynching, and later a proponent of women’s right to vote. You could consider Ida Wells to be an early leader in the “Long Civil Rights Movement.”
In October 1892, Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Having examined many accounts of lynchings due to the alleged "rape of White women", she concluded that Southerners accused Black men of rape to hide their real reasons for lynchings: Black economic progress, which White Southerners saw as a threat to their own economic progress. She also concluded that lynching was a symbolic statement toward keeping Blacks in second-class status and under white domination.
In 1895, after conducting further research, Wells published The Red Record, a 100-page pamphlet with more detail, describing lynching in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It also covered Black people's struggles in the South since the Civil War. The Red Record explored the alarmingly high rates of lynching in the United States (which was at a peak from 1880 to 1930). She believed that during the antebellum period of slavery, white people did not commit as many attacks because of the economic labor value of slaves. Wells noted that, since emancipation, "ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution".
Southern Horrors and The Red Record's documentation of lynchings captured the attention of Northerners who knew little about these mob murders or accepted the common explanation that Black men deserved this fate. Later the Equal Justice Initiative, documented that 4,084 African Americans were murdered in the South, alone, between 1877 and 1950, of which, 25 percent were accused of sexual assault and nearly 30 percent, murder. White juries refused to indict any perpetrators for these lynchings, although they were almost always known and sometimes shown in the photographs being made of such events.
Ida Wells was born in 1862 in Mississippi, during the Civil War, but both her parents were enslaved. After emancipation, her parents became involved in establishing Rust College, where Ida would attend as a student. In September 1878, both of Ida's parents died during a yellow fever epidemic that also claimed a sibling. Ida had been away visiting her grandmother when the epidemic hit, so she was spared.
After going to Memphis to become a schoolteacher, she experienced one of many indignities that set her career on a trajectory toward activism. On September 15, 1883, a train conductor with the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad ordered Wells to give up her seat which she had purchased, in the first-class ladies' car and move to the smoking car, which was already crowded with other passengers. When Wells refused to give up her seat on September 15, the conductor and two men dragged her out of the car. Wells gained publicity in Memphis when she wrote a newspaper article for The Living Way, a Black church weekly, about her treatment on the train. This was 72 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery Bus.
In 1891, Wells was dismissed from her teaching post by the Memphis Board of Education due to her articles criticizing conditions in the Black schools of the region. She was devastated but undaunted and concentrated her energy on writing articles for The Living Way and the Free Speech and Headlight.
After fleeing Memphis in the aftermath of the lynching there and her investigative articles published, Wells received public notice. She began a series of speaking tours in Britain where her safety was assured, and on the last night of her second tour, the London Anti-Lynching Committee was established – reportedly the first anti-lynching organization in the world.
The American press was critical of her and wrote racist articles about her tour, but Wells had nevertheless gained extensive recognition and credibility, and an international audience of supporters for her cause.
Eventually settling in Chicago, Wells continued her anti-lynching work while becoming more focused on the civil rights of African Americans. She worked with national civil rights leaders to protest a major exhibition in Chicago, she was active in the national women's club movement, and she ultimately ran for a position in the Illinois State Senate. She also was passionate about women's rights and suffrage. Wells' role in the U.S. suffrage movement was inextricably linked to her lifelong crusade against racism, violence, and discrimination toward African Americans.
Wells helped to establish several civil rights organizations. In 1896, she formed the National Association of Colored Women. Wells is also considered a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). NAACP co-founders included W.E.B. Du Bois who is normally credited with its founding since women were given secondary roles at that time.
Working on behalf of all women, as part of her work with the National Equal Rights League, Wells called for President Woodrow Wilson to put an end to discriminatory hiring practices for government jobs. She was a tireless advocate for equal rights, anti-lynching laws, and antiracism.
Wells died of kidney disease on March 25, 1931, in Chicago. She leaves behind a legacy of social and political activism. As a tribute to Ida Wells in 2020, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously "for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."
And, finally in March 2022, after a hundred years or more of activism to enact an antilynching law, President Biden signed the “Emmett Till Antilynching Act.”
President Biden included Ida Wells in his comments at the signing ceremony. After recognizing that the first antilynching bill was introduced in 1898, Biden closed his remarks with a tribute to Wells. He said:
Ida B. Wells once said, quote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon the wrongs.” “Turn the light of truth upon the wrongs.”
That is why I close this month’s series of Black History Month posts with the story of Ida B. Wells. The greatest honor we can bestow to her and so many others like her is to continue to “turn the light of truth upon the wrongs.”
That is what this column is committed to doing….we will continue to shine a light on the truth of history.
Here is a short video about Ida Wells featuring modern journalist and activist, Nikole Hannah-Jones: