Wells-Barnett, Ida (1862–1931)

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Wells-Barnett, Ida (1862–1931)

African-American writer, editor, and organizer, best known for her crusade against lynching. Name variations: Ida B. Barnett; Ida B. Wells; Ida Wells Barnett. Born Ida Bell Wells on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi; died of uremia in Chicago, Illinois, on March 25, 1931; daughter of Elizabeth Warrenton Wells (a slave, then domestic servant) and James Wells (a slave, then carpenter); attended Rust College intermittently; married Ferdinand Lee Barnett (an attorney, Republican politician, and editor), on June 27, 1895; children: Charles Aked (b. 1896); Herman K. (b. 1897); Ida B. Wells (b. 1901); Alfreda M. Duster (b. 1904).

Taught in Holly Springs and Memphis areas (1878–91); was a weekly columnist for American Baptist (1886); was part owner and editor, Memphis Free Speech and Headlight (1889–92); contributed to various African-American newspapers; served as secretary, National Colored Press Association (1891–93); was a founder of the Southern Afro-American Press Association (1893); organized the Ida B. Wells Club, Chicago (1893); was owner and editor, Conservator (Chicago, 1895–97); was a founder of the NationalAssociation of Colored Women (1896); served as editor for Women's Era (1896); was a founder of the National Afro-American Council (1898) and secretary (1898–99); headed the Anti-Lynching Bureau (1899–1903); was a national organizer (1900–03); was a founder of the Frederick Douglass Center, Chicago (1904); was a participant at the National Negro Conference (1909) and member of the Committee of Forty; was a founder of the Negro Fellowship League, Chicago (1910); was an early participant of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909–14); served as president, Chicago bureau, National Equal Rights League (1914); was on the publicity committee, National League of Republican Colored Women (1924); was a national organizer, Illinois Colored Women of Colored Voters Division, Republican National Committee (1928).

Selected writings:

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York Age Print, 1892, reprint, Arno, 1969); A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (Donohue & Henneberry, 1895, reprint, Arno, 1969); (with Frederick Douglass, Garland Penn, and F.L. Barnett) The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World Columbian Exposition (Ida B. Wells, 1893, reprint, University of Illinois Press, 1993); Lynch Law in Georgia (Chicago Colored Citizens, 1899); Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900, reprint, Arno, 1969); The Arkansas Race Riot (Hume Job Print, 1920); The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (Negro Fellowship Forum, 1917); (Alfreda M. Duster, ed.) Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (University of Chicago Press, 1970); (Trudier Harris, comp.) Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (Oxford University Press, 1991); (Miriam DeCosta-Willis, ed.) The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (Beacon Press, 1995).

On March 9, 1892, in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, three black males were lynched. Three years earlier, these same men had organized the People's Grocery Company, which was located in a thickly populated suburb on the corner of Walker Avenue and Mississippi Boulevard. Thomas Moss was company president. Calvin McDowell clerked in the store. Will Stuart owned stock in the firm. The new enterprise quickly cut into the profits of the sole competitor, a white merchant named W.H. Barnett, who owned a store across the street and who had enjoyed a monopoly in this racially mixed neighborhood.

Exactly a week before the lynching, some black and white boys fought over a game of marbles. The father of one of the whites whipped one of the black victors. The black fathers gathered near the home of the offender, at which point whites called the police. This tension led to a violent incident at the People's store between black clerk McDowell and white competitor Barnett, with the specific circumstances of the conflict in dispute. A criminal court judge arrested McDowell, who posted bail and was released.

Three days later, on March 5, nine armed whites, dressed in civilian clothes, entered the People's store and arrested two blacks who had called for dynamiting "white trash." These armed whites were confronted by black armed guards, who fired on them, wounding three deputies in a brief shoot-out. The remaining deputies gathered additional troops, then arrested McDowell and Stuart. The white press magnified the incident, calling it "a bloody riot." Soon the People's store was looted. White deputies, some of them mere boys, broke into over 100 black homes, arresting some 30 black "co-conspirators," including Moss. Within hours, rumors of a black revolt had spread throughout the entire county. A black militia was disarmed.

Four days after the shoot-out, around 3 pm, a group of whites entered the jail and carried Moss, McDonald, and Stuart about a mile north of Memphis. There all three were shot; in addition, McDonald's eyes were gouged out. A grand jury met for two weeks on the matter but failed to indict anyone. No one connected with the lynching was ever arrested.

A 29-year-old African-American woman, who was in Natchez during the entire episode, wrote an editorial in a newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, which she partially owned. She had been an extremely close friend of Moss and his widow, serving as godmother to their daughter. Wrote Ida Wells-Barnett:

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or becomes his rival. 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 we can do; save our money and leave a town that will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.

Before the Memphis affair, Wells-Barnett believed that the rape of white women was the prime motive in lynching. As she later recalled:

Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved to die anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.

Now her eyes were opened "to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and 'keep the nigger down.'" Sixty-one hundred blacks disposed of their property, leaving the city of Memphis. Leading pastors took entire congregations with them as they headed for Oklahoma Territory. Whites soon shut Free Speech down. The world of Ida Wells-Barnett had been permanently shaken.

She was born Ida Bell Wells in 1862 in the northern Mississippi hill town of Holly Springs, of slave parents, the oldest in a family of four boys and four girls. Her mother Elizabeth ("Lizzie") Warrenton was the child of a black mother and an Indian father. One of ten children born to slaves in Virginia, she had been beaten frequently by various masters. Moreover, she and two sisters were sold apart, separated from their mother. Her last owner, whom she served as a cook, was a Holly Springs carpenter named Bolling, who proved to be a kind master. Elizabeth's husband James Wells, the acknowledged son of his master, was apprenticed to Bolling to learn the carpentering trade. James could hire himself out while living in the town of Holly Springs. After Ida's parents became free, her mother continued to work as a cook and her father as a carpenter.

I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.
—Ida Wells-Barnett

Ida's upbringing was strict. On Sunday, only the Bible could be read. When she went to school, her semiliterate mother attended class as well. Wells-Barnett was educated at Holly Springs' Shaw University (informally called Rust College until 1890). Sponsored by northern Methodists, the school educated newly emancipated blacks, providing instruction at levels ranging from elementary instruction to teaching training. She left Shaw temporarily in 1878, when, that September, her parents and an infant brother died in a devastating epidemic of yellow fever that swept the Mississippi Valley. Suddenly, at age 16, Ida had to care for five siblings, the oldest a sister paralyzed below the waist. She later recalled, "After being a happy, light-hearted schoolgirl I suddenly found myself at the head of a family."

Claiming to be 18, Wells-Barnett let down her skirts and put up her hair, so as to make herself look older. The tactic worked, for she secured a position teaching in a one-room school at Holly Springs. Her salary: $25 a month. She taught for three years in neighboring areas and six months in a school in Cleveland County, Arkansas. She continued her studies at Rust between teaching terms. In 1881, at the instigation of aunt Fannie Wells , she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, which was 40 miles from Holly Springs. She first served in the nearby town of Woodstock, then after 1884 in Memphis' black schools, where monthly salaries came to $60. At that time almost half of Memphis was black.

Wells-Barnett hated teaching, being troubled by overcrowded classrooms, unruly students, and slim chances for advancement. Yet she felt trapped, finding menial labor the only other option. Besides, being a teacher catapulted her into Memphis' black elite. She became particularly active in literary and dramatic circles and found what she called "a breath of life" in the Memphis Lyceum, editing its newspaper, the Evening Star.

Always a devout Christian, Wells-Barnett was active in several Memphis congregations, among them Episcopal, African Methodist, and the Disciples of Christ. To Ida, God was the defender of the persecuted as well as the one who forgave her admittedly strong temper. At the same time, she was frequently scornful of African-American clergy, whom she found corrupt and ignorant.

Wells-Barnett found herself engaged in the struggle for civil rights somewhat inadvertently. In 1883, while traveling from Memphis to Woodstock on the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad, she purchased a first-class ticket and sat in the "ladies' car." Upon being told to move to the second-class "smoking car," where all African-Americans were expected to sit, she refused to leave. When the conductor grabbed her arm, she bit the back of his hand. As she was being forcibly removed, the white passengers applauded. Filing suit against the railroad, in November 1884 she won her case in circuit court, being awarded $500 in damages. Blacks throughout the nation celebrated the verdict. In April 1887, however, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision, fining her $200 for court costs. She confided to her diary:

I felt so disappointed, because I had hoped such great things from the suit for my people generally…. O God is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us? Thou has always fought the battles of the weak and oppressed. Come to my aid at this moment & teach me what to do, for I am sorely,
bitterly disappointed. Show us the way, even as Thou led the children of Israel out of bondage into the promised land.

Wells-Barnett's accounts of the case in a local black newspaper launched her journalism career, though she remained a teacher until 1891. Then the Memphis school board fired her, doing so because she criticized the substandard, faulty buildings available to black children. At first she wrote gratis for the Memphis Living Way, a journal run by two black Baptist ministers. Using the pen name "Iola," she advocated education, selfhelp, and social reform. By 1884, the African-American New York Globe (later the Freeman and the Age), edited by T. Thomas Fortune, had picked up her articles. Soon she was contributing to a host of African-American journals, including A.M.E. Church Review, Indianapolis World, Kansas City Dispatch, and Conservator of Chicago. She became a protégé of the powerful minister William J. Simmons, president of both the National Baptist Convention and a theological school in Louisville and editor of the Black Press Association. In October 1886, Simmons hired Wells-Barnett to write the weekly women's column for his American Baptist, putting her on regular salary for the first time. Within a year, she became so popular that a black journalist called her the "Princess of the Press." In 1889, Wells-Barnett invested her savings to buy one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, a paper she edited as well. (She shortened its name to Free Speech.) Within a year, she had raised its circulation from 1,500 to 4,000. By 1892, she became half-owner.

Wells-Barnett was soon involved in wider African-American circles. In 1891, she began a two-year term as secretary of the National Colored Press Association. That year she helped form the Southern Afro-American Press Association, an ephemeral body founded by discontented Southern and Western editors in protest against Eastern attempts to dominate black journalism. She also assisted in organizing the National Afro-American League, a body established to fight lynch law and integrate public accommodations.

In 1885, a newspaper described Wells-Barnett as "about four and a half feet high, tolerably well proportioned, and of ready address." Wrote editor Fortune, "She is rather girlish looking in physique, with sharp regular features, penetrating eyes, firm set lips and a sweet voice." However, many black leaders, both male and female, felt ambivalent towards her, finding her writings too militant, her personality too confrontational. Former U.S. Senator Blanche K. Bruce, for example, called her arrogant and egotistical. "Ida B. Wells," he wrote in 1894, "has become so spoiled by the Afro-American press that she has delegated to herself the care and keeping of the entire colored population of the United States."

In 1892, after the Memphis lynching, a frightened Wells-Barnett left Memphis for good. It would be over 20 years before she returned to the South. She became a weekly contributor to Fortune's New York Age, which had become the leading black paper in the nation. In June 1892, the paper published her lengthy attack on lynching, which was reprinted in pamphlet form as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Three years later, another work, A Red Record, updated her findings. It listed all the lynchings of the past two years, organized by accusations against its victims. The nation's foremost abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, wrote the preface. The St. Paul Appeal commented:

We cannot see what the "good" citizens of Memphis gained by suppressing the Free Speech. They stopped the papers of a few hundred [sic] subscribers and drove Miss Ida B. Wells to New York, and now she is telling the story to hundreds of thousands of readers.

In her writings on lynching, Wells-Barnett stressed several themes. She challenged the notion that lynching was perpetuated by poor whites, declaring that leading businessmen led the mobs. Lynchings averaged over twice a week precisely because African-Americans were resisting degradation. Whites, she said, were saying to themselves, "Kill the leaders and it will cow the Negro who dares to shoot a white man, even in self-defense."

In two-thirds of the cases, Wells-Barnett observed, the much-touted accusation of rape was not even charged. Even if one were accused of such a crime, guilt was often doubtful. As part of her argument, she stressed the appeal black males held for white females. She wrote, "There are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law." Similarly she noted many incidents where white males raped black females with impunity. She wrote, "Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect." She questioned the "manliness" of such a practice, stressing that lynching involved savage acts of uncontrolled fury. Indeed, in the face of such barbarism, African-Americans acted with remarkable restraint.

Wells-Barnett called for black self-defense, claiming that armed resistance had prevented several lynchings. "A Winfield rifle should have a place of honor in every black home," she asserted. "The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched." She herself had bought a pistol as soon as Thomas Moss was murdered.

Soon Wells-Barnett was on the lecture circuit, appearing practically everywhere but the South. By the 1890s, among African-Americans, only Frederick Douglass received more attention. Douglass wrote Wells-Barnett, telling her that her protests against lynching were unequaled. He personally was particularly grateful to her as well, for many African-American women had snubbed his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass , who was white. In fact, when Douglass died in 1895, one could well argue that Wells-Barnett was his logical heir apparent. She had the edge on the other two contenders, then being far more famous than the budding scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and more ideologically compatible with Douglass than Booker T. Washington. There was, however, one major drawback: Wells-Barnett was a woman.

At first, however, she had supported Washington's accommodationist strategy. Washington, finding himself totally dependent upon the white establishment, was insisting that a segregated society could protect blacks while generating their economic self-reliance. In 1890, Wells-Barnett sent him a letter of support. In 1894, she declared that his "quiet, earnest work is a shining light in the Black Belt of Alabama, where it is so needed." In 1899, she spoke at a pro-Washington meeting in Boston and "the Wizard of Tuskegee" soon returned the compliment in New York.

In October 1892, the Ida B. Wells Testimonial Reception Committee, composed of African-American women in the greater New York area, raised about $400 for her anti-lynching crusade. It was reportedly the largest gathering of black club women yet assembled. While visiting Philadelphia, Wells-Barnett met Catherine Impey , an English Quaker dedicated to temperance and antipoverty efforts. Impey published the journal Anti-Caste, "devoted to the Interest of the Coloured Races." In April 1893, at the request of Impey and Scottish author Isabelle Mayo (whose pen name was Edward Garrett), Wells-Barnett left the U.S. to tour the British Isles for several weeks. In her attempt to mobilize sentiment abroad, she was undoubtedly aware of the crucial role played by British cotton purchases in the economy of the American South. Following her first lecture in Mayo's Aberdeen home, the women organized the Society for the Recognition of the Brotherhood of Mankind.

In 1894, Wells-Barnett returned to Britain for six weeks. During her stay she was a correspondent for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, a widely circulating daily paper. In both trips she met with major opinion leaders, including the archbishop of York and the duke of Argyle. She helped launch the London Anti-Lynching Committee, the first anti-lynching organization in the world.

During her second trip, she attacked Frances Willard , American president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, who was also touring that nation. Willard had accused "the colored race" of drunkenness ("The grogshop is its center of power"). She also appeared to condone lynching: "The safety of women, of children, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree." (Willard did back down by explicitly condemning lynching, but the two women sniped at each other for years.) Similarly Wells-Barnett assailed evangelist Dwight L. Moody, who acquiesced in segregated revivals in the South.

By now she was firmly ensconced as a Chicago resident. Little wonder that in 1893 Ida joined Frederick Douglass, author Garland Penn, and Chicago attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett to produce a pamphlet denouncing the Chicago World's Fair. Its title: The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World Columbian Exposition. The fair had omitted the black contribution to the United States and failed to note the nation's prevailing racism, hoping to mollify criticism by holding a segregated "Colored Jubilee Day." In the pamphlet, the authors argued that without the contributions of African-Americans over the centuries, there could never have been such an exposition. Some 20,000 copies were distributed to foreign visitors.

On June 27, 1895, Ida Wells was married in Chicago to the widower Ferdinand Lee Barnett. The wedding was widely covered in the nation's press. The son of a slave, Barnett was born about 1856. Raised in Nashville, he graduated from the law department of Northwestern University. He was a successful attorney and owned the Chicago Conservator, the city's first black paper. Advising Republican presidents in black appointments, in 1896 and 1900 he headed the Western office of the Republican Negro Bureau. From 1896 to 1911, he was assistant state's attorney. Ida joined her last name to his, becoming Ida Wells-Barnett. She bought the Conservator from Ferdinand, editing it from 1895 to 1897.

The couple had four children. Motherhood slowed down Wells-Barnett's public activities but certainly did not stifle them. In 1896, at a meeting held in Washington, D.C., she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), serving on the editorial staff of its journal Women's Era. Almost immediately, however, she withdrew from the group, for she clashed with NACW president Mary Church Terrell . In part, the tension was created by professional rivalries and personality conflicts. In part, it was rooted in Wells-Barnett's criticism of Terrell's support of Booker T. Washington's conciliatory policies.

In 1898, Wells-Barnett assisted in the formation of the National Afro-American Council (NAAC), a group organized in Rochester, New York, to confront deteriorating race relations. She was the only woman to hold office, serving as secretary until 1899, when she began heading its Anti-Lynching Bureau. She became national organizer in 1900, but finding that all the new officers supported Booker Washington, she left the group within three years.

Wells-Barnett remained highly attuned to violence against African-Americans. In November 1898, a race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, resulted in the death of 11 blacks. In addressing the matter, Wells-Barnett accused President William McKinley of apathy, in the process challenging Booker T. Washington's assumption that blacks could rise in American society by economic means alone. When that year a black postmaster and his infant were lynched in Lake City, South Carolina, Wells-Barnett was part of a protest delegation that called upon the president. She again attacked Booker Washington when he appeared too slow in protesting the lynching of a Georgia black who was burned alive. The victim, who killed a white man, had supposedly acted in self-defense. Wells-Barnett wrote another pamphlet, Lynch Law in Georgia (1899), to publicize the injustice. After the death of a Louisiana black, who had violently resisted what he considered unlawful arrest, she published Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900).

By now Wells-Barnett was a major opponent of the "Tuskegee machine." In April 1903, in an article for World Today entitled "Booker T. Washington and His Critics," Wells-Barnett found the entire system of vocational education, centering on the "wizard's" Tuskegee Institute, most destructive. "It is," she wrote, "the South's old slavery practice in a new dress."

Speaking at the National Negro Conference called in New York in 1909, Wells-Barnett demanded federal anti-lynching legislation and a government investigating agency. After initially being ignored, she was appointed to the executive committee of the convention's Committee of Forty, which soon established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As with other such groups, she withdrew within several years. In this case, she found the body too moderate in tone and too dominated by whites. Mary White Ovington , the white chair of the NAACP executive committee, later responded in turn: Wells-Barnett "was a great fighter, but we knew she had to play a lone hand. And if you have too many players of lone hands in your organization, you soon have no game."

In 1919, Wells-Barnett and NAACP assistant secretary Walter White did cooperate in investigating a four-day riot in Elaine, Arkansas, an event that left five whites and many more blacks dead. African-American sharecroppers, forced to sell their cotton below market prices, had attempted to unionize. When whites fired on their organizing meeting, the blacks fought back. Though 12 blacks initially received death sentences, all were soon released. Out of the turmoil came another Wells-Barnett pamphlet, The Arkansas Race Riot (1920).

Despite such national activity, Wells-Barnett increasingly centered her activity on Chicago. In 1893, she organized a black woman's organization, which adopted the name the Ida B. Wells Club. Projects included a kindergarten for black children. In 1902, she successfully integrated black women into the League of Cook County Clubs. In 1904, she helped form the city's Frederick Douglass Center, whose projects included a kindergarten, sewing classes, a men's forum, classes in sociology and English, a summer school for black children, and athletic clubs for boys and girls. From 1906 to 1911, she fostered the Pekin Theater, which launched the careers of numerous black entertainers. In 1910, Wells-Barnett set up the Negro Fellowship League, a settlement house for black men just arrived from the South. It maintained a social center, reading rooms, a dormitory, and an employment bureau. During its ten-year life span, she was its president, also editing its Fellowship Herald from 1911 to 1914. From 1913 to 1916, she was the first black adult probation officer for the Chicago municipal court. At one time, 200 probationers were under her charge.

Wider encompassing activities also drew her support. In 1913, Wells-Barnett led a successful campaign to block a bill that would have segregated public transportation in Illinois. Both that year and in 1915, she fought congressional proposals to outlaw interracial marriage in the District of Columbia. In 1913, Wells-Barnett and William Monroe Trotter, the militant editor of the Boston Guardian, visited Woodrow Wilson, presenting the president with a petition of 20,000 signatures protesting the newly initiated segregation of the Treasury and Post Office departments. A year later, she became president of the Chicago bureau of the National Equal Rights League (NERL), an organization founded by Trotter, who was an impassioned enemy of Booker Washington and his "Tuskegee machine."

Riots in Wells-Barnett's home state in 1917 led to another publication, The East St. Louis Massacre, The Greatest Outrage of the Century. Seeking legal aid for the victims, she personally visited the stricken city where 100 African-Americans had been killed. In July 1919, she wrote the Chicago Tribune, warning that Chicago faced a similar explosion. On July 27, the predicted outbreak occurred, leaving 23 blacks and 15 whites dead. The Chicago NERL met daily during the riot, serving as liaison with the city government. Wells-Barnett, however, resigned, opposing the group's call to have state attorney general Edward J. Brundage investigate the crisis. (She felt Brundage had been derelict in handling the East St. Louis matter.)

Wells-Barnett was always a strong suffragist. In 1913, she headed the Alpha Suffrage Club, Illinois' first such organization for black women. When, on March 3, 1913, a national parade was held in Washington, D.C., she defied the color line by slipping into the Illinois delegation at the last minute. In June 1916, she led her club members in a famous Chicago parade. Five thousand suffragists marched to the Republican National Convention in a pouring rain, there to seek a suffrage plank in the party platform.

Once the United States entered World War I, the government's Military Intelligence Division found Wells-Barnett disloyal. Why, federal agents asked, did she keep harping on domestic grievances—lynching and segregation being foremost—when the country was at war? Far from being intimidated, she went so far as defend some 13 African-American soldiers sentenced to death after a race riot in Houston. The Third Battalion of the 24th Infantry, a black unit, had been stationed just outside the city. Experiencing insults because of their race, 100 soldiers marched on the city. In the wake of the insurrection, 20 lay dead, of whom 16 were white and 4 black. In other ways, Wells-Barnett did support the war effort, selling Liberty Bonds and organizing Christmas kits for soldiers.

After the war, both Wells-Barnett and her husband supported Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a mass movement led by a Jamaican immigrant and centering on black nationalism and "Back to Africa." (She later wrote that Garvey was too "drunk with power" to be an effective leader.) Both the UNIA and Trotter's National Colored Congress for World Democracy chose Wells-Barnett as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The federal government, still finding her subversive, would not grant her a passport.

In her last decade, Wells-Barnett was relatively inactive. Now in her 60s, she taught an adult Sunday school class in Chicago's Metropolitan Community Church. She also led such local groups as the Women's Forum and the Third Ward Women's Political Club. In 1922, she lobbied unsuccessfully for the Dyer anti-lynching bill. Two years later, she ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of the NACW president, being defeated by educator Mary McLeod Bethune . She had equal misfortune with the National League of Republican Colored Women, simply gaining a place on its publicity committee that year. In 1928, she was slightly more successful, being appointed national organizer of Illinois Colored Women, a branch of the Colored Voters Division of the Republican National Committee. Two years later, she failed in a three-way race for the state senate. In 1928, she began her autobiography, a spirited volume in which she refought old feuds. On March 25, 1931, Ida Wells-Barnett died in Chicago of uremic poisoning.

In summarizing her career, editor and critic Walter Goodman finds Wells-Barnett "a sophisticated fighter whose prose was as tough as her intellect." Few important events occurred in the struggle for black rights without her participation. Her uncompromising attitude and prickly personality, however, often prevented effective leadership. Even her leading biographer, Linda O. McMurry , finds her unable to work with most people, for "her temper led her tongue to alienate even those who were ideologically compatible." This quality led to her eventual failure to get the credit she deserved, both in her lifetime and long afterwards.

Biographer McMurry finds Wells-Barnett continually forced to choose between competing ideals: "support of black 'manhood' and the need for strong black women; race unity and the belief in the oneness of humanity; political realities and personal integrity; racial uplift and class identity; tolerance and high moral standards; integration and black autonomy; nurturing her family and crusading for justice." Despite a contentious personality, few balanced such rival loyalties so well.

sources:

Duster, Alfreda M., ed. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

McMurry, Linda O. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. NY: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Thompson, Mildred I. Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893–1930. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990.

collections:

Ida B. Wells Papers, University of Chicago.

related media:

Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (documentary film), read by Toni Morrison , written by William Greaves, produced by William Greaves and Louise Archambault , narrated by Al Freeman, Jr., New York, aired on "American Experience," 1989.

Justus D. Doenecke , Professor of History, New College of the University of South Florida, Sarasota, Florida

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia