Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and civil rights activist, Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Ida B. Wells served as one of the founding members of the Niagara Movement and later the NAACP in 1909. She was Born in 1862 in Mississippi, her parents who were slaves died along with a younger sibling when Wells was fourteen. Wells graduated from Rust College before moving to Memphis where she worked as a school teacher. Her involvement in fighting discrimination in the early 1880s launched a career in journalism and civil rights activism. In 1892 Wells’ three friends—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart operated the People's Grocery Company that competed for customers with a white owned grocery stores in Memphis. In response the latter group tried to attack the People's Grocery Company but it’s owners fought back shooting one of the assailants. Local officials arrested and jailed The three black entrepreneurs. Wells interviewed the three men in jail and did further investigations which she published in her paper Free Speech and Headlight. Thereafter a lynch mob broke into the jail and killed the three men before they went on trail. African American newspapers across the country republished her articles. Threats on her life in Memphis led her to migrate to Chicago where she continued her anti-lynching activism and civil rights organizing.
