| Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) |
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| Monday, 27 October 2008 23:50 |
 Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)Tireless leader of America's anti-lynching crusade Born of slave parents in 1862, just months before the Emancipation Proclamation, journalist and publisher Ida B. Wells-Barnett rose to the top of her profession to become known as the tireless leader of America's anti-lynching crusade. Wells-Barnett was born in Holly Springs, Miss., and moved to Memphis at age 16 to teach school and attend Fisk University. Her experiences with racial injustice in Tennessee led her to become a journalist. In 1889, she bought an interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and became its editor. The lynching of three Memphis grocers, one of whom was a friend, catapulted her into action and changed the course of her life. Using the power of her press, she attacked the evils of lynching and urged African Americans to leave the city and to boycott its businesses. While in New York City on business, a mob destroyed her offices and threatened her life. Wells-Barnett moved to New York City, where she became a writer for The New York Age and began investigating lynchings. Wells-Barnett published two famous pamphlets on lynching, Southern Horrors in 1892 and A Red Record in 1895. Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so, Wells-Barnett explained in an understated tone. In A Red Record, Wells wrote: Not all nor nearly all of the murders done by white men during the past thirty years in the South have come to light, but the statistics as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned, show that during these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood In 1895, she married attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett, publisher of The Chicago Conservator, and settled in Illinois. In Chicago, Wells-Barnett wrote for the Conservator and remained active in civil rights and women's groups. She died in Chicago on March 25, 1931. In 1990, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in her honor. |
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