#ida b wells
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” - Ida B. Wells
DECEMBER 30 - IDA B. WELLS
The oldest of eight children, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents, who were very active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction, died in a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1870s. Wells attended Rust College and then became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee.
Shortly after she arrived, Wells was involved in an altercation with a white conductor while riding the railroad. She had purchased a first-class ticket, and was seated in the ladies car when the conductor ordered her to sit in the Jim Crow (i.e. black) section, which did not offer first-class accommodations. She refused and when the conductor tried to remove her, she “fastened her teeth on the back of his hand.” Wells was ejected from the train, and she sued. She won her case in a lower court, but the decision was reversed in an appeals court.
While living in Memphis, Wells became a co-owner and editor of a local black newspaper called The Free Speech and Headlight. Writing her editorials under the pseudonym “Iola,” she condemned violence against blacks, disfranchisement, poor schools, and the failure of black people to fight for their rights. She was fired from her teaching job and became a full-time journalist.
In 1892, Tom Moss, a respected black store owner and friend of Barnett, was lynched, along with two of his friends, after defending his store against an attack by whites. Wells, outraged, attacked the evils of lynching in her newspaper; she also encouraged the black residents of Memphis to leave town. When Wells was out of town, her newspaper was destroyed by a mob and she was warned not to return to Memphis because her life was in danger. Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to England and was well received.
Wells wrote many pamphlets exposing white violence and lynching and defending black victims. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney. The following year she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women. She was opposed to the policy of accommodation advocated by Booker T. Washington and had personal, if not ideological, difficulties with W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1909, she helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Wells-Barnett continued her fight for black civil and political rights and an end to lynching until shortly before she died.
Text from today’s post was originally written by Richard Wormser for the PBS series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.
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![eternallybeautifullyblack: The African-American Suffragists History Forgot by Lynn Yaeger [T]hough](https://64.media.tumblr.com/04d1fb06dd46f43a04c58d11fc04289a/tumblr_nwq9ah9cFi1rkianko1_1280.jpg "eternallybeautifullyblack: The African-American Suffragists History Forgot by Lynn Yaeger [T]hough")
The African-American Suffragists History Forgot
by Lynn Yaeger
[T]hough we may have vague notions of the American women who fought so heroically for the ballot on this side of the Atlantic, they are, in our minds, in our imaginations, in the photographs and first-person narratives that have come down to us, uniformly white people.
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The African-American Suffragists History Forgot
by Lynn Yaeger
[T]hough we may have vague notions of the American women who fought so heroically for the ballot on this side of the Atlantic, they are, in our minds, in our imaginations, in the photographs and first-person narratives that have come down to us, uniformly white people.
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Ida B. Wells was a famous early African-American civil rights activist. We civil rights activists of the 21st century owe our movements to the legacy people like her, the leaders of Civil Rights and Suffrage movements that started these great pushes for social change.
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In addition to being a major fighter for racial justice, Wells was a suffragette. Suffrage rights are a psychosis issue, as many psychotic people lose their right to vote when placed under the legal guardianship of the courts. We are all one bad episode away from becoming disenfranchised.
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Wells was one of the founding members for the NAACP. Like People of Color in the 20th century, psychotic people need to band together now and develop a sense of cohesive identity to fight for our ultimate freedom. We cannot achieve anything significant acting as individual actors, but together we can have significant strength.
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Let us learn from the civil rights movements of the past and the great minds that fought in them.
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All information was taken from the Ida B Wells Wikipedia page.
In March of 1892, three Black grocery store owners in Memphis, Tennessee, were murdered by a mob of white men. Lynchings like these were happening all over the American South, often without any subsequent legal investigation or consequences for the murders. But this time, a young journalist and friend of the victims set out to expose the truth about these killings. Her reports would shock the nation and launch her career as an investigative journalist, civic leader, and civil rights advocate. Her name was Ida B. Wells.
Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862, several months before the Emancipation Proclamation released her and her family. After losing both parents and a brother to yellow fever at the age of 16, she supported her five remaining siblings by working as a schoolteacher in Memphis.
During this time, she began working as a journalist. Writing under the pen name “Iola”, by the early 1890s she gained a reputation as a clear voice against racial injustice and become co-owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. She had no shortage of material: in the decades following the Civil War, Southern whites attempted to reassert their power by committing crimes against Black people including suppressing their votes, vandalizing their businesses, and even murdering them.
After the murder of her friends, Wells launched an investigation into lynching. She analyzed specific cases through newspaper reports and police records, and interviewed people who had lost friends and family members to lynch mobs. She risked her life to get this information. As a black person investigating racially motivated murders, she enraged many of the same southern white men involved in lynchings.
Her bravery paid off. Most whites had claimed and subsequently reported that lynchings were responses to criminal acts by Black people. But that was not usually the case. Through her research, Wells showed that these murders were actually a deliberate, brutal tactic to control or punish black people who competed with whites. Her friends, for example, had been lynched when their grocery store became popular enough to divert business from a white competitor.
Wells published her findings in 1892. In response, a white mob destroyed her newspaper presses. She was out of town when they struck, but they threatened to kill her if she ever returned to Memphis. So she traveled to New York, where that same year she re-published her research in a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In 1895, after settling in Chicago, she built on Southern Horrors in a longer piece called The Red Record. Her careful documentation of the horrors of lynching and impassioned public speeches drew international attention.
Wells used her newfound fame to amplify her message. She traveled to Europe, where she rallied European outrage against racial violence in the South in hopes that the US government and public would follow their example. Back in the US, she didn’t hesitate to confront powerful organizations, fighting the segregationist policies of the YMCA and leading a delegation to the White House to protest discriminatory workplace practices.
She did all this while disenfranchised herself. Women didn’t win the right to vote until Wells was in her late 50s. And even then, the vote was primarily extended to white women only. Wells was a key player in battle for voting inclusion, starting a Black women’s suffrage organization in Chicago. But in spite of her deep commitment to women’s rights, she clashed with white leaders of the movement. During a march for women’s suffrage in Washington D.C., she ignored the organizers’ attempt to placate Southern bigotry by placing Black women in the back, and marched up front alongside the white women.
She also chafed with other civil rights leaders, who saw her as a dangerous radical. She insisted on airing, in full detail, the atrocities taking place in the South, while others thought doing so would be counterproductive to negotiations with white leaders. Although she participated in the founding of the NAACP, she was soon sidelined from the organization.
Wells’ unwillingness to compromise any aspect of her vision of justice shined a light on the weak points of the various rights movements, and ultimately made them stronger—but also made it difficult for her to find a place within them. She was ahead of her time, waging a tireless struggle for equality and justice decades before many had even begun to imagine it possible.
Watch the amazing story of Ida B. Wells on TED-Ed: How one journalist risked her life to hold murderers accountable - Christina Greer
Animation by Anna Nowakowska
This month, TED-Ed is celebrating Black History Month, or National African American History Month, an annual celebration of achievements by black Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of African Americans in U.S. history.
“A podcast about Clayton and Kelley, two lost millennials, and their never-ending conversation about the questions that keep them up at night, from the history of v-necks to ethical mourning to media curation.” Check out conversationstarterscast on Tumblr.
“Lynch Law in America” by Ida B. Wells (1900)
“Not only are two hundred men and women put to death annually, on the average, in this country by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity.”
Against Students by Sara Ahmed
“Complaining, censorious, and over-sensitive, university students are destroying their own institutions. Wait, seriously? People think that?”
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
Beatrice Martini - On tech tools for social justice and rights
Material beings: objecthood and ethnographic photographs by Elizabeth Edwards
“Photographs are both images and physical objects which exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience.”
“codedoodl.es is a showcase of curated creative coding sketches. The aim of these doodles is to exhibit interactive, engaging web experiments which only require a short attention span. No loading bars, no GUI, no 5MB 3D models or audio files, just plain and simple doodles with code.” Read more about the project from Neil Carpenter.
Inspecting the Nineteenth Century Literary Digital Archive: Omissions of Empire by Adeline Koh
Adeline Koh examines the use and operations of archives alongside the developments of digitization. Specifically, Koh discusses “the politics of digitizing the literary nineteenth century.” Koh outlines three different components of her study, which are “(1) how the politics of the literary nineteenth century archive interact with and reflectissues within Victorian studies; (2) existing issues with interfaces of existing literary digital projects that limit their correlations with colonialism or the literary productions by the colonized; (3) the contrast between digital literary projects and broader historical digital archives, and the urgency of dealing with this gap (385).”
Check out more resources here.
