:
Institute for African American Studies,
University of Georgia
On lynchings: Southern horrors, A red record, Mob rule in New Orleans
New York, Arno Press, 1969
[Works originally published in 1892, 1895, and 1900 respectively]
Ida Wells-Barnett was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. In 1883 after she was asked to leave the "ladies' car" aboard a railroad train and go the the "smoking car," where all African Americans were expected to sit, she sued the railroad company and won, however the state Supreme Court overturned the decision. Her accounts of the case in a local black newspaper launched her career in journalism. She soon became a successful newspaper editor and writer who in 1892 began an anti-lynching crusade when three black Memphis businessmen were lynched after opening a grocery store that competed with one owned by a white businessman. In 1893 she published, circulated, and co-authored with Frederick Douglass, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition--the Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature, when African Americans were denied participation in the Exposition, which took place in Chicago.
Ida was forced to overcome discrimination, not only as an African-American, but also as a woman. (American women were not granted the right to vote until 1920.) T. Thomas Fortune, perhaps the greatest African American journalist of the 19th Century, said of Wells in 1888 that, "she has become famous as one of the few of our women who handles a goose quill with diamond point as handily as any of us men in newspaper work. . . . If [Ida] was a man she would be a humming Independent in politics. She has plenty of nerve; she is as smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug."
Sources:
Athey, Stephanie. "Ida
B. Wells-Barnett." Dictionary of Literary Biography,
Volume 221: American Women Prose Writers, 1870-1920. Edited by Sharon
M. Harris. Detroit: Gale, 2000.
McMurry, Linda O."Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell." American National
Biography. Edited by John A. Garraty, Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
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