Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells (later Ida Bell Wells- Barnett, * July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, † March 25, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American journalist and civil society and women 's rights activist. She was co-founder of numerous organizations, including the NAACP and the NACW ( National Association of Colored Women), and sat prominently against the then widespread lynching of African Americans in. Through their work they influenced significantly the civil rights movement in the United States.

Life

Ida B. Wells was born a slave six months before the constitution of the Emancipation Proclamation. Later she attended Rust College was established in 1866. Her parents and her youngest brother died of yellow fever epidemic, when she was sixteen, after which they themselves had to look after her five younger siblings. To support the family, she took, though not yet eighteen, a job as a teacher at. At the invitation of an aunt, she moved in 1882 with two younger sisters in the vicinity of Memphis, where she again got a job and also began to write for various newspapers. In the summer, she attended the Fisk University in Nashville. On the way to Nashville in 1884 she made the experience not to be allowed to sit in a ladies compartment of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, despite a first - class tickets. Instead, she was forcibly taken into the compartment for colored people. She sued the railroad and received compensation of $ 500, the sentence was, however, revised in 1887 by the Tennessee Supreme Court. She turned to journalism then even more and became a shareholder of the newspaper Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. She criticized continuing the progressive suppression of the black population in the southern states, where they also advocated violence for the purposes of self-defense against the oppressors. An article that was directed against the local school system, led to her dismissal as a teacher in 1891.

In particular, the lynchings, the preferred means of terrorizing Black, found at Ida B. Wells considerable attention and was part of numerous articles and speeches by her, in which she exposed about the often mentioned as a reason rape of white women as a myth. The only possibility of future prevention she saw a change in legislation in which " the strong arm of the government (...) extend beyond the borders of the Federal States " must. About committed lynchings and their supposed causes led Wells accurate statistics. She herself had been confronted with this crime: The father of her goddaughter, and two other blacks who stood with a grocery store in direct competition with whites were lynched in 1892. Wells demanded that in their articles to help to boycott the business of the whites or equal to emigrate to the recently released for populating areas in Oklahoma (→ Oklahoma Land Run ), what actually happened. In response, a mob destroyed the building in which their paper was produced. At the time on the way to New York City, she received death threats many Southerners who forbade her to return to Memphis. She remained in New York and was, by virtue of the New York Age. In 1893 she spent a year to the UK. Your local speeches led to the founding of the British Anti- Lynching Society. Upon her return, she moved to Chicago where she worked with Frederick Douglass and the lawyer and founder of the newspaper Conservator Ferdinand Barnett, whom she married in 1895. The couple had four children, in addition to two from a previous relationship Barnett. Between 1898 and 1902 Wells- Barnett worked as a secretary one of the first civil rights organizations, the National Afro - American Council. In 1909 she was involved in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but came later from her as not militant enough deems Association and founded other organizations. She took care continues with various programs, such as the construction of a kindergarten to the black community of Chicago and also sought the implementation of full women's suffrage in the United States, for which she took part in a parade of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1913.

In 1924, Wells- Barnett for election as president in 1896, co-founded by her National Association of Colored Women, but lost to Mary McLeod Bethune. The same fate befell her in 1930 in an attempt to be elected to the Illinois Senate. A year later she died of kidney failure. Published in 1970 her daughter, Alfreda Duster Wells- Barnett's autobiography, Crusade for Justice. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women 's Hall of Fame. Your home is listed today as a landmark of the city of Chicago and as a National Historic Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.