This year is the 150th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public transportation. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 declared the Act unconstitutional, saying it infringed on the ability of private companies and individuals to run their affairs as they wanted. That overturn soon turned around the life of the most influential late-19th-century black journalist, Ida B. Wells.
Wells “remains a little known figure in America and abroad,” according to The Guardian, but she had an amazing life focused on both career and family. Wells in 1883 was a 21-year-old who traveled by train each week from Memphis to her teaching job a dozen miles north. Her first-class train ticket allowed Wells to sit in the carpeted Ladies Only car with upholstered seats and an ice-water dispenser—until the Supreme Court sided with racism.
Like other ladies, Wells wore a hat, gloves, and a full-length dress, and carried a parasol—but on September 15, 1883, a newly emboldened conductor told her to move forward to the second-class smoking car in which passengers smoked, drank, cussed, and dodged sparks and ash from the engine. Wells refused to move. When the conductor grabbed her by the arm, she hooked her feet under the seat. He pulled her away and dumped her into the smoking car as passengers applauded.
Wells sued the train company and eventually lost. She even had to pay $500 in court costs, the equivalent of $16,000 today. Wells wrote in her diary, “O God is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us?” It wasn’t what she expected after growing up in Mississippi at a time of increasing opportunity for African Americans. Her father was active in local politics and owned his own carpentry business. Wells herself was a voracious reader, thriving under the guidance of the missionary teachers.
But her life crashed at age 16, when both her parents died in a yellow fever epidemic. She moved to Memphis, which in the late 1870s had a burgeoning black middle class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and journalists. African Americans gained election to the city council, school board, and state legislature. They had their own churches, schools, and cultural institutions, and supported four black newspapers, but their overall situation would begin to deteriorate.
Wells attended church services each Sunday. She went to concerts and the theater and paid for elocution lessons. She eventually passed the exam that allowed her to teach in Memphis schools. Then she had her battle on the train, and pushed back by writing occasionally for Christian publications “in a plain, common-sense way on the things which concerned our people. Knowing that their education was limited, I never used a word of two syllables where one would serve the purpose.”
In 1889, Wells began writing for Free Speech and Headlight and then bought a one-third interest in that Memphis newspaper. As its editor, she criticized the Memphis school board and the poor condition of its black schools, so the board did not renew her teaching contract. Wells went full time into journalism and “trod the winepress alone.” She stepped on toes.
When Wells identified by name an adulterous black minister, the black ministerial alliance voted to boycott Free Speech. Wells in the following issue published the names of every minister who belonged to the alliance. She asked readers if they supported “preachers who would sneak into their homes when their backs were turned and debauch their wives.”
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Wells made her biggest journalistic contribution in 1892, when a mob dragged three African American men out of a Memphis jail and lynched them. One of them, Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells, was a postal worker and Sunday school teacher. Wells was godmother to one of his children. White newspapers portrayed the victims as rapists and brutes, but Wells knew these three men died because their store, the People’s Grocery, had drawn customers away from a nearby white-owned store.
Wells told the real story: The white store owner had maliciously accused Moss and his friends of crimes and urged the police to raid the grocery. A gunfight broke out, with three deputies wounded. Police arrested the black store owners. While they were in jail, The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche stirred the pot: “Shotguns fired at officers [by a] nest of turbulent and unruly negroes.” The episode ended with the mob storming the jail, dragging out the three men, and lynching them.
Wells recommended in Free Speech that blacks “leave a town which 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.” Two pastors migrated from the city with their entire congregations. White housekeepers had a hard time hiring maids because many fled to Chicago. Other blacks boycotted the streetcars and walked instead.
Officers of the City Railway Company came to the Free Speech offices and pressured Wells to use the paper’s “influence with the colored people to get them to ride on the streetcar again.” Instead, Wells left town but not before penning an incendiary editorial that began by noting, “Eight negroes lynched since last issue … five on the same old racket—the new alarm about raping white women.”
Her most potent paragraph was this: “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”
The suggestion that some white women lacked virtue brought a sharp reaction from Memphis newspapers. A Daily Commercial writer huffed: “That a black scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of southern whites. But we have had enough of it.” An Evening Scimitar writer proposed “to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison.”
Thus provoked, a mob broke into the Free Speech office, damaging Wells’s press and vandalizing the building. Wells, in New York at the time, couldn’t return to Memphis. She took a job with a leading black newspaper, The New York Age, and studied accounts from white newspapers along with statistics from the Chicago Tribune. The result in June 1892 was a comprehensive article on lynching.
Wells found 878 documented lynchings from 1883 through the first half of 1892. Noting that two-thirds did not include charges of rape and that some of the other third were consensual, Wells gave specific examples to show how newspaper accounts were often wrong. She criticized lynch mobs but didn’t stop there: “The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages are … accessories before and after the fact.”
Wells said “the actual law-breakers would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them.” She said her fellow blacks believed too readily the false narrative of African American criminals as brutes: “They forget that a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime, not only concedes the right to lynch any person for any crime, but (so frequently is the cry of rape now raised) it is in a fair way to stamp us a race of rapists and desperadoes.”
Citing the movement of blacks out of Memphis after the three lynchings, Wells urged blacks to use their economic power to force change. She even advocated armed defense: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
Some white Memphis residents had hoped to shut Wells up, but instead they saw her lynching exposé in The New York Age reaching tens of thousands more people than it would have had she stayed in Memphis. The New York Age printed extra copies to send throughout the South, including 1,000 to Memphis. Donors paid to publish the exposé as a pamphlet: Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases.
Wells at age 30 also received a boost from the most famous American ex-slave, 75-year-old Frederick Douglass: “Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If … American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.”
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With her newfound fame, Wells hit the lecture circuit in the Northeast and in England, where her street-level reports of lynchings reached a wide audience and brought unflattering attention to the practice and to the South. It turned out that 1892, the year of Southern Horrors, was the peak year for U.S. lynchings: 230, according to statistics from the Tuskegee Institute. After 1901, the number was never more than 99. A gradual decline continued throughout the century. After 1935, there were never more than eight, and from 1952 on, the figure was usually zero.
The reason for the drop was largely cultural, not legal. Some states passed anti-lynching laws, but lynchers almost never were penalized. Congress remained inactive until early in the 20th century, when the House of Representatives began considering and passing anti-lynching legislation, which filibusters by southern senators then killed. Finally, in 2022, Congress passed a federal anti-lynching law as a symbolic way of belatedly recognizing the nearly 6,500 lynchings that took place in the U.S. from 1865 to 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
Wells in 1894 moved to Chicago, where the following year she married lawyer and journalist Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a widower with two children from a previous marriage. She added four more children during the next decade and made motherhood her primary occupation. She also did local volunteer work and helped to lay the groundwork for the NAACP—but was disappointed to be kept off the Committee of Forty that unveiled the permanent organization in 1909.
That wasn’t surprising: She functioned best as an independent journalist, not in an organizational role. Wells died on March 25, 1931, by then largely forgotten. Today she is, as The Guardian put it, “the unsung hero of the civil rights movement.”
