07/16/2025
Celebrating Ida B. Wells. Ase'
in 1862, journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, MS. Wells is remembered as a voice for the voiceless, and one of our nation’s foremost critics of racial injustice and as a journalistic champion of the truth.
After a tragic illness, Wells lost her parents and moved to Memphis, TN. She began her career as an activist while a student at Fisk University, turning to writing and chronicling issues of race and politics in the Deep South. Under the name “lola,” Wells became a leading voice on issues of racial injustice and eventually owned the newspaper, “The Memphis Free Speech & Headlight,” (later shortened to “The Free Speech.”
However, it was the deaths of Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart—three African American business owners in Memphis—that ignited her charge to take on a campaign against lynching. The men were murdered after they opened a grocery store that competed with a White-owned store. In response, Wells traveled the South gathering records of lynchings and wrote “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases” in 1892. Her reports outraged some southern White communities, and she was never able to return to Memphis.
In 1898 she took her anti-lynching campaign all the way to the White House, urging President William McKinley to act to save Black lives. Although several bills would be introduced, the United States did not federally outlaw lynching until March of 2022 with the signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.
📸 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, c. 1893. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
