Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Ida Bell Wells-Barnett
    Place of Birth
    Burial Place
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Female
    Race
    Black
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Siblings
    7
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    4
    Family
    James Wells (father), Elizabeth Warrenton (mother), Ferdinand L. Barnett (husband),
    Education
    Other
    Other Education
    Rust College, MS
    Occupation
    Educator
    Journalist
    Relation to Slavery
    Slave or Former Slave
    Other Affiliations
    Other
    Other Affiliation
    National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

    Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (American National Bibliography)

    Scholarship
    In 1892 Wells found a focus for her militancy following a triple lynching in Memphis. After three young black men opened the People's Grocery, a white competitor's resentment triggered a chain of events that led to their murders. Earlier lynchings had angered her, but the deaths of three friends brought the evil close to her. She had believed lynchings happened to innocent people but not to respectable ones. Turning the full force of her powerful pen against lynching, Wells attacked the premise that lynching was a necessary deterrent to black rapists. In May she wrote a Free Speech editorial in which she suggested that many rape charges arose from the discovery of voluntary sexual liaisons of white women with black men. While Wells was away, angry whites closed the newspaper office and ran her partner out of Memphis.
    Linda O. McMurry, "Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00924.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/35135.