Ida B Wells and anti-lynching activism

Ida B. Wells & Anti-Lynching

Ida B. Wells- Barnett has been one of those women dedicated to a goal, to a scope in life. Indeed, she was a true believer and went from her slavery days to anti-racism opposition and to strong anti-lynching campaigns.

In order to understand Ida Wells's role in the South and her campaigns against segregation and lynching actions in the Southern states, we need to briefly refer to her biography and, even more important, to the situation of the South at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

Ida Wells was born in Mississippi as daughter to a slave family. She remained an orphan when she was fourteen and began teaching in order to provide an income for her brothers and sisters. Her first antiracial experience came when she was on a train in Memphis. The 1875 Civil Rights Act had banned all discrimination on racial or color issues, but it seems that it was often the case that segregation was practiced, especially in certain railroad companies.

Ida Wells was asked to give up her seat to a white man and take place with the other Negroes in the smoking wagon. Courageously she fought off the decision until she was carried out. Here is a bit of her own story: "[The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself."

The struggle for justice had indeed begun for Ida Wells. She sued the railroad and won in the first instance. She then joined the Free Speech and Headlight, a local paper run by a pastor of the Baptist Church. It was in 1892, when three of her friends were lynched that she became fighting against brutal and savage lynching.

Her first words against lynching were published in the paper she worked for. She said "there is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms (...)There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town." If we look at this first of Ida's protests against lynching, this appears to be a rather fatalistic tone, a tone where she proposes renouncing, not as a way of fighting the injustice, but a way to protect lives.

This tone however changes as soon as she moved to Chicago and is most relevant in her anti-lynching manifesto, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, published the same year. In her work, she counts no less than 150 lynch-related deaths. Many of the Negroes had been accused of rape, but just as many were absolved of the accusation, only subsequent to their death.