Written by Sarah Davis, Illinois State Museum Educator of Public Programs

Ida B. Wells, a journalist and civil rights activist, was born enslaved in Mississippi in 1862. Her parents were very active in reconstruction era politics and her father instilled in her from a young age the importance of education. Before the death of both her parents and baby brother in 1878, Wells attended Rust College. At 16, Wells was now responsible for the care of her siblings and took a job teaching in a town nearby to support the family. In 1882, she moved with her sisters to Memphis, Tennessee to live with her aunt and found a better teaching job. During her early years in Memphis, Wells sued Chesapeake and Ohio the railroad after being removed from the train for refusing to give up her first-class ticket in the woman’s car. She won her case, but the decision was overturned on appeal. 

After her experience, she began to write about race and politics in the Southern United States, publishing her articles in black-owned newspapers including The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and Free Speech, which she owned. She began to write and speak out against lynching after her close friend Tomas Moss was murdered by an angry white mob. She traveled throughout the South researching other lynchings. In 1892, she published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases. 

Wells moved to Chicago and married African American lawyer, Ferdinand Barnett in 1895. She was one of the first American women to keep her last name after she married. Wells continued with her writing and activism after she married. She went on to form several civil rights organizations including the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wells was also very active in the women’s suffrage movement and advocated for African American women in Illinois. During the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., she refused to march at the back of the parade with the other African American women, instead marched with the rest of the delegates from Illinois. Wells continued her social activism until she died in 1931. In 2020, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize "for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."