She was called by other black journalists the princess of the press.
Some black leaders had a problem with her militancy because they felt she was rocking the boat.
She was probably the most uncompromising black leader. She never backed down from anything.
This was 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 and keep the nigger down.
Ida B. Wells, A Passion for Justice, next on The American Experience.
Ida B. Wells, A Passion for Justice
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Good evening. I'm David McCullough.
Who was Ida B. Wells? How many know today, even among those who teach and write history?
And I include myself. I didn't know.
By almost every measure, she was the kind of heroic figure we all should have grown up with in school.
All of us should know her from books and films about great American achievements.
That is, if we really believe what we say about the value of human relations and justice in American life.
She stood for, she fought for everything we've been raised to hold most dear as the bedrock of the good society.
Her play, freedom of opportunity, freedom from intimidation and the horror of mob rule.
She had enormous courage. She was an investigative journalist before there was such a thing.
She risked her life for her principles.
She was everything, in other words, that we value in a hero.
And in many history textbooks, even today, she receives no mention at all.
But then you see Ida B. Wells was a black woman in the 19th century.
Until comparatively recent times, most textbooks barely mention the existence of blacks in America,
beyond the subject of slavery or perhaps passing mention of Booker T. Washington.
It was as if our past could be seen only with blinders on.
Tonight's film, Ida B. Wells, A Passion for Justice, is a great American story.
1865. The Civil War was over.
Four million former slaves gained the most basic rights of citizenship.
The right to marry, raise children, own property, to be protected by law.
Within two years, black men would have the right to vote.
It was a time of great optimism.
A whole generation infected with the possibilities of freedom and justice.
Among them, Ida B. Wells.
But by the time she was 21, this child of slavery would find that promises made were not to be kept.
Wells would launch a campaign against oppression that reverberates throughout America to this day.
O my soul, O my soul, when I was sleeping down, Beneath God's righteous crown, Christ laid aside his crown.
O my soul, O my soul, Christ laid aside his crown.
I was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, before the close of the Civil War.
My father was the son of his master, who owned a plantation in Tipal County, Mississippi, and one of his slave women, Peggy.
My mother was born in Virginia and was one of ten children.
She and two sisters were sold to slave traders when young, and were taken to Mississippi and sold again.
She used to tell us how she'd been beaten by slave owners in the hard times she had as a slave.
During the period after the Civil War, there was an opportunity of slaves, former slaves, to marry again in freedom under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau.
And the Wellses got married again.
It was one of the first really social choices of freed people after the Civil War.
So obviously they were people of commitment, of family commitment, of commitment to each other.
Her mother was a woman who, and I think this is very interesting, that when Ida went to school, she went to school, the mother as well.
Eight times four is 32. Eight times five is 40.
For nearly a century, it was against the law to teach enslaved African people to read or write.
At the end of the war, 90% were illiterate.
Free now and hungering for an education, young and old attended thousands of newly opened public schools throughout the South.
Our job was to go to school and learn all we could.
My father was one of the trustees, and my mother went along to school with us until she learned to read the Bible.
All my teachers had been the consecrated white men and white women from the North who came into the South to teach us immediately after the war.
It was they who brought us the light of knowledge and their splendid example of Christian courage.
The father used to ask Ida to read the newspapers to him, and mostly about what was happening politically in the community and in the country.
Ida's father was what they used to call a race man, very involved in the politics of the period, so he was very, very much involved.
As Ida was growing up, the South was in convulsive change.
Devastated by war, suffering crop failure, deprived of slave labor, the economy was in crisis.
The African American was the scapegoat.
A massive propaganda campaign was unleashed in the press, the schools and the church reinforcing beliefs that Black Americans were genetically inferior.
That freed from bondage, they would revert to savagery.
They had to be restrained.
But for Ida Wells, the first great challenge in life had nothing to do with race.
In 1878, the Mississippi Delta was hit by a plague called Yellow Fever.
It struck down white and Black alike.
Ida's family, both her parents, who were involved in trying to help others who were dying in that epidemic, caught Yellow Fever themselves and died within 24 hours of each other.
A young sibling died as well.
And so at the age of 16, Ida Wells found herself and her family, orphaned.
There are three other siblings.
She was the oldest and trying to decide, you know, how to pull their life back together.
And so some friends and also some family members gathered and decided to divide up the children to different friends and different family members.
And also there was a young child who was crippled, and she, though, they felt would have to be institutionalized because no one wanted to take care of her.
And Ida Wells said, and we go back to the influence of those parents, when she heard the plans, and she is 16 years old, she heard the plans and she said, my parents would turn over in their graves.
If our family, if they knew our family would be separated like this, I can't let it happen.
And so that was the end of, in a very conscious decision, was the end of her childhood.
She left school, made herself look older to get a teaching job.
Two years later, the veteran schoolteacher, Ida Bell Wells, moved to Memphis, 40 miles away, on the Mississippi River.
Wells, part of the migration of black people to the big cities of the South, found a better paying job in the Memphis school system.
With spared destruction during the war, the city was thriving, a hub of commercial traffic for the entire South.
City fathers envisioned Memphis as having the same exalted status as its namesake in ancient Egypt.
When Ida arrived in Memphis, almost half of the population of the city was black.
It was a period of great hope for black people. It was opening up of the society.
I think black people rushed into that void, hoping that this was going to be a new day.
And you think your grandmother was part of that optimism, Dr. Duster?
Oh yeah, she was perhaps one of the most idealistic of that group.
Everything in her later life indicated that she really believed that the country was opening up, that there was going to be full justice for black people.
As a schoolteacher, Wells was invited to join the Lyceum, a literary club.
Black cultural and self-improvement societies were springing up all over the South.
Many met regularly for music, recitations, and debates.
Wells Club had its own newspaper, The Evening Star, and she was elected the editor.
But there were other clubs.
Back in 1866, a white social club called the Ku Klux Klan had begun a campaign of terror against black Americans,
against any whites who dared speak out in their defense.
Freed men looking for work in the city were rounded up and transported back to the countryside to pick cotton.
In spite of a continuing climate of hostility, a small black middle class had begun to emerge throughout the South.
Most had struggled up the economic ladder.
Many had served in the Union Army, some finally settling on small farms.
There were black shopkeepers, landowners, doctors, lawyers, councilmen, and state legislators.
But democracy would be deferred. The North soon lost interest in the plight of the black American.
In 1877, the last of the federal troops were withdrawn from the South.
Within five years, the Supreme Court overturned the federal laws that provided equality for African Americans.
The states regained control of civil rights. The period known as Reconstruction was over.
Southern states began to enact a series of laws to force the black citizen back into a subordinate class.
A climate of intimidation was settling over the nation.
A climate that was to radicalize the idealistic young schoolteacher, Ida B. Wells.
In much of the South, segregation was fast becoming the law of the land.
Wells, who had been exposed to the ideas of freedom and democracy, was not about to accept the new order.
One day, while riding back to my school, I took a seat in the ladies' coach of the train, as usual.
When the train started and the conductor came along to collect tickets, he took my ticket,
then handed it back to me and told me I would have to go in the other car.
I refused, saying that the forward car was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay.
He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm, I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand.
When she fought, I had to bring in, I believe, two other conductors, and they physically took her off of that train.
And when she's thrown off the train, even more humiliating is that the rest of the white passengers applaud.
Now virtually powerless, most black Americans believed they had no choice but to buckle under to the forces of segregation.
But not 22-year-old Wells. She brought suit against the railroad and was awarded $500 in damages.
The case was widely reported and celebrated by black people throughout the nation.
But the railroad took the case to appeal. In 1887, the state Supreme Court reversed the decision.
Wells had lost her fight. She made the following entry in her diary.
I had hoped for such great things, for my suit for my people, generally.
I had firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice.
I feel shorn of that relief and utterly discouraged.
And just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.
Despair gave way to fury. Wells wrote articles about her case that were published by the local papers,
and then by the leading black newspapers throughout the country.
Now she had to tell that story basically herself. She saw what that would do.
There were a lot of black newspapers beginning to emerge, and a lot of them had been created by churches and by black religious organizations.
The black church, of course, was independent. The black church didn't have to answer, to any great degree, to white owners.
And as a result of that, it's really the beginning of her career as a journalist.
So it's important historically, but also important in terms of her own life.
You see now there's a focus on it and a new kind of determination.
She had found the meaning of her life, which was in her work as a journalist.
Signing her weekly column, Myola, Wells advocated self-help, education, and social reform.
After exposing corruption and poor conditions in the Memphis school system, she lost her teaching job and became a full-time journalist.
She was called by other black journalists the princess of the press.
And you get the very strong impression from the historical, what there is available, of historical record,
that whatever Ida Wells showed up at a meeting of black journalists, that she was kind of the highlight.
She was apparently a very personable woman, as well as being a very beautiful woman, a very bright woman.
Wells soon became editor and a co-owner of the newspaper Free Speech.
She now found herself writing about issues she had read about as a child, racism and power.
Blacks were attempting to gain power.
Whites were unwilling to share it.
Over here across the river in Marion, Arkansas, in 1888 there was a big incident.
The county had been ruled by or governed by elected black officials ever since Reconstruction.
But that year the whites rented about a thousand Wincesters from Memphis,
and they marched to the office of all of the black officials and said,
now the county is not big enough for you and us, and we got a one-way ticket for you to Memphis, and don't come back.
So they marched them down to the railroad and put them on the train to Memphis.
The governor in Arkansas said there's nothing he could do about it, so that the people didn't want black officials.
Why? He couldn't do anything about it.
For black people, law and order was collapsing.
Police not only tolerated, but in some cases even participated in mob violence.
Lynch law was deliberately used to terrorize black Americans.
Pamphlets like this incited more violence.
This was the situation in 1892 when three young black men, Will Stewart, Calvin McDowell, and Thomas Moss,
friends of Ida Wells, opened a grocery store in direct competition with a white-owned grocery across the street.
The white grocer didn't like it once, and so there was a bad blood between the white grocer and the black grocery store.
He went to the city officials and tried to get them to, or the county officials, tried to get them to close it down,
and said that they were maintaining a nuisance. They were selling beer.
And when the deputy sheriffs arrived, now they didn't have uniforms, they were in plain clothes.
It was after dark, and you see some white folks with guns coming after you, why, blacks fired on them.
You had gunfire, and a deputy was wounded.
At that point, the truth must have come out, and so the blacks stopped firing,
and the deputies went in and arrested all they could find in the grocery store.
Then they went out and arrested everybody in the neighborhood they could find, and so they threw 20 to 30 people in jail.
Within hours, rumors of a black revolt spread throughout the county. A black militia was disarmed.
The three grocers were dragged from their cells by a mob and murdered.
The killers were never brought to justice.
Everybody in town knew and loved Tommy, an exemplary young man.
He was married, and the father of one little girl, Maureen, whose godmother I was.
He and his wife, Betty, were the best friends I had in town.
He owned his little home, and having saved his money, he went into the grocery business with the same ambition a young white man would have had.
One of the morning papers held back its edition in order to supply its readers with the details of that lynching.
It said that Thomas Moss begged for his life for the sake of his wife and his child and his unborn baby,
that Calvin McDowell got hold of one of the guns of the lynchers, and because they couldn't loosen his grip, a shot was fired into his closed fist.
There's a strong belief among us that the criminal court judge himself was one of the lynchers.
The black community of Memphis was stunned.
Wells retaliated with her pen. She wrote an editorial.
The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.
The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order was rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes.
This is something that touched her not just as a woman who is sensitive to the injustices we're being imposed upon blacks,
but it was a personal note and all that I think forced her to ask the question, am I willing to stand up to whoever may oppose me in trying to, in fighting for racial justice?
Wells chose to fight. She also chose her weapons.
There's therefore only one thing left that we can do, save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property nor give us a fair trial in the courts,
but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.
Hundreds disposed of their property and left.
Leading pastors took their whole congregations with them as they too went west.
She said, leave. You know, this is that that black migration to the to the Middle West, the Kansas and Oklahoma migration.
Go to Kansas, go to Oklahoma. And many blacks left.
And I think that's another reason that the power structure was angry with her because she understood the economic and political strategy that they were using to intimidate blacks.
And what she was saying is you don't have to stay here and be intimidated. Leave.
And so the white businesses were in a panic that blacks had left. They're buying everything on the installment plan and they just left everything. So people that the people were left the restaurants are going out of business.
Because all the black patronage was was going.
And you talk about the power of the pen and of her leadership to be the force behind thousands of black people leaving and whatever Memphis represented to them was the only thing that they knew.
It was where their roots were, where they were working, where their families were.
And six thousand people packed up their bags, went to the Oklahoma territory.
Of course, Ida Wells had gone there previously to sort of scout the place.
To get black people to leave everything and go to a place that's unknown.
They don't know anything that's that's out there. The weather is different. The circumstances are different.
You know, the towns are many of them yet to be established. And she did that when she was just a young woman.
Among those who remained in Memphis, Wells helped to organize a boycott aimed at the newly installed trolley system.
Six weeks after the lynching of Thomas Moss and his partners, the superintendent and treasurer of the City Railroad Company came into the office of the free speech and asked us to use our influence with the colored people to get them to ride on the streetcars again.
When I asked why they came to us, the reply was that colored people had been their best patrons and that there had been a mark falling off of their patronage.
I asked them what they thought was the cause. They said they didn't know. They had heard Negroes were afraid of electricity.
When they left the office, I wrote this interview for the free speech and told the people to keep up the good work and to keep on staying off the cars.
She moved to a strategy of organizing. She wanted to mobilize black people, women's groups in particular, but other kinds of black mobilization, which signaled that it wasn't only a matter of the mirror image.
You don't just get people to see that they're wrong and they change. She saw that you had to get some organizational apparatus in place.
Wells used her paper to campaign against the growing number of lynchings, some involving mobs as large as 10,000 people.
She described the carnival-like atmosphere in which black men, women, and children were hanged, shot and burned to death for such offenses as nonpayment of a debt, insulting whites, even testifying in court.
Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the free speech. Three were charged with killing white men and five with raping white women.
The charge of sexual assault against white women was routinely offered by the press and the authorities as the justification for these atrocities.
Wells, at great risk, began to investigate these charges, one after the other proved false.
I also found that what the white man of the South practiced as all right for himself, he assumed to be unthinkable in white women.
They could and did fall in love with the pretty mulatto and quadrant girls as well as the black ones, but they professed an inability to imagine white women doing the same thing with Negro and mulatto men.
Whenever they did so and were found out, the cry of rape was raised and the lowest element of the white South was turned loose to wreak its fiendish cruelty on those too weak to help themselves.
Wells was now digging at the psychological roots of the sexual charges. She wrote an editorial about her findings.
Nobody in this section believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women.
If Southern white men are not more careful, they will overreach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.
Wells was raising an unspeakable issue, suggesting voluntary relationships between white women and black men.
It was an inflammatory idea. Outraged, the white press of Memphis rushed to the defense of white womanhood.
Edward Ward Carmack, the fiery editor of the Memphis commercial, led the attack, claiming that the black sets aside all fear of death for the gratification of his bestial desires.
The evening scimitar had even more to say on the subject.
If the Negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay, it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked.
Again, they're assuming that the writer of these editorials is one of the men associated with Ida Wells.
To tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison streets, brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor's shears.
Well, it's perfectly obvious what they were talking about there.
I bought a pistol the first thing after my friend Tom Moss was lynched because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers.
I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap.
I'd already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked.
I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.
Wells was on a train headed for a conference in the East when the uproar over her editorial occurred.
In New York, she learned that a committee of leading citizens had marched to her office, smashed the presses and destroyed everything they could find.
With a price on her head, Wells was now in exile.
It would be 30 years before she would return to the South.
Immediately, Wells was hired by the leading black newspaper of the New York age, published and edited by T. Thomas Fortune, the dean of black journalists.
By now, she was one of the most widely published writers in the black newspaper world.
In the autumn of 1892, at the height of what was called the Gay Nineties, Wells stumbled upon an unexpected source of power, the black women's club movement.
She was asked to speak at a testimonial given in her honor at Lyric Hall in Brooklyn, New York.
Women came from as far away as Philadelphia and Boston.
It was reportedly the largest gathering of black club women ever held.
Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed,
that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching,
that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.
But Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart had committed no crime against white women.
This was 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 and keep the nigger down.
It was here that the first national anti-lynching campaign was born.
The women collected $500 to enable Wells to continue her investigations into the causes of lynchings and to publish her first pamphlet on lynching.
During the slave regime, the southern white man owned the Negro, body and soul.
It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body.
The slave was rarely killed. He was too valuable.
But emancipation came and the vested interests of the white man in the Negro's body were lost.
With freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue.
The Negro was not only whipped and scourged, he was killed.
Frederick Douglass, the most prominent black leader of the 19th century, wrote Wells,
Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the south.
There has been no word equal to it.
In one of her studies, a red record, Wells reported that during the year 1894, 197 persons were put to death by mobs who gave the victims no opportunity to make a lawful defense.
These scenes of unusual brutality, she observed, failed to have any visible effect on the humane sentiments of the people of our land.
She knew that if she wasn't meticulous about it, that people would question her, and she made an effort of collecting all the data, the oral testimony as well as the written testimony that she could find.
And again, she often used the white newspapers so that people would not say you were making these stories up.
Armed with these facts, Wells reached out to the conscience of America.
But the press, the political establishment, the courts, and the church remained unmoved.
Thirty years after the Civil War, the most basic rights of black Americans were effectively subverted.
Determined to be heard, Wells carried her crusade to England.
Her strategy was to mobilize moral as well as economic pressures abroad.
She understood just how critical the English market was to southern cotton.
One newspaper made this comment, we're naturally loathe to express any opinion upon the way in which our American neighbors manage their own affairs.
But when ruffians take to skinning men alive, vivisecting them, burning them slowly to death, no decent man can resent the expressions of horror and indignation that burst from the lips of all observers.
That's just one of the things the British newspapers were saying as a result of what Ida Wells was reporting to the British.
During two European tours, Wells met with every leader of public opinion she could find, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Duke of Argyle.
Working through English and Scottish women reformers, she helped launch the London Anti-Lynching Committee, the first anti-lynching organization in the world.
She had interviews with all of the leading newspapers, with people in parliament.
These interviews were written up and she sent them back to the Memphis newspapers so they could see the nasty things being said about them.
And so, of course, they had to reply to them and say they're not sold, that this is really a great and a decent place for black people to live.
And in saying the things weren't sold, they said, we're not for lynching and we never have been.
Now, of course, this wasn't true.
But she did persuade the Memphis business elite they had to do something if they didn't, by their reputation, it would be ruined, be bad for them economically.
Though Wells was slandered in the American press, she had succeeded in making mob rule an issue of public debate.
Lynchings soon began to decline. In Memphis, after 1894, there would be no lynchings for two decades.
Returning home, Wells seized the occasion of the world's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 to continue focusing international attention on racial injustice in America.
Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in America, it was the most spectacular world's fair ever organized.
But black America was not represented at the fair.
Wells published a pamphlet with Frederick Douglass and a black Chicago lawyer named Ferdinand L. Barnett, pointing out that without centuries of the unpaid labor of Afro-Americans, there would be no Columbian Exposition.
Twenty thousand pamphlets were distributed to foreign visitors.
When she pointed out why blacks were not represented at the Columbian Exposition, I think she did somewhat the same thing as she did in Memphis.
I think she did to some extent show the white community for what it was, discriminating racists.
People were embarrassed by it, whether even the people who tried to argue that it was a distortion, that there was not a true statement of the facts.
There was a certain part of it they could not deny, and that was the blacks were not represented.
Wells settled in Chicago and continued writing.
One of Wells' ongoing concerns was the unrelenting assault on the moral character of black women.
She traveled about the country, speaking out on this and other racial issues.
Some black leaders, mainly southern ministers, had a problem with her militancy because they felt she was rocking the boat.
And we also speculate today, I mean, in hindsight we can look back and say that they also probably had a problem with her because she was female, and that she was speaking out.
If they didn't have a problem with Frederick Douglass speaking out, but they definitely had a problem with her.
Wells had two battles to fight, racism and sexism.
She joined the suffragist movement, organized the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first black women's suffrage group in Illinois,
and campaigned with Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and other white women leaders.
Ida never bit her tongue, and even among friends like Susan B. Anthony, she would challenge them.
One season she visited Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York when she was lecturing.
It was shortly after a women's suffrage meeting had occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, the first national meeting to be held in the south.
And Frederick Douglass always attended these meetings.
But Susan B. Anthony asked him, as a favor to her, not to come because she knew that the women in the south, white women in the south, would be offended.
And so she told this story to Ida, and Ida really admonished her, how could you do that?
And you think I was wrong in so doing, Miss Anthony asked?
I answered uncompromisingly, yes.
I felt that although she may have made gains for suffrage, she also confirmed white women in their attitude of segregation.
I suppose Miss Anthony had pity on my youth and inexperience, for she never in any way showed resentment of my attitude.
She gave me rather the impression of a woman who was eager to hear all sides of a question.
In the midst of this campaign, Wells made what some suffragists considered a radical move.
On 27 June 1895, I was married in the city of Chicago to attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett and retired to what I thought was the privacy of a home.
The newspapers all over the country gave a good deal of space in mention of this fact.
Three different dates had been set for the wedding and every time a call had come to go some place to deliver an address.
When the announcement was made in the daily papers and through the Associated Press out to the country on June 12th,
I was in Kansas delivering addresses nightly and spoke up to within a week of the day on which I was married.
Ferdinand L. Barnett was not only a successful attorney, he was also an activist and the founder of the conservator, the first black newspaper in Chicago.
After the wedding, Barnett sold the paper to his wife.
When their first child was born in 1896, Ida Wells Barnett faced a very modern dilemma.
It was at a meeting, if I remember correctly, and every time Susan B. Anthony, and they had had a personal, they had known each other and they were certainly on a first name basis,
but at this particular meeting, Susan B. Anthony would always say, Mrs. Barnett.
I noticed the way she would bite out my married name in addressing me.
Finally, I said to her, Miss Anthony, don't you believe in women getting married?
She said, oh yes, but not women like you who had a special call for special work.
I too might have married, but it would have meant dropping the work to which I had set my hand.
She said, I know of no one in all this country better fitted to do the work you had in hand than yourself,
but since you've gotten married, agitation seems practically to have ceased.
You have divided duty. Your 11-month-old baby needs you at home, and that makes for divided duty.
Wells' activism was limited not so much by her growing family as by increasing opposition from conservative black leaders
who were wary of her uncompromising attitude and widespread influence.
At the turn of the century, there were two opposing forces in African-American politics.
The Radicals, led by W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, and Ida B. Wells, fought every form of discrimination based on race.
The Accommodationists, led by the powerful Booker T. Washington, were eager not to offend the white establishment that supported them.
Washington insisted that a segregated society would protect black Americans while generating jobs in economic self-reliance.
Washington considered Wells a troublemaker. He moved to undercut her politically.
She was probably the most uncompromising black leader and maybe leader that I have ever read about in this country.
She never backed down from anything, even when other leaders did in various ways.
And as a result, of course, she sort of ran afoul of everybody.
Here's a woman who criticized William McKinley for not pushing anti-lynching legislation and went into the White House and told him so.
In 1909, Wells was one of the founders of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Even though the NAACP adopted most of Wells' anti-lynching strategies, she was maneuvered out of power in the organization.
Wells was hurt and anchored by this, but decided not to challenge her opponents.
Wells focused her energies on the Chicago community, working with black women's clubs and grassroots organizations.
She founded the Negro Fellowship League, which ran a settlement house in the slums of Southside Chicago for new arrivals from the South.
Both she and her husband became deeply involved in state and local politics.
At the start of World War I, Wells actively supported the involvement of the African-American in the war effort.
But as the war in Europe continued, racial violence increased throughout the nation.
For black Americans, it was ironic that while black soldiers were overseas fighting to make the world safe for democracy, black Americans were still forced to fight for justice at home.
In 1917, the 24th Infantry of Black Soldiers was stationed just outside of Houston, Texas, awaiting transportation overseas.
Fed up with the indignity of a Jim Crow army, with continued insults by the white population, with the abuses of the local police, 100 soldiers took up arms and marched on the city.
In the wake of the rebellion, 20 men lay dead, 16 whites, and four black soldiers.
After a summary court-martial, 50 of the soldiers were sentenced to life, 19 were hanged.
Ida B. Wells protested, and she had some buttons made up that said, martyred black soldiers, or martyred Negro soldiers.
And Ida B. Wells found herself being visited by some secret service men when they found out about her activities and the distribution of these buttons.
And they told her to desist, to stop. And she said, on what basis? And they said, on the basis of, you criticize the government, it's treason.
And we all know what can happen to you if you're accused of, convicted of treason.
I told them, I think it was a dastardly thing to hang those men as if they were criminals and put them in holes in the ground just as if they'd been dead dogs.
And if it's treason for me to think and say so, then you will have to make the most of it.
The men didn't come back, and I continued disposing of the buttons to anybody who wanted them.
And strange to say, I was never molested, and no further reference was made to the incident.
1919. The war was over.
Despite the demands of an extended family, Wells continued her battle for justice.
An incident that came to be known as the Arkansas Race Riot ended Wells' 30-year exile from the South.
When black farmers in Arkansas, forced to sell their cotton below market prices, tried to unionize,
whites fired on them at an organizing meeting. The farmers fought back.
Five whites and scores of black people were killed, many imprisoned.
Twelve men charged with murder and conspiracy were sentenced to die.
Wells had been warned never to return to the South, but the plight of the black farmers brought her home.
She was now a woman of 60.
I took the train for Little Rock in 1922, arrived there Sunday morning and went directly to the address
that had been given me in the letter sent me by one of the 12 men.
I made myself look as inconspicuous as possible, and thus had no trouble whatsoever in gaining entrance to the prison.
The one guard on duty sat about 50 feet away reading the Sunday paper.
When he looked up, he saw only a group of insignificant-looking colored women who had been there many times before,
so he went on reading his newspaper.
When we got up close to the bars, Mrs. Moore whispered, this is Mrs. Barnett from Chicago.
I talked to them about their experiences, asked them to write down everything they could recollect about the rioting
and what befell each one of them.
They were beaten, given electric shocks, and in every possible way terrorized
in an effort to force them to confess that their union was actually a conspiracy
for the purpose of murdering white people and confiscating their property.
Then Mrs. Moore said, boys, don't you want to sing for your cousin?
Whereupon they sang a song of their own composition.
Finally, I got up, walked close to the bars, and said to them in a low tone,
you have talked and sung and prayed about dying and forgiving your enemies,
but why don't you pray to live and ask to be freed?
Quit talking about dying.
If you believe your God is all-powerful, believe he's powerful enough to open these prison doors.
And say so.
Dying is the last thing you want to even think about, much less talk about.
Pray to live and believe you're going to get out.
I came back to Chicago, wrote my pamphlet about the Elaine rioters.
In the closing section, I stated the following.
This booklet goes into the greatest court in the world, and before the bar of public opinion,
it pleads the cases of these helpless men.
Every reader is a member of that bar.
And white people of Arkansas are the judges and jury to whom this appeal is made.
The condemned men were released.
In Wells's hands, the press became a powerful weapon against injustice.
In the closing years of her life, Ida B. Wells wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice.
She said,
The gallant fight and marvelous bravery of the black men and women,
fighting and dying to exercise and maintain their rights as freemen and citizens,
is a heritage of which our young people would be proud.
Proud to know how their fathers and grandfathers handled their brief day of power
during the Reconstruction period.
Yet most of this history is buried in oblivion.
Our youth are entitled to the facts of race history which only the participants can give.
I am thus led to set forth the facts contained in this volume, which I dedicate to them.
Ida B. Wells Barnett died in Chicago, Illinois on March 25, 1931.
When Ida B. Wells died, the country took little note.
Others became famous for leading the battle for civil rights.
But slowly the textbooks have begun to change to recognize that not all our heroes were white or male.
The United States Postal Service, for example, has commissioned a new posting stamp in honor of Ida B. Wells.
I'm David McCullough. Good night.
Ida B. Wells Barnett died in Chicago, Illinois on March 25, 1931.
Ida B. Wells Barnett died on March 25, 1931.
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