Women You May Not Know

Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks refused to yield her bus seat to a white man, African-American journalist Ida B. Wells (Barnett) (1862-1931) was dragged from a train car for a similar refusal (her case against the railroad reached the Tennessee Supreme Court).

Wells was born just prior to her parents’ freeing under the Emancipation Proclamation; they were guardedly supportive of her dissident streak. At sixteen, Wells visited relatives, narrowly avoiding the yellow fever that claimed both parents and an infant brother.

It was the first of several near-misses with death; in 1889, Wells was traveling when her friend Thomas Moss and two others were lynched. In 1892 Wells was on tour when a mob razed the offices of Free Speech and Headlight, the anti-segregationist paper in which she had condemned her friends’ murders.

Wells braved years of death threats for her reportage, which produced Southern Horrors and A Red Record, among other anti-lynching and suffragist commentary. She protested with Frederick Douglass and took white suffragists to task for perpetuating stereotypes of sexually predatory black men.

Wells strove to politicize black women throughout America and Britain, founding the National Association of Colored Women (1896), and the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago (1913).

By Jen Hawkins