Review

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, also known as Ida B. Wells, was an African-American journalist and activist. She was part of the suffrage movement and was co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People dedicated to the defence of civil rights and women's rights in the United States. 

Justifications

• Activist for the rights of black people and feminist in the 19th century.
• Suffragist.
• Precursor of investigative journalism.

Biography

Ida B. Wells was born into slavery, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, six months before slavery was abolished […]. Her parents continued to work for their former master after emancipation, like many others who were often forced due to economic circumstances to continue living and renting the land of their former slave owners. […] An epidemic of yellow fever left Wells an orphan at the age of 16. To support her siblings, she became a teacher for $25 a month, pretending to be of legal age. […] 

In 1880, after seeing her brothers placed as apprentices, she moved with her two younger sisters to live with a relative in Memphis. There she got a teaching position at a school for black people and began attending college classes in Nashville. She also began writing for the National Association of Black Journalists. She became editor of a weekly, the Evening Star, and later the Living Way, writing under the pseudonym Iola. 

In 1884, on a train trip to Nashville, Wells was taken from the car she was traveling in and forced into the wagon for black people, even though she had a first-class ticket. This was more than 70 years before Rosa Parks' refusal to transfer to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, helped spark the civil rights movement in 1955. Wells sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, obtaining $500 in damages. In 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict, and Wells was ordered to pay $200 in court costs.

Wells began writing more on issues of racial injustice, and became a reporter and co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech newspaper. […] She continued her outspoken criticism of racism. "She (also) toured the country lecturing on the evils of mob violence," wrote Crystal N. Feimster, an associate professor of African-American studies and American studies at Yale University, in 2018, in an opinion piece in The New York Times. […]

Wells wrote against lynchings in general. In particular, the white community was outraged when she published an editorial denouncing the myth that black men raped white women. Her allusion to the idea that white women might consent to relationships with black men was particularly offensive to the white community. […]

Wells continued to write articles for newspapers. She also wrote pamphlets and spoke widely against lynching. […]

Returning from her first British tour, Wells moved to Chicago. There she worked with Frederick Douglas and a local lawyer and publisher, Ferdinand Barnett, on the writing of an 81-page pamphlet on the exclusion of black participants from most Columbian Exposition events. She met and married widower Ferdinand Barnett in 1895 (thereafter she was known as Ida B. Wells-Barnett). They had four children together. She also wrote for his newspaper, The Chicago Conservator.

In 1895, Wells-Barnett published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States 1892-1893-1894, documenting that lynchings were not due to rapes of white women by black men.

From 1898 to 1902, Wells-Barnett was the secretary of the National African American Council. In 1898, she was part of a delegation seeking justice after the South Carolina lynching of a black mail carrier. Later, in 1900, she spoke in favour of women's suffrage.  […]

Wells-Barnett died in 1931 in Chicago, unappreciated and unknown.  […]

Although fighting lynching was her primary goal, and Wells-Barnett shed light on this important issue of racial justice, she never achieved her goal of federal anti-lynching legislation. However, she inspired generations of legislators to try to achieve her goal. […]

Her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, which she worked on in her later years, was published posthumously in 1970, edited by her daughter Alfreda M. Wells-Barnett. Her home in Chicago is a National Historic Landmark and is privately owned.

Adapted from the biography (in Spanish): https://www.greelane.com/es/humanidades/historia-y-cultura/ida-b-wells-barnett-biography-3530698/ (retrieved on 23/01/2022) 

Works

Bibliography

Didactic approach

She can be studied in:

- English: during the first term, to review of the past simple, review of vocabulary related to professions and review of vocabulary related to crimes.

- Ethical values: to talk about racial discrimination.

Documents