03/22/2024
Ida B. Wells is considered one of the most important Black businesswomen and leaders in the history of the nation.
Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells emerged as one of America’s foremost critics of racial injustice through her journalistic and philanthropic endeavors. Wells began her career in activism early as a student at Fisk University, turning to writing and chronicling issues of race and politics in the Deep South. Under the name “lola,” Wells became a leading voice on issues of racial injustice and eventually owned 3 newspapers, including the “Memphis Free Speech,” “Headlight,” and the “Free Speech.”
However, it was the killings of Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart –3 African American business owners in Memphis – that ignited her charge to take on a campaign against lynching. The men were murdered after they opened a grocery store that competed with a white-owned store. In response, Wells traveled the South gathering records of lynchings and wrote “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All its Phases” in 1892.
In 1898 she took her anti-lynching campaign to the White House, urging President William McKinley to act. Wells co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913, to educate Black women on how to cultivate Black candidates and ensure their votes. The organization became the largest Black women’s suffrage organization in the state.
📸 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, c. 1893. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
