Though Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was born into slavery and only lived 58 years, she would accomplish more in her life than most of her contemporaries; male or female, rich or poor, born enslaved or free.
Far more than an investigative journalist and educator, she was, in many ways, an originator of what would eventually be known as the Civil Rights movement. She co-founded the NAACP, and during her lifetime, was arguably the most famous colored woman in all of America, as well as one of the strongest voices for women’s suffrage anywhere in the world.
Ida was born on a plantation in Holly Springs, MS, on July 16, 1862; a year into the Civil War and just two months before the Emancipation Proclamation freed her and her parents, James and Elizabeth Wells. And though technically born a slave, Ida, fortunately, never had to experience the institution.
As James and Elizabeth’s first child, Ida would grow up seeing her father, a former slave, become a founding trustee of Shaw College (now Rust College, one of the nation’s oldest historically black colleges) and become immensely politically active; including a deep commitment to Lincoln’s Republican Party.
In 1878, Ida, at age 16, would go on to enroll in Shaw herself, and would quickly gain a reputation as an outspoken advocate for women’s equal rights. A few months into her college career, however, tragedy would strike: Ida would lose both her parents and her infant brother to yellow fever during the epidemic, and end up going to work as a teacher in order to help keep the family together.
Six years later, while riding a train on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, a conductor ordered Ida to give up her seat in the first-class ladies’ car and move to the already crowded smoking car. Ida refused, and the conductor and two men dragged her out of the car. Undeterred and still not backing down, Ida both wrote a newspaper article for The Living Way, a Negro church weekly, about her treatment on the train and launched a protracted legal assault against the railroad.
While continuing to teach, Ida got increasingly involved in journalism; taking an editorial position at Washington DC’s The Evening Star, writing weekly articles against the burgeoning Jim Crow policies and serving as editor and co-owner of The Free Speech and Headlight, which focused on issues of racial segregation, discrimination and growing inequality. In the 1890s, after a mob murdered a personal friend, Ida began meticulously documenting lynchings in the United States; a practice that skyrocketed after the passage of Plessy v. Ferguson.
In a serial pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases, she began applying investigative journalistic techniques to, and reporting on lynchings; including debunking the frequent claims by white-identifying folk that lynchings were reserved for criminals.
Likely named after William Lynch of Pittsylvania, VA, who, during the American Revolutionary War, began forming vigilance committees that used torture and terrorism, ostensibly, to maintain order, lynching was a horrific practice, and in every case, a desecration, rather than fulfillment of justice. Originally popularized in the South starting in the 1830s through the Civil War, the victims, early on, were primarily poor European ethnics.
Ida’s investigations revealed how, after the war, both the purpose (from mob justice to economic gain) and the targets (from Euro-ethnic lawbreakers to Negro business owners) had flipped completely, and how these new lynchings were designed to punish the beneficiaries of the Reconstruction Amendments and exploit their economic progress.
It was not uncommon for a white-identifying store owner to fabricate a claim against a colored store owner, particularly something that couldn’t be proven or disproven (such as a Negro man having “laid eyes” on an Anglo woman), in order to have his competition eradicated, the colored business burned and the business owner killed — after the store’s contents had been confiscated. The intimidating and terror-inducing power of lynchings, along with unjust laws, poll taxes, literacy tests and other tools, together, created the machinery that made economic cannibalism nearly as profitable after slavery as before it.
Though often thought of today as another word for hanging, lynchings were something altogether different. The practice was no less than torture at its most heinous. For instance, though neither were hanged, both James Byrd and Matthew Shepherd, after whom the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was named, were lynched.
James, instead of being given a ride home, was driven into the woods, beaten severely, had his face spray-painted, was urinated and defecated on, then, was chained by his ankles to a pickup truck and drug three miles. Alive until his body hit the edge of a drainage ditch that severed his right arm and head about half-way through the ordeal, the men then drove the rest of the way to an African American church and dumped his body there; before heading off to a barbecue.
Matthew, like James, was offered a ride home by people he thought he knew, but was instead taken to a remote area where he was robbed, pistol-whipped, and brutally beaten; leaving Matthew with severe brainstem damage. They tied him to a fence, stripped him of his shoes, and left him to die, alone, out in the freezing Laramie weather. He was found by a cyclist who thought he was a scarecrow.
Below are summaries of just a few lynchings that Ida would report on. But be warned; what follows is tough, but necessary reading:
1893: Henry Smith, in front of a 10,000-person crowd, had his clothes torn off and distributed as mementos, then, had red-hot iron brands placed all over his body for 50 minutes, including burning out his eyes and thrusting irons down his throat, then, set afire. When he somehow, after all that, managed to jump out of the flames, they pushed him back in. After the event, someone would make a watch charm from his kneecap, photographers would sell postcards of the event and his screams were recorded and sold on gramophone.
1898: In Frazier Baker’s case, the mob didn’t even bother to fabricate a legitimate crime. His offense was simply being appointed as a postmaster in a small South Carolina town. As a result, his house was set afire, with him and his family inside, and as they sought to escape, every single fleeing family member suffered gunshot wounds. Frazier and his one-year-old baby would be killed; their charred bodies found near the wreckage of the house the next day.
1899: For Sam Hose’s execution, organizers arranged a special train so that more people could attend. After being tied to a tree in front of a crowd of 2,000 people, they stripped him naked, then, proceeded to mutilate him; severing both his ears, his fingers and privates. Then, they set him afire. Afterward, the crowd was allowed to cut off pieces of him as souvenirs. Bone bits were twenty-five cents and slices of liver, ten. Even the tree where he’d been tied up and tortured was chopped up and sold.
1904: Both Luther Holbert and his wife were forced to hold out their arms as their fingers, one at a time, were chopped off. Then, their ears. Their eyes were then gouged out, and a large corkscrew was used to bore spirals of “raw, quivering flesh” out of their arms, legs, and bodies. Finally, they were burned to death.
None of these people had done anything wrong, nor did they receive even a semblance of a trial.
Ida’s work brought the reality of lynching, in all its horror, to the world. As a result, her Memphis newspaper office would be destroyed by a raging mob, and Ida, under constant threat of death, would finally take the same advice she’d given so many coloreds, she’d leave the South for good. Her follow-on publication, The Red Record, a 100-page pamphlet describing lynching in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation, would provide even more research and detail regarding the practice, while at the same time, delving into broader coverage of the mounting backlash faced by former slaves in the years since the end of the war.
Ida provided statistical evidence that documented the alarmingly high (and rising) rates of lynching, and was among the first to recognize that economics; the same thing that had prevented the wholesale killing of Negros under slavery, was now the primary driver. Her research revealed how over that time, upward of “ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution.” And this was all after the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
In 1893, in protest of the lack of colored representation at the World’s Columbian Exposition (a world’s fair in Chicago to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in what he considered the “New World”), 30-year-old Ida, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn and Ida’s future husband, Ferdinand L. Barnett, both organized a boycott of the fair and co-authored a pamphlet titled, The Reason Why: The Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition; which made public the unknown atrocity that was lynching.
More than 20,000 copies of the pamphlet would be distributed at the fair alone. Two years later, Ida and Ferdinand would marry. Ferdinand, a prominent attorney, fellow journalist and civil rights activist in Chicago, shared Ida’s social justice passions and like Ida, had dedicated years to efforts to make lynchings illegal, while fighting a number of other legal and journalistic battles on behalf of civil rights. They’d spend the rest of their lives working on the causes they shared; writing, speaking, and organizing for civil rights and the women’s movement; traveling nationally and internationally.
An outspoken advocate of equality, she would never be a stranger to disapproval, but Ida never let that deter her. As an African American and as a woman, as someone born into slavery but never defined by it, Ida would never bow and never allow herself to be broken. She wore her diversity like an amulet, and as a result, everywhere she went, change followed.
The Emancipators is an open series about extraordinary people in American history who have done what it takes to make sure the United States is a nation that lives up to the ideals that birthed it. Ida B Wells is the first article in the series.
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RD Moore is an artist, minister, lifelong social activist, emancipationist and founder of the Mary Moore Institute for Diversity, Humanity & Social Justice (MMI). He credits the people who crossed his path starting in his formative years in post-Civil Rights-era Birmingham for the person he’d become and for his unyielding faith in who we can be together. Known for his intimate storytelling and insightful understanding, his work continues to explore that fertile space where diversity, spirituality and humanity all intersect. His blog, Letters from a Birmingham Boy, can be found here.
