Ida B. Wells a Biography

Ida B. Wells

A Biography of Ida B. Wells

Within the framework of American history, Ida B. Wells may be called a child of the Emancipation. Born in 1862 just prior to President Lincoln's Civil War decree that forever changed the order of the South, Ida B. Wells grew up in a society as new to the world as she was. However, her experience with prejudice and segregation as it continued to be manifested (despite the end of slavery) compelled her to become a leading light in the Progressive Era politics that challenged the hypocrisy of her nation. Her contribution to American history was to form part of the militant line that advocated social reform, social justice, and social equality for blacks in Post-Reconstruction America. This paper will examine the life of Ida B. Wells and show how she helped shape and urge new ideals for her nation during her lifetime.

The Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) coincided with the Republican government that followed the defeat of William Jennings Bryan and the gold standard (and which culminated in the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the Great Depression). The Progressive Era saw such diverse initiatives take place ranging from women's suffrage to Prohibition to the ground work for the Civil Rights campaign. Not everything in the Progressive Era centered on progress in an egalitarian sense. For example, various elitist foundations like the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations sponsored programs that transformed the face of society for the next century: Their "philanthropic" enterprises instigated the rise of the American Birth Control Movement, designed expressly to limit the population of blacks in America (Jones, 2000, p. 279), as well as the end of the local family doctor in what had been his traditional role in the past. (the new doctors would be churned out like Henry Ford's automobiles, products of the "best schools" in the nation, and subjects to the pharmaceutical industry, their feudal overlords) (Friedman, McGarvie, 2003, p. 232). Into this world, Ida B. Wells sought to unite blacks (along with W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP) in an anti-lynching campaign that sought to re-assert the rights of Negro citizens in the new America that had such conflicting interests embedded deep in the establishment.

Ida B. Wells received her education from various institutions as she migrated from Mississippi to Tennessee tending to her siblings (as both her parents had died from fever). Nearly three-quarters of a century before Rosa Parks became famous for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, Ida B. Wells in 1864 (and at just 22 years of age) refused to give up her seat to a white man on a train. When she was forced off the train, she sued the railroad and thus began an active and passionate career in standing up for civil rights (Fridan, 2000, p. 21). During the Civil War, Lincoln had freed the slaves of the South to help turn the tide against the Confederates. However, Emancipation did not mean that the freed slaves were now on an equal footing with whites, as Wells' treatment on the train showed. Indeed, one of the most pressing political issues that African-Americans faced during this time was how to secure for themselves the freedoms and rights that had now supposedly been granted them with the abolition of slavery. Wells' fight to win her right to sit where she pleased on a train was a major contribution to the struggle for civil rights: It announced to the establishment that blacks were no longer going to passively take persecution and unjust treatment based on racial politics and Jim Crow ideology.

Women's suffrage soon became an issue after the War and so did women's independence. In many ways, WWI changed the face of modern living: it dispensed with the old world ways once and for all and ushered in an era of independence for both genders. Women were used more and more in advertising: sex appeal was used by advertisers to hawk to their goods. Many women acted as nurses in World War I, following in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale. With men off to fight and die, women in America took to the workforce to both support their men and Uncle Sam's war effort.

Because women could now be seen as part of the war, no part of society was safe from war. The idea of total war began to emerge: this was the concept that civilians could be attacked like any other soldiery in the war. In a way, the disasters of world war were simply the expression on a macro level of what was happening in the U.S. On a micro level. Ida B. Wells helped illustrate the senseless violence occurring in the U.S. against Negroes when she wrote "Lynch Law" in 1893 at just 31 years of age. "Lynch Law" described the violent prejudice being visited on Southern blacks. As she writes, the Negro as a person has been "murdered by masked mobs for trying to vote," as well as for numerous other reasons supported by false charges (Wells, 1893). Wells gathered evidence of these crimes against blacks in order to support her claims. She gave speeches to draw attention to the violent racism she saw being leveled at defenseless blacks. In this sense, she was a forerunner to such Civil Rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr. And Malcolm X who used their voices to raise awareness about inequality in America.

In fact, Wells led an anti-lynching campaign that even received attention from the international community. Her work in the States and in Britain inspired the British Women's Temperance Association to pass "a relatively strong resolution against lynching, one that had been adopted by a number of unions in the States" (Giddings, 2008, p. 332). The resolution perfectly expressed what Wells herself had crusaded to effect on the behalf of the Negro race: "We are opposed to lynching as a method of punishment no matter what the crime and irrespective of the race by which the crime is committed" (Giddings, p. 332). With support from overseas, Wells was able to make headway in America against the segregationist element that sought to undermine the rights of blacks.

In this manner, Wells was able to set the stage for the fight against Jim Crow laws and the suppression of the black voice. She united her efforts to those of all famous black Americans who spoke out against oppression and organized to help protect the lives of Negroes through committees like the NAACP. Without women like Ida B. Wells leading the charge against injustice, it may be argued that the Civil Rights movement would have been less powerful a force in the 20th century and that forced segregation would have continued to be the rule.