Ida B. Wells-Barnett Born - July 16, 1862

Journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born on this day in 1862.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July sixteen.
Idabe Wells Barnett was born on this day in eighteen
sixty two, and let me tell you, Ida b Wells
Barnett never gave up. She was enslaved from birth, born
to enslaved parents, and marriages between enslaved people weren't legally recognized,

(00:24):
but after the end of the Civil War, her parents
got their marriage formalized. They made sure that Ida and
her siblings got an education was incredibly important to both
of them. Her mother actually enrolled in school as well,
so that she could educate herself, give herself the education
she had not been allowed while enslaved. But then, when

(00:45):
she was sixteen, both of Idabe Wells parents died in
a yellow fever epidemic. She was away visiting her grandparents
at a time everybody tried to stop her from going
back home. There weren't even any passenger trains running because
the epidemic was so ad. She took a freight train
back to her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi to look

(01:05):
after her surviving siblings. Her baby brother had actually also
died by the time she got there, and when she
heard her father's brothers from the Masonic lodge talking about
how they were going to split up the children and
take them in groups of ones and Two's I to
be well, said no, they were not. She refused to
let them do that. She said that if her father's

(01:26):
brothers from the Masonic Lodge helped her find a job,
she would take care of all of her siblings. She
was sixteen years old, she got a job as a teacher.
She didn't give up pursuing her own education, though, she
kept up with that while she was studying. After a while,
she moved to Memphis with her two youngest sisters, that
was one and she kept working as a teacher. She

(01:46):
had to commute back and forth by train for this job,
and after doing this for about two years without incident,
she was on her way back from a trip to
Holly Springs one day when a conductor told her she
would have to leave the ladies car. She refus used
she had paid for a first class ticket on the
ladies car. The conductor insisted, and she refused again, so
he took her baggage to the forward car, expecting that

(02:09):
she would follow her stuff if he moved it, but
she did not. She again refused to move, so he
tried to remove her bodily from her seat. She dug
in and then bit him. Ultimately, she was removed from
the train by force, and she wound up filing not one,
but two lawsuits about it. The first one wasn't even
settled when she was taken off the train again. This

(02:31):
is one of the things that led her to become
more politically active. She started a career in journalism under
the pen name of Iola, and then three men that
she knew were lynched in Memphis. They had been trying
to defend their grocery store against a white mob. She
started focusing a lot of her writing and a lot
of her investigative journalism on lynching. She was calling attention
to how many black men were being murdered for alleged

(02:54):
crimes totally outside of the law. A lynch mob actually
formed to come after her and the co owner of
the newspaper that she was running. She was actually out
of town at the time. She did not even go
back to Memphis to try to get her belongings after
this happened, but once again she did not back down.
Investigating lynching became the work that she would pursue for

(03:14):
the rest of her life. She mounted a huge anti
lynching crusade that involved multiple trips across the Atlantic Ocean
to the United Kingdom. Even though Southern legislators blocked several
attempts to pass federal anti lynching legislation, she never abandoned
this work and she kept it going after she married
Ferdinand Lee Barnett on June. Although her work did slow

(03:38):
down a little bit as she had and raised children,
it didn't stop. People had criticized her for not being
married before she got married. She was thirty two at
the time of her marriage, and now they criticized her
for getting married, basically saying that she had important work
to do and she didn't need to be wasting time
on a marriage and children. But number one, she wanted

(03:59):
to get married and how children. Number Two, she and
her husband had found in each other someone who could
help them with the work that they were doing and
actually make it more possible for them to be able
to do it. Late in Wells Barnette's life, she went
to a Negro History Week event where the speaker had
written a book on the subject. The field of Negro

(04:20):
history was just forming and would of course later become
Black History. This book did not mention her or her
anti lynching campaign at all, so she once again refused
to give up and got to work writing her own
autobiography so that there would be a record of what
she had done. Her daughter edited this book and had
it published after her death. It came out in nineteen seventy.
I Tobe Wells died on March twenty, nineteen thirty one,

(04:42):
at the age of sixty nine. And you can learn
more about id B. Wells Barnett on the Stuff You
Missed in History Class episode from June four. And you
can subscribe to This Day in History Class on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, and whatever else you get your podcasts. Tune
in tomorrow for a famous mass execution.