SYMHC Classics: Ida B. Wells-Barnett

This 2018 episode connects to a lot of others in our archive. Ida B. Wells-Barnett fought against lynching for decades, at a time when it wasn't common at all for a woman, especially a woman of color, to become such a prominent journalist and a speaker.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy is Saturday, everybody. In light of what's been going
on in the United States this week, we thought we
would return to investigative journalist and activists. I to b
Wells Barnett, who spent decades fighting against lynching and advocating
for anti lynching legislation. Almost ninety years after her death,
legislators are still trying to get legislation passed that would

(00:22):
make lynching a federal crime, most recently with the Emmett
Till Anti Lynching Act. That act passed the House in February,
but it needs to be reconciled with a slightly different
version passed by the Senate. In This episode originally came
out on June four, Welcome to Stuff You Missed in

(00:44):
History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Fry. I to b Wells Barnett, one of those
figures who connects to a lot of our past episodes.

(01:06):
She's mentioned in our podcast on Frederick Douglas, and the
two of them were colleagues and friends. In our show
In the Night of Terror at the Aquaquon Workhouse, we
talked about her refusing to march in a segregated section
of the nineteen thirteen Woman's Suffrage progression, instead saying and
I am refusing to play by that racist rule and

(01:26):
marching with the Illinois contingent with everyone else. She investigated
the death of Robert Charles in New Orleans and nineteen
hundred and the racist violence that surrounded that, and then
the discussion of lynching, and our two partner on the
Wilmington's queue of was also informed by her investigative reporting
in her anti lynching campaign, I W. Wells Barnett fought

(01:48):
against lynching for decades, and this on its own would
be remarkable, but she also lived at a time when
it was not common at all for a woman, especially
a woman of color, to become a prominent journ list
and speaker in this way, and then doing this work
also meant that she had to speak out very candidly
about violence and about rape. Discussing rape at all was

(02:11):
a huge taboo, but it was especially taboo coming from
a woman, and for a substantial part of her career
she was an unmarried woman, so it was even more taboo.
And that is all why we are talking about her today.
Ida B. Wells Barnett was born Ida Bell Wells in
Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July six, eighteen sixty two. She

(02:33):
was the oldest child of James Wells, who was known
as Jim, and Elizabeth Warrenton, who was known as Lizzie,
and they were both enslaved, so Ida was enslaved from birth.
Jim and Lizzie both worked for a man named Spiers Bawling.
Jim was owned by another man, but had been hired
out to Bawling for an apprenticeship in carpentry. The American

(02:56):
Civil War was ongoing when Ida was a baby, and
part of Mississippi, where she and her parents lived, was
no stranger to raids and skirmishes. The Emancipation Proclamation was
issued on January one of eighteen sixty three, and while
it technically freed her family and everyone else who was
enslaved in Mississippi, slavery persisted until Mississippi surrendered on May

(03:17):
fourth of eighteen sixty five, and probably beyond that point
really um as word reached more outlying areas of what
had happened. Once they were able to do so, Jim
and Lizzie Wells made their marriage legal. The young Ida
Wells was too young to remember the earliest years of reconstruction,
but in general life was really difficult for the freed people.

(03:40):
It was also chaotic as politicians and social reformers tried
to work out what to do about the formerly enslaved
population and the social and economic conditions that slavery had caused.
But the Wells Is had a couple of advantages. Jim's
owner had also been his father, and Jim had no siblings,
and being his own ER's only child came with some privileges,

(04:02):
including an education. For a time after the end of
the war, the Wells has continued to work for Spires Bowling.
But then Bawling told Jim to vote for the Democratic
candidate in the upcoming election, and Jim had no intention
of doing this. As we've talked about before, the Democratic
Party at this point was mostly made up of wealthy
white slave owners. He intended to vote for the radical

(04:25):
Republican candidate. He came back from the polls to find
that his employer had locked him out of the workplace.
The fact that Jim and Lizzie Wells were skilled workers
rather than manual laborers, made it easier for them to
find other work. Lizzie and her children also enrolled in school.
The family also became politically active, and Ida's father became

(04:46):
a member of the board at Rust College, then known
as Shaw College, where Ida would go on to study.
Ida learned quickly, and she read voraciously, including reading the
Bible all the way through, which was the only reading
that was allowed in the Wells home on Sundays. In
eighteen seventy eight, Idawell's life changed dramatically. She went to

(05:08):
visit her grandparents on their farm, and while she was
away from home, a yellow fever epidemic spread to Memphis.
At first, when they heard about this outbreak, Ida and
her grandparents weren't particularly concerned. Memphis had dealt with yellow
fever before, and outbreaks had never made it as far
from there as Holly Springs, which was roughly fifty miles
or eight kilometers away. People also blamed yellow fever on

(05:32):
miasmas or bad swamp air, so they thought Holly Springs
was protected by being on the highest ground in the area.
So instead of calling for a quarantine, officials in Holly
Springs offered refuge to Memphis residents who were fleeing the illness.
But yellow fever is really transmitted by mosquitoes, not by
swamp vapor, so once people arrived in Holly Springs carrying

(05:56):
the illness, it spread rapidly. Holly Springs had a population
of about three thousand, five hundred people, and more than
four hundred of them contracted the disease. More than three
hundred people died. This included both of Ida's parents, and
as soon as she and her grandparents learned what had happened,
she took a freight train back to Holly Springs. She

(06:18):
went against the advice of basically everyone. Everyone was telling
her that it was way too dangerous. There were not
even any passenger trains that were running, which was why
she was on a freight train in the first place.
But there was nobody else to look after her siblings,
and by the time she got back home, her baby
brother had also died. Ida's father had been a Mason,
in his Masonic brothers came to the family's aid. They

(06:41):
started talking about dividing up the Wells children, sending them
to live with other families in ones and two's. Ida's sister,
Eugenia was of special concern. She was paralyzed from the
waist down due to severe scoliosis. Ida was in the
room for this conversation, but she wasn't really consulted about
these decisions, and she finally told her father's Masonic brothers

(07:04):
that they were not going to send any of her
siblings anywhere, that her parents would be spinning in their
graves if they heard that their children had been split up.
She said that if the Masons helped her find a job,
that she would look after all of her siblings. With that,
she became both the breadwinner and the head of household.
She and her siblings had two legal guardians, but i'da

(07:25):
got a job as a teacher so that she could
raise and support her five younger siblings. She was only
sixteen at this point. Ida b Wells kept up her
studies while she worked as a teacher and raised her siblings.
Her job was at a rural school, so she had
to travel back and forth to it by mule. She
also started taking college courses at Rust College. Although she

(07:46):
was expelled from the school in eighteen eighty one or
eighteen eighty two. The details of exactly why are not known,
but she wrote about losing her temper with the teachers
and speaking to them with hateful words. In eighteen eight one,
when she was nineteen, one of Welles's aunts invited her
and her two youngest sisters to move to Memphis. By

(08:07):
this point, her brothers had both been placed in apprenticeships
and Eugenia had gone to live with another aunt. And
this offer gave the Wells sisters the chance to move
to a bigger city with more opportunities, and it gave
Item more freedom to pursue her own education and career
since her aunt would be helping to look after her sisters.
It was in Memphis that she really started to become

(08:29):
politically active, which we will talk about after a sponsor break.
After moving to Memphis, I had to be Wells continued
to work as a teacher. She had a job in Woodstock, Tennessee,
which was not all that far away. She traveled back

(08:50):
and forth to it by train. She was very carefully
trying to build a middle class life for herself and
her sisters, stretching her teacher's pay to cover things like
ice dresses, in a comfortable place for them to live,
and one of the things that she spent her money
on was on first class tickets in the Ladies car.
Whenever she traveled by train. The ladies car was more

(09:11):
comfortable than the second class cars, which were called smokers.
The Lady's car was quieter and it had more comfortable seats,
and since she was a young, petite, attractive woman traveling alone,
it was also just safer. She had been going back
and forth from Memphis to Woodstock for two years without
incident in the ladies car, and then in three she

(09:33):
was traveling back to Memphis from Holly Springs on the Chesapeake,
Ohio and Southwest Railroad. The conductor came to take her
ticket and told her that she would have to move
to the smoker's car. Wells refused. She had bought a
ticket and she was, as was clear by her dress,
her demeanor, and behavior, a lady. The conductor insisted that

(09:55):
she would have to move, and even went so far
as to move her luggage and belong longings into the
forward car, expecting her to follow them. When she stayed
where she was, he came back and attempted to remove
her bodily from her seat. She once again refused to move.
She was, as we said, a petite woman. She braced

(10:16):
herself against the seat to keep this man from dragging
her away, and when he kept man handling her, she
bit him. Ultimately, Wells was forcibly removed from the train
with both sleeves torn out of her linen duster, and
when she got back to Memphis, she filed suit against
the railroad. She was removed from the ladies car a
second time before that suit had even been settled, so

(10:38):
she filed another one. This is kind of on a
cusp of segregation by race on railroads, Like it was
a lot more common to have a ladies car that
women could pay additional you know, in an upgraded fair
to sit in, and all the cars were all the
other cars were just kind of a mix, and it
was becoming more formalized to instead have have trained cars

(11:02):
segregated by race. Since this was sort of in the
interim of that that changeover happening. So a circuit court
found in I. Toby Wells favor under the Civil Rights
Act of eighteen seventy five, and she was awarded five
hundred dollars in the first case and two hundred dollars
in the second case. But the railroad appealed the decision

(11:22):
and the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned that ruling in seven.
The Supreme Court's assertion was that Wells had only filed
the suit in the first place to harass the train company,
and that her actions were quote not in good faith
to obtain a comfortable seat for a short ride. That
is infuriating. Uh. Wells was devastated, and it wasn't just

(11:44):
the loss of the case, it was what that law signified,
especially since she had been taking this legal action pretty
much on her own, without the help of any civil
rights organizations or the greater Black community of Memphis. Her
case wound up being one of the ones on the
road to Plessy versus Ferguson, which we have covered on
the show before, in which the U. S. Supreme Court

(12:05):
ruled that racial segregation was constitutional. This whole experience inspired
Wells to become more politically vocal. While she was still
working as a teacher, she started working as a journalist
as well, under the pen name of Iola. She wrote
about civil rights, and she wrote about social issues, and
she was eventually nicknamed Iola Princess of the Press. By

(12:29):
the end of the eighteen eighties, Wells had already written
a prolific body of newspaper columns. She also purchased a
one third share in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight
in eighteen eighty nine, and eventually she and one of
the other co owners, J. L. Fleming, bought out their
third partner and they owned and ran the Free Speech together.

(12:50):
In eighteen ninety one, Wells wrote an article that was
critical of the Memphis School Board, and her teaching contract
was not renewed. She then turned her attention to journal
is um full time, and soon the focus of her
journalism turned to lynching. The catalyst was the May nine
lynching of Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Henry Stewart in Memphis.

(13:13):
They had been arrested and charged with maintaining a public
nuisance while trying to defend themselves and a grocery store
called the People's Grocery from an armed white mob. McDowell
was the store's manager, Stewart was the clerk, and Moss
was the president of the joint stock company that owned
the store. This incident started with a group of black
and white children playing marbles near the store. A fight

(13:37):
broke out after a black child won all the marbles.
A white man came out and beat the child who
had won the game, and a group of black men
attempted to intervene. A white mob formed in retaliation bent
on destroying the people's grocery. One of the white instigators
actually owned a competing grocery store. Yeah, they definitely had

(13:58):
it in their minds to run a grocery store out
of business and to hurt or kill its owners. So
after McDowell, Moss, and Stewart were jailed on the public
nuisance charged, an armed militia of black men tried to
stand guard outside of the jail. Was a known risk
if a black man was in jail for something that
a white mob could come and take him out of

(14:21):
that jail and harm him, so they were standing guard,
but eventually the sheriff ordered them to disperse and confiscated
all of their weapons. After they were gone, a crowd
of white men, as they had feared, came to the jail.
They took McDowell, Moss, and Stewart to a field outside
of town and shot all of them. Wells knew all

(14:42):
of these men. She was friends with Tom Moss, and she,
along with the rest of the black population, was terrified,
especially since the sheriff secured a court order authorizing him
to shoot any black person who seemed to be causing
trouble on site, even though men this had passed a
law banning the sale of firearms to its black population.

(15:03):
Wells bought a pistol, and she carried it in her purse.
But she also recognized that that pistol was only going
to go so far to defend her and the pages
of the Free Speech. She became one of the many
black voices urging the rest of the black population to
leave Memphis. There was actually a mass exodus out of Memphis,

(15:24):
was big enough that it's set off an economic crisis
as black business owners and laborers fled the city. After
this incident, Wells began researching, investigating, and writing about lynching.
This was the work that she would pursue for most
of the rest of her life. Almost immediately this work
led to Wells being threatened with lynching herself. On two

(15:48):
she published an article in The Free Speech that started
out with a statement that eight men had already been
lynched in the span of just a week. Five of
them had been accused of rape. She went on to write, quote,
no but in this section of the country believes the
old threadbare lie that negro men rape white women. If
Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves,

(16:09):
and public sentiment will have a reaction. A conclusion will
then be reached which will be very damaging to the
moral reputation of their women. This was basically the same
argument that would appear in the Wilmington's Daily Record in
that these rape allegations were stemming from consensual relationships between

(16:29):
black men and white women. That was the article that
was used as justification for the Wilmington's coup and the
mass racist violence that followed it, and Wells's article sparked
similar outrage, although it did not launch a massacre. A
few days later, a white paper called the Daily Commercial
responded to wells article, and here's a quote quote. The

(16:51):
fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and
utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is of volvolume of
evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites. But
we have had enough of it. Similar sentiments ran in
other papers, and a mob of people convened at the
Cotton Exchange Building in Memphis intending to lynch both co

(17:15):
owners of the Free Speech but Wells had gone to
Philadelphia to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Churches General Conference,
and from there she went on a trip to New
York rather than returning to Memphis. J. L. Fleming had
also left town for fear of his life. While Wells
and Fleming survived, the Free speech didn't. The mobs sacked

(17:36):
its offices and destroyed all of their equipment and furniture.
After this incident, Wells followed her own advice and she
left Memphis. She didn't even go back to try to
get her belongings. We will talk about her life after
leaving Memphis after a sponsor break. Even though I to

(18:01):
B Wells left Memphis behind, she did not back down
in her writing against lynching. After all of this happened,
she published a response to what had happened in the
New York Age on June nine two, and then a
lot of that response became her pamphlet, Southern Horrors Lynch
Law in all its phases. This pamphlet is one of

(18:22):
the most well known of her many many written works.
It started with a letter of praise from Frederick Douglas
saying of his own efforts related to lynching quote, I
have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison to
quickly recamp. Lynching is the extra judicial murder of someone

(18:42):
who has been accused of a crime or other wrongdoing.
Between eighteen eighty two and nineteen sixty eight, there were
more than four thousand recorded lynchings in the United States.
More than seventy percent of the victims were black, and
many of the white victims were civil rights workers or
other people who tried to defend black citizens. Most of

(19:03):
these happened in the South, and they were away to
terrorize the black community and violently reinforced white supremacy. By
the time Ida B. Wells started her anti lynching work,
a false idea had been well established within the white community,
and that idea was that black men were raping white
women and that lynching was necessary to discourage these rapes.

(19:28):
Wells tackled this idea head on, countering that there were
consensual relationships between black men and white women like we
alluded to before the break. She wrote, quote, hundreds of
such cases might be cited, but enough have been given
to prove the assertion that there are white women in
the South who love the Afro Americans company, even as

(19:49):
there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro
American women. She also documented multiple instances of the same pattern,
a black man at used of a crime, then removed
from his jail cell by a white mob who murdered
him and desecrated his body. She wrote about the disenfranchisement
of the black population in the South through racist voting

(20:12):
laws and how that was contributing to the problem, and
she picked apart how white newspapers were participants in this
violence as well, repeating the same unproven and sometimes completely
fabricated allegations about the victims of lynching as though they
were fact, often using racist and sensationalized language to do it,

(20:32):
and Southern horrors. Wells also wrote about the need for
the black community to protect itself since no one else
was willing to do it, writing quote, the lesson this teaches,
and which every Afro American should ponder well, is that
a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in
every black home, and it should be used for that
protection which the law refuses to give. She made the

(20:56):
point that this wasn't about the law. The people carried
out these lynchings were not interested in punishing all alleged
rapists only the black ones. Lynch mobs weren't operating within
any kind of legal framework, and they were celebrating the
murders they committed with things like postcards depicting the hanged
and desecrated bodies of the victims. After the publication of

(21:20):
Southern Horrors, Wells spent some time in New York City,
and then she went to the United Kingdom for an
anti lynching lecture tour. She wrote about her travels in
a dispatch called inter Ocean, including how, for the first time,
en route to Britain, white passengers treated her with quote
the courtesy they would have offered to any lady of
their own race. But she also remarked that some of

(21:43):
them seemed to be courteous to her in order to
shock the other white people around them. Wells returned from
the United Kingdom to take part in a boycott and
protest of the World's Colombian Exposition in eight three, also
known as the Chicago World's Fair. As we've talked about
on the show before, these fairs were celebrations of a

(22:03):
very particular aspect of American progress, that being white progress.
The Chicago World's Fair left black Americans almost entirely out
of its exhibitions, and what representations there were were demeaning. Also,
apart from janitors, porters and laborers, the fair only had
two black employees, both of them were clerks. So I. T. B. Wells,

(22:27):
Frederick Douglas, F. L. Barnett, and Jay Carlin Penn published
a pamphlet called The Reason Why the Colored American Is
Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, which was basically an
explainer written for fair attendees with an introduction in English, French,
and German. It walked through the many social and political

(22:47):
issues affecting the black population, and then it detailed a
lengthy back and forth with organizers, basically going back and
forth about including black people in the fair that showed
discrimin nation against the black community at every step. Ferdinand
Lee Barnett, co author of this pamphlet, attorney and founder

(23:08):
of Chicago's first black newspaper, would go on to be
Wells's husband. It's not clear exactly when they met or
how their courtship began. Wells had from her teenage years
had lots of suitors, and by her thirties she was
frustrated that she was not yet married. And the fact
that she wasn't caused a lot of suspicion about her morals.

(23:29):
Black women were heavily stereotyped as promiscuous, and Wells's work
meant she was often in the company of men, so
she had to constantly defend herself against malicious gossip. Some
of this was like malicious gossip published in newspapers as fact,
it wasn't just people talking about her behind her back.

(23:50):
For a time, this courtship was long distance. Wells returned
to the UK and eighteen ninety four to continue her
anti lynching tour. She was really finding a much more
receptive audience to her work in the UK than in
the US. She helped found the British Anti Lynching Committee,
which started launching other anti lynching groups and working with

(24:10):
British clergy to get their American colleagues on board. Ida B.
Wells and Ferdinand Barnett married on June when Wells was
thirty two. She was so well known by this point
that The New York Times mentioned her wedding in a
small feature at the bottom of the front page. That's
suspicion and criticism of her personal life that had been

(24:33):
going on while she was single. Didn't really stop after
Wells Barnett's marriage, though other activists, including Susan b. Anthony,
criticized her for getting married. Susan b Anthony basically told
her she shouldn't be messing around with some man when
she had important work to do. But unlike a lot
of the white women who were activists and were choosing

(24:54):
not to marry, Wells Barnett did not come from money
or have other family to help support her in her work.
She also just wanted to be married and to have children.
She and Frederick had each found in one another a
partner that they could trust and who could work with
and support the other and the civil rights work that
they were both doing, and their marriage was not exactly conventional.

(25:18):
Wells Barnett hyphenated her last name rather than taking her husband's,
and her work and travel did slow down a little
bit as she raised children. She and Ferdinand had four
kids together, and he had too from his marriage to
his late first wife, but she did not stop working,
and sometimes she traveled to speaking engagements with the babies
and a nurse. Wells Barnett continued her anti lynching campaign

(25:42):
for much of the rest of her life, and she
also advocated for other causes. She called for a kindergarten
in Chicago that would enroll black children. She was part
of the movement for women's suffrage, and in addition to
investigating and spreading awareness of the lynching of black men,
she did the same for lynching, ray and sexual assault
of black women. She also butted heads with a lot

(26:05):
of other leaders in these spaces. She was described as difficult, headstrong, stubborn, temperamental,
and prickly. She helped found multiple civil rights organizations, but
she often didn't become an ongoing member. In the face
of these personality conflicts, many of which were likely due
to the fact that she was not behaving as was
expected of a woman. Gets pretty well agreed upon that

(26:29):
if she had been a man, a lot of the
things that people criticized her for would have instead been
seen as assets. She also called out both black and
white activists for their complicity or their missteps. This included
ongoing disagreements with Booker T. Washington, whose work was a
lot more focused on the idea of giving black citizens

(26:50):
the tools and education to help themselves, not on advocating
for changes to the law or aggressively fighting back against injustice.
She really saw his approach as to conciliatory and too
tolerant of white racism, and she finally cut ties with
him after he refused to denounce a particularly horrifying lynching.

(27:11):
She also called out past podcast subject Jane Adams. On
January third, nineteen o one, Adams published an essay in
The Independent called Respect for the Law. This essay clearly
and definitively condemned lynching, but it also gave the people
perpetrating these crimes a lot of the benefit of the doubt.

(27:31):
She wrote, quote, let us assume that the Southern citizens
who take part in and a bet the lynching of
negroes honestly believe that it is the only successful method
of dealing with a certain class of crimes. And later
she went on to write, quote, let us give the
Southern citizens the full benefit of this position, and assume
that they have set aside trial by jury and all

(27:52):
processes of law because they have become convinced that this
brutal method of theirs is the most efficient method in
dealing with a peculiar case of crime committed by one
race against another. Jane Adams, in a lot of ways
when it came to to to racism and racial discrimination,
like a lot. In a lot of ways she was
really progressive, and this was not a case where she

(28:14):
was really progressive, and you know, I'd be Wells Barnett
knew her and worked with her they were both living
in Chicago. She published a rebuttal on May sixt So
Wells Barnett started out by praising Jane Adams and saying
that she was reluctant to diminish the impact of what
Adams had done. Adams was a well known, well respected

(28:35):
white woman who was condemning lynching, and she was doing
so with a dispassionate and logical argument. So this just
was not something that most white leaders in the United
States were doing. So Wells Barnett made it clear that
if every white activist wrote a similar essay, the nation
would be in a much better place. But from there,

(28:56):
Wells Barnett directly criticized the assumption that Adams had rested
her argument on. She pointed out that giving the perpetrators
of lynching the benefit of the doubt, as quote doing
what was best, was dangerous and damaging. She also picked
apart once again the idea that the victims of lynching
had committed rape, using the Chicago Tribunes annual lynching statistics

(29:19):
to back up what she was saying. Wells Barnett was
present at the founding of the Double A c P
and at its first meetings she gave a talk called
Lynching Our National Crime, which incorporated her, at that point,
almost twenty years of research and advocacy. To sum it up, quote, first,
lynching is color line murder. Second, crimes against women is

(29:43):
the excuse, not the cause. And third, it is a
national crime and requires a national remedy. So, although she
did continue to participate in the Double A CPS work
at various points, she wasn't listed as an official founder,
and she eventually distanced herself from that organization. In spite

(30:03):
of Wells Barnett's lifelong work, there was no national remedy
for lynching. Although some states passed laws against lynching, Southern
Democrats blocked efforts to pass laws at the national level.
The protections Wells Barnett was fighting for we're finally included,
at least on paper, in the Civil Rights Act of
nineteen sixty four. By that point, Wills Barnett had been

(30:27):
dead for more than thirty years. She died on March
thirty one, at the age of sixty nine. At the
time of her depths, she had been working on her autobiography,
which she started on about three years before. She was
motivated in part to write this autobiography by attending a
Negro History Week event in Chicago. They were discussing a

(30:49):
book by Carter G. Woodson, who was one of the
first scholars of black history like that was becoming a field,
and he's recognized as one of the first people doing
this work. His book that he had written on a
topic made no mention of her anti lynching work at all,
and she realized that if she wanted her life and
work to be documented, she was going to have to

(31:11):
do it herself. Her youngest daughter, ALFREDA. Duster, edited this autobiography,
which is called Crusade for Justice, and it was published
in nineteen seventy and the book came out just as
there was an increasing focus on both black history and
women's history in the United States. It helped bring Wells
Barnet's work and accomplishments back to the forefront of the

(31:33):
national consciousness. Yeah and those decades between her death and
when the book came out, she she kind of faded
in the background. She wasn't included in a lot of
discussion about black history. Today, there is an Ida B.
Wells Barnett Museum at the Spirous Bowling House. The IDB.
Wells Barnett House in Chicago is a private residence, but
it's also a National Historical Landmark. And the National Memorial

(31:56):
for Peace and Justice, which is a memorial to the
victims of lynch, ng and racist terror, opened on April
teen in Montgomery, Alabama. And we will end with a
quote that sums up both what made her such a
force to be reckoned with and why people describe her
with words like prickly. That makes me angry, but I

(32:17):
also know that people describe me with words like prickly,
So I feel like a tiny bit of kinship with her,
although she is far beyond my abilities Anyway. In nineteen
o nine, a man had been lynched in Cairo, Illinois,
and according to a nineteen o four Illinois in Illinois law,

(32:37):
a sheriff whose prisoner was lynched had to be removed
from his position and then he had to apply for reinstatement.
So the sheriff who was involved with this lynching. I
don't know if he was directly involved, but the man
had been taken from his jail while he was the
person in charge. UH he had applied for reinstatement, and
Wells Barnett went to Cairo and successfully got that application

(33:01):
for reinstatement denied. So the Springfield Forum had this to
say on December eleven of that year. Quote, Ida Wells
Barnett is to be highly lauded for her courage and magnanimity.
She towers high above all of her male contemporaries and
has more of the aggressive qualities than the average man.

(33:23):
It belittles the men to some extent to have a
woman come forward to do the work that is naturally
presumed to be that of men. But Mrs Barnett never
shrinks or evades. She is a heroine of her age,
and the nation is better off for her having lived
in it. Long live Mrs Ida b Wells Barnett. I

(33:44):
love that quote. Thank you so much for joining us
today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any
kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are
l during the course of the episode that might be
obsole leap. It might be doubly obsolete because we have
changed our email address again. You can now reach us

(34:05):
at history podcasts at i heart radio dot com, and
we're all over social media at missed in History, and
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(34:27):
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
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