Ida B. Wells: Bearing the Light of Truth
In our Icon Series, we give thanks to those whose lives have laid the foundation for our journey toward justice and equity. In this season of being focused on showing appreciation the New Hampshire Center for Justice & Equity celebrates the extraordinary life of Ida B. Wells.
Portrait of Ida B. Wells. Image credits: Chicago Tribune
About Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells stands out as a fearless historical figure from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An investigative journalist, suffragist, and founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she refused to stay silent in the face of terror, challenging racial violence and the structures that sustained it. Her most notable work is the anti-lynching book A Red Record, where she documented lynchings and related statistical data, exposing their brutality and baseless justifications.
Early Life: From Enslavement to Self-Reliance
Ida Bell Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to enslaved parents James and Elizabeth Wells. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865, her family was freed and hopeful about the Reconstruction era. Wells shared her parents’ strong belief in education, and went on to study at Rust College, a Freedmen’s College where her father had been a trustee.
Tragedy struck in 1878 when a yellow fever epidemic claimed both of her parents and one of her siblings. At just 16, Ida became the caretaker for her younger siblings and dropped out of school in 1880 after she passed her teaching exam. To support her family, she taught in rural schools across Mississippi and later moved to Tennessee. From those early years, Wells cultivated resilience, self-reliance, and a commitment to education.
Challenging Systemic Racism Through Journalism
Wells’ first brush with segregation happened in 1884, while traveling to teach in Shelby County, Tennessee. After boarding a train with a first-class ticket for the ladies’ car, she refused to move to the ‘colored’ section and was forcibly removed. Determined to seek justice, she sued the railroad company, and despite initially winning damages, the Tennessee Supreme Court later reversed the decision.
This incident made her aware of systemic injustice and shaped her commitment to challenging structural racism. After the case, Wells channeled more energy into journalism and advocacy. In Memphis, she worked for local newspapers under the pen name “Lola”, insisting on equal status as a partner and editor. She penned editorials that criticized racial inequities in Memphis and also investigated the dire conditions of segregated public schools. This cost her a job as a teacher, but launched her deeper into journalism.
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
Turning a Personal Tragedy Into an Anti-Lynching Movement
A turning point in Wells' activism came in March 1892, when three of her close acquaintances, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee Stewart, were lynched by a white mob in Memphis for no reason other than owning a grocery store that competed with nearby white businesses. Wells responded with powerful editorials that exposed the “old threadbare lie” that African American men were raping white women as justification for lynching.
Since then, Wells systematically collected testimonies, newspaper reports, and local records to document lynching patterns across the South. Her first major pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), confronted the myth of lynching as spontaneous or justice-driven violence and instead argued that it was a tool of racial control, used to terrorize Black communities and enforce social hierarchies.
In 1895, she published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, which cataloged hundreds of documented lynchings with painstaking detail and offered a statistical analysis of motivations. Wells’ anti-lynching activism was bold. She traveled across states and beyond U.S. borders to galvanize international scrutiny of American racial violence. In doing so, she reframed lynching not as a regional problem but as a moral and political crisis of American democracy.
In 1909, at the National Negro Conference, she presented “Lynching, Our National Crime,” consolidating decades of research and calling for federal anti-lynching legislation and protection of Black lives. Despite her prominence, Wells was not listed among the “Founding Forty” when the NAACP was founded that same year, although the organization today recognizes her as one of the founding members.
Beyond Anti-Lynching: Women’s Rights and Community Empowerment
Wells’ work also encompassed Black women’s political empowerment, echoing modern intersectionality. She criticized racism within the mainstream women’s suffrage movement and insisted that Black women’s voices and experiences should be included. In Chicago, Wells and her husband, attorney and newspaper publisher Ferdinand Barnett, helped establish several suffrage organizations for Black women, including the League of Colored Women, the National Association of Colored Women, and the Alpha Suffrage Club.
In 1910, they founded the Negro Fellowship League, a settlement-style social center offering housing, job assistance, legal counseling, and education to Black men arriving in Chicago. The league also served as a hub for Wells’s organizing efforts.
Wells’ activism continued throughout her later years. In 1913, she took part in the first suffragist parade in Washington, D.C., organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Being the only Black woman in the Illinois delegation, she was asked to move to the segregated section of the procession, which she refused, highlighting the inequalities within the feminist movement. In 1915, she joined a committee led by William Monroe Trotter to present concerns about segregation to President Woodrow Wilson. Later, in 1918, she brought national attention to the discrimination African American soldiers faced during and after World War I.
A Lifelong Pursuit for Truth and Justice
Ida B. Wells died on March 15, 1931, from kidney disease. Throughout her life, she fiercely faced constant threats of violence, legal harassment, and social ostracism. She continued her investigations even when her offices were threatened or attacked, and she received death threats for her exposés.
Wells revealed that mob violence was intertwined with a justice system that enabled it. In recent decades, her investigative work has been credited with pioneering a combination of narrative storytelling and data-driven documentation that was replicated in modern approaches to social sciences.
Memorials like Chicago’s Light of Truth National Monument, unveiled in 2021, and the Ida B. Wells Museum, housed in her Holly Springs residence in Mississippi, honor her lifelong pursuit of truth. In her autobiography Crusade for Justice, posthumously published by her daughter, Wells reflected on the heavy toll of a life dedicated to resistance, but her legacy endures as a cornerstone of civil rights history. In celebrating Ida B. Wells for NHCJE’s 2025 Icon Series, we recognize not just a historic figure but a driver for those who seek truth in the face of injustice.
Learn more about Ida B. Wells
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett - Womenshistory.org
https://www.nps.gov/people/idabwells.htm - National Park Service
https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/new-coin-celebrates-living-legacy-ida-b-wells - Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum
https://www.usmint.gov/news/inside-the-mint/ida-b-wells-light-of-truth?srsltid=AfmBOorz_Fc9G7dv4AcDwFlIBmPCHOtxptXP6evnU24JQOoEvANWm6rN - United States Mint
https://www.aauw.org/resources/article/ida-b-wells-a-suffrage-activist-for-the-history-books - American Association of University Women
Call to Action
Following in the footsteps of the civil rights icons who came before us, New Hampshire is facing unprecedented challenges, and NHCJE is preparing to fight the ‘good fight’.
Will you help us continue their legacy by investing in our work this Giving Tuesday?