The Iconic Ida B. Wells
As The Blue Record enters our fourth year of elevating the voices and stories of Spelman students and marginalized folks, we want to take a moment to pay homage to the woman who inspires our work and guides our mission: the iconic Ida B. Wells.
The Women’s Suffrage Movement
Ms. Ida B. Wells was a radical journalist and activist whose relentless pursuit of justice in the late 19th and early 20th century influenced Black women activists for generations to come. Ida B. Wells was outspoken in her protests against Black American lynchings and the exclusion of Black women from the Women’s Suffrage Movement. One of Wells’ most notable accomplishments is founding the Alpha Suffrage Club, the most prominent voter advocacy club for women of color. This move challenged the status quo and wrote Black women back into the narrative of the fight for women’s rights.
During a suffrage protest in Washington D.C., Wells was told that she and her members would have to march in the back to avoid offending the Southern White suffragists who viewed them as inferior. In a radical move, Wells ignored this segregation policy, gathered her group of Black suffragists, and proceeded to the front alongside her White counterparts. Ida B. Wells placed Black women at the forefront of a movement they had essentially been erased from.
A Red Record
Repulsed by her surroundings, Ida B. Wells sought to combat the grim realities plaguing the Black American experience: lynching and racial violence. In 1892, there was a disturbance in Memphis, Tennessee, after a gambling incident between a group of men of mixed races. They had been gambling in front of a convenience store when strong emotions resulted in erratic behavior. The father of a white gambler assaulted his black counterpart. Afterward, the owner of the convenience store, W.H. Barrett, traveled to a neighboring store and assaulted a Black employee named Calvin McDowell. McDowell retaliated and was sentenced to jail by a white judge. When a white mob came to collect McDowell, they were met by a group of Black men who refused to let McDowell escape. Gunshots were fired, wounding people from both groups and leading to several Black people’s arrests. One night, a mob broke into the jail where they were held, kidnapped McDowell and two other Black men - Thomas Moss and Will Stewart - and shot them in a field. The kidnappers were never tried or punished.
Wells, a Memphis resident, was in New York when these tragedies occurred. A good friend of Moss, she was devastated to receive the news of his death. Upon returning home, Wells wrote an article for the Free Press, a Memphis-based newspaper, detailing the terrors of lynching in the American South by listing ten lynchings from the same week in Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia. She stated in the article, “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was: an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” In the late 19th and early 20th century, lynchings were a custom. Blacks were consistently wrongly accused and murdered by a crowd of racist White vigilantes for sport. Lynchings became so normalized that White residents would gather in large groups to witness these brutal killings for amusement and entertainment. Domestic terrorism was a satisfying entertainment for White Southerners.
White mobs did not take well to the release of Wells’ article; in response, they destroyed the Free Press and sent her threatening messages. For her safety, Wells traveled back to New York. Still, soon after she settled, she began publicly disclosing the horrors happening in the South through her publications, A Red Record: Lynchings in the United States and Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Wells spoke out against racial violence, traveling throughout the country and eventually to Washington D.C., encouraging William McKinley (the 25th U.S. president) to outlaw all forms of lynching and discrimination. Wells’ efforts resulted in a ten-year campaign to eradicate racial violence and injustice, however, no law was ever passed to ban lynching legally. Despite this setback, the work of Ida B. Wells highlighted the tragedy of lynchings and encouraged additional work to make the practice illegal.
Ida B. Wells conducted research to accompany her advocacy against racial violence, recording 241 lynchings in her publications, A Red Record: Lynchings in the United States and Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases prefaced A Red Record and served as an introduction to the racial violence of the South. In this publication, Wells investigated the crimes of sexual violence that White men frequently committed against Black women, presenting a rebuttal to the myth (created by White Southerners) that Black men raped White women, used to justify inhumane lynchings and violent attacks. However, out of all the lynchings Wells recorded, only 30 percent of the Black people killed were accused of committing acts of sexual violence, revealing that this was merely a fabricated pretense to eliminate Black existence in the United States (Feimster, 2018). Wells would further her research of racially motivated violence and injustice in A Red Record: Lynchings in the United States.
A Red Record: Lynchings in the United States revealed that lynching was a way to uphold White supremacy and withhold social and economic opportunities from Black people. White Southerners’ would often justify their tyrannical rule by claiming anarchy (such as race riots) would occur if Black people exercised their rights. A Red Record contained every lynching from 1892 to 1894, accompanied by their supposed crimes. Wells analyzed statistics, identified victims, and documented how justice was denied to victims and their families. Her persistent work and empowering journalism would fuel future movements seeking to end racial violence in America. She is an exemplary leader in research, dissemination, and social justice advocacy.
Continued Legacy
Today, we pay homage to Ida B. Wells’ legacy and strive to emulate her advocacy for civil rights. Ida B. Wells was always considered ahead of her time, challenging discriminatory practices, speaking out against bigotry and racism, and fighting for what was right. Through our platform, we seek to elevate marginalized voices, share the stories of Black women and non-binary people, and highlight the advocacy of Spelman students. Thanks to the contributions of Ida B. Wells and powerful women like her, we see past the red tape that attempts to extend our days of oppression; we follow in their footsteps and honor the blue hue of our current reality.
References:
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/ida-b-wells-and-the-campaign-against-lynching
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/ida-b-wells-lynching-black-women.html
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ida-b-wells-lynch-law-in-all-its-phases-34867/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIn%20'Southern%20Horrors%2C',consensual%20sex%20with%20white%20women.