Ida B. Wells, Truth Seeker, Truth Teller
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photo: Cihak and Zima, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: What Is History? What We Lose With Erasure & Gain With Dissemination
This week’s focus: Hidden History, a facts-based narrative to highlight someone who changed history
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is under XX words, an estimated X-minute read.
Content Warning
There’s a content warning for today’s newsletter, as we’ll mention lynching. We won’t go into graphic details, but the topic will be discussed.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, our theme is “What Is History? What We Lose with Erasure & Gain with Dissemination,” and today we’re going to learn more about the life of a person who risked her own to seek truth and disseminate it.
She was an educator, a writer, a suffragist, an ancestor of the Long Civil Rights Movement — and she’s largely considered one of the first investigative journalists. She was a Black American and a woman speaking and seeking truth in “Victorian America.”
Her name was Ida B. Wells. As a writer, Ida B. Wells penned many quotes worth remembering, and her following quote may continue to strike a chord today: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
In the late 1800s, Wells led an anti-lynching campaign, penning unflinching accounts of lynchings — exposing both the unjust, brutal acts of violence that also served as a dehumanizing form of social control, and the bogus justifications often given for them. She diligently reported her findings in pamphlets and in essays published in Black-owned newspapers — for some newspapers she served as editor, and at one point, she even co-owned a press.
Wells devoted much of her life’s work to make lynching — acts of terrorism and violence led by select White mobs with nearly no local of state-level repercussions — a federal crime. What was the impact of her tireless efforts? (Keep reading to find out how long it took the U.S government to make lynching a federal hate crime.)
How did Ida B. Wells’ truth-telling campaigns impact society, from the 1800s to today?
From Mississippi to Tennessee
Described by her own great granddaughter, public historian Michelle Duster, Ida B. Wells “fought for freedom, justice and inequality.”
Born in 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida B. Wells entered the world when slavery was still legal, just six months before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
She grew up in a politically active family, where her father had to secretly attend organizing meetings in the middle of the night to remain safe, where she — as the oldest of seven children — was encouraged to read newspapers out loud to leverage her voice.
At sixteen years old, when Wells had left her family’s home to visit her grandmother’s farm, tragedy struck. Yellow fever had swept through the region. Both of her parents died, as well as one of her brothers.
She would return home, determined to keep the family together, taking a job as a school teacher, becoming the family’s breadwinner and primary caretaker. To receive some help from family, Wells eventually moved to Tennessee, joining a lyceum founded by Black educators, a community of “thinkers and artists.”
She seemed to be preparing for something. Ida B. Wells’ great granddaughter, Michelle Duster, describes Wells’ focus: “She actually took elocution classes, which is speaking classes. And in her diary, she writes about how she was trying to scrape up the money to pay for her next lesson. So you wonder, what in the world is she preparing herself for? But she was honing her skills.”
Truth Seeker, Truth Teller
In Tennessee, Wells continued to teach and started writing for Black-owned newspapers. It was a specific event, however, that would catapult her lifelong dedication to journalism — the unjust murder of her good friend, Thomas Moss.
Ida B. Wells was a family friend to Thomas Moss, a Black American business owner and devout churchgoer. Wells was also the godmother of Moss’ children. Moss and two other men, Calvin McDowell and William Steward, opened People’s Grocer in South Memphis, a neighborhood grocery store in a primarily Black neighborhood.
According to historical accounts, on March 9, 1892, a White American man who was a competing grocer, caused a scuffle outside of the store to create tension, and to convince the county sheriff to deputize him. Once deputized, he returned, armed with a large group: “When the white mob attacked the store one evening soon after, shots were exchanged and three white men were wounded. Mr. Moss, Mr. McDowell, and Mr. Stewart were quickly arrested, and sensational newspaper reports published the next day fanned the flames of racial outrage. The lynching came soon after.”
At the time, though it was alarmingly rampant, lynching was not a topic openly chastised across larger U.S. society.
In fact, lynching was horrifically normalized in parts of dominant culture. Some newspapers would advertise lynchings to invite people to attend, sometimes postcards were distributed — highlighting the crowds of people, often in the thousands, of primarily White Americans who came to watch, with children in attendance.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes the event that changed Wells’ life and how she utilized journalism to channel her energy: “Devastated [by the murder of her friend], she channeled her journalistic efforts into one of her most famous pieces, Southern Horrors, an unflinching investigative report of the causes of lynching in Jim Crow America…. Her reporting techniques serve today as basic principles as modern investigative journalism.”
She also began to write about the “separate and unequal” school systems in Memphis, Tennessee, which she saw first hand as an educator. Because of her critical writing, however, Ida B. Wells eventually lost her teaching job, and focused full time on journalism and disseminating hidden facts.
Ida B. Wells wanted her journalism and writing to make an impact.
In her own words, she said, “I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things which concerned our people.” She diligently focused on “facts and figures” to make her case, stating “When I present our cause to a minister, editor, lecturer, or representative of any moral agency, the first demand is for facts and figures.”
Across the 1890s, she penned three influential pamphlets, including “A Red Record. Lynchings in the United States,” published in 1895. To create this, she used “White newspapers,” which advertised lynchings, and traveled to the sites to interview as many people as she could find, unearthing the bogus justifications for said lynchings, and counting how many innocent lives were lost. (To view her data visualization, consider viewing The Red Record of Lynching Map.)
In total, she investigated 728 murders, ultimately revealing that lynchings were used as a means of social control and racist terrorism, and many of the perpetrators would never meet local or state-level legal repercussions.
This fueled her efforts to lead a multi-decade campaign — to make lynching a federal crime, but along the way, she would continue to face obstacles, and somehow continue to find ways to keep going.
Continuing the Work, Even When It’s Unfathomable
Ida B. Wells was a pioneer. She sought truth, and used her pen to disseminate it at a time where racial violence was unchecked and rampant.
As described in this video by Chicago PBS Station WWTW: “Ida B Wells was ascending at a precarious moment. As she and other newly emancipated African Americans made waves, white supremacist fervor flooded the south.”
As a result of Wells’ journalism, she would face intimidation and threats. After writing about her friend’s murder, Edward Ward Carmack, editor of the Memphis Commercial, demanded retaliation of the author who penned the article, not fully realizing he was speaking about a woman. As a result of Carmack’s own article, where he called for violence, what was described as a mob of “angry Whites” converged on the offices of the Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper Wells co-owned. The mob destroyed the physical press, burned records, and left behind death threats. To this day, there are no known surviving copies of the Free Speech newspaper.
As described by Tennessee Historical Society, “No copy of the Free Speech survives... Our only knowledge of the once thriving and outspoken African American newspaper comes from reprinted articles extant in other newspapers.” (There were over 206 Black newspapers in just the state of Tennessee in the last century or so, read here to learn about an archival project working to combat this erasure.)
Wells fled Tennessee and traveled for a year, ultimately landing in Chicago. There, her work continued.
Described by WWTW, “By the time Ida returned to Chicago in 1895, she’d been a refugee from the south for three years.”
Wells had lost her printing press, and many of her friends, stating: “Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life, and been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth, I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth, now that I was where I could do so freely.”
For example, when she realized that the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair did not mention, highlight, or celebrate Black Americans or their countless contributions to the U.S., she stood outside of the halls of the Haitian exhibit — the only country to have invited a Black American (Frederick Douglass) to participate. There, Ida B. Wells distributed 10,000 copies of “The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.” It was an expensive and daring act of defiance, one she had fundraised to do, and one that got the attention of international audiences, sparking an international speaking tour.
Throughout her life, Wells would continue to push for anti-lynching legislation.
After the Springfield Massacre of 1908, a horrifying event where a “mob of about 5,000 white people” took the lives of many Black Americans, where homes and businesses were burned to the ground, Wells and others formed the NAACP.
Wells would also work to advance women’s suffrage. On March 3, 1913, more than 250,000 women marched as a part of the Women's Suffrage Processions. One of the White organizers asked that Black delegates march in the back of the parade. But Wells refused, and marched with the rest of the Illinois delegation up front.
An Unfinished Biography
While it’s important to honor the work of those who risked so much to make change, it should also be noted that it comes at a great cost.
In her sixties, Wells began to draft her own memoir. As described by Chicago PBS, “Her unfinished biography ended mid-sentence, a fighting reflection perhaps of a woman who knew there was more work to be done.” In March of 1931, days after a fever broke, Wells passed away.
When thinking of her impact, Wells’ great granddaughter states, “Her motivating factor was to inform the world about how this country was treating its own citizens.”
It would take over a century, 124 years to be exact since Ida B. Wells’ first visit to the White House, for the United States to pass a federal ban on lynching. It wasn’t until May of 2022, when President Biden signed the country’s first anti-lynching law, making, in his own words, “lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in American history.”
Ida B. Wells’ legacy is hard to measure, as her impact is still surfacing.
In addition to influencing the 2022 anti-lynching law, in 2019, “Ida B Wells Drive” was officially named, becoming Chicago’s first street named for an African American woman. In 2020, she was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize.
When considering her work and impact, it may be helpful to note that not everyone is an educator, a journalist, a writer, a political organizer; we each have our own talents and skills. Who is carrying forward her legacy today? Who will be our truth seekers? The ones who will create a safer, more humanizing tomorrow?
For those of us who want to make change, it can begin with the statements we make to our children, our friends and neighbors, our co-workers.
When we see injustice, are we silent, or do we say something? How do we tell the human story — to our children, to ourselves? Do we contribute to the erasure of U.S. or World history, like some people are advocating for, or do we share stories of people who took big risks to make change and expand the project of a multiracial democracy, so we can understand the lessons, take note, and take steps of our own?
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