The First Vote (1867), depicting the state of Virginia’s first election in which African American men were permitted to vote.
An Abrupt End to Childhood
Ida turned sixteen on July 16, 1878. She was enjoying the summer on her grandmother Peggy’s farm, which was far enough from home that news traveled slowly. She had heard that yellow fever, the deadly disease carried by mosquitos, had swept through Memphis, as well as Granada, Mississippi. But she wasn’t worried about anything happening in Holly Springs. Little did she know that her entire world was going to turn upside down.
The mayor allowed people from the ravaged cities to take refuge in Holly Springs. Over two-thirds of the residents of Holly Springs had fled for safety. Ida assumed that her family members were among them. However, both parents decided to be kind and help others who were ailing.
One fall day, Ida saw some familiar faces coming to her grandmother’s farm. She was expecting good news. Instead she was handed a note that read:
Jim and Lizzie Wells have both died of the fever. They died within 24 hours of each other. The children are all at home and the Howard Association has put a woman there to take care of them. Send word to Ida.
Ida was stunned when she read the words. Her entire body went numb, and she could barely shed a tear. All she could think was that it couldn’t be true. There was no way that both of her parents were gone, leaving seven children to fend almost for themselves. But she did not have the luxury to spend much time mourning. There was too much to do in order to try to keep her family together. At the age of sixteen, she had to be the leader of her family. She realized that she must return home to care for her brothers and sisters, who might also be ill. All she could think was how awful it must have been for them to watch their parents die. Not only that—they were all alone in the house while it happened.
Ida was determined to get back to Holly Springs, even though it was a dangerous proposition. Train conductors had died. Passenger trains weren’t running. Ida was sternly warned that she herself could get sick. But that would not stop her from getting home. Despite protests from everyone, including her grandmother, Ida proclaimed that as the oldest of seven children she had to do whatever was necessary to be there for her brothers and sisters.
Adding to her heartbreak, once she arrived back home she learned that her youngest brother, Stanley, had died along with her parents. Despite her anguish, Ida had no time to mourn. With the help of a nurse, she tended to her four sick siblings. Luckily, neither she nor Eugenia fell ill. After several harrowing weeks, the epidemic finally ended later in the fall. Ida had spent time trying to come up with a plan to take care of her siblings to keep them all together. The last thing she could imagine was being separated from her siblings after they all had lost their parents. The agony her mother had always expressed about never seeing most of her family again haunted Ida. And she wanted to do everything possible to make sure she and her siblings stayed together.
Her childhood was officially over. Even though her father’s friends offered to split up the children and take care of them, Ida vowed to keep everyone together. Luckily, James and Elizabeth Wells had been resourceful and frugal: James had purchased a small house and had left the children three hundred dollars. That was enough money to support them for several months while Ida prepared for a teacher’s test. She lengthened her dresses and pulled her hair into a bun to make herself appear older than sixteen. After passing the test, she was assigned to a school for Black children six miles out in the country. She then took on the adult responsibility of being the breadwinner and caretaker.
Ida was able to cover all of the family’s expenses with her monthly salary of twenty-five dollars. But traveling by mule on the unpaved route between her school and Holly Springs was exhausting. The slow, arduous journey took hours. So Ida arranged to live with her students’ families during the week and to return home on the weekends.
Ida needed help raising her siblings, especially since she had to live away during the week. Grandmother Peggy moved from her farm into the Holly Springs house to care for the children. With her demanding schedule of teaching all week, then spending the entire weekend washing, ironing, cooking, and grading papers, Ida worked almost around the clock. She had no time for dating, socializing, or having any type of hobbies or fun. Her only pleasure was reading, which filled any spare moment she could find.
After Grandmother Peggy suffered a stroke and moved back to her farm, and Ida endured almost two more years of her grueling schedule with the help of an old friend, she was completely worn out. She had to admit to herself that she just couldn’t do it all anymore. Her brothers were growing into teenagers, and her sisters still needed a lot of care. She was only eighteen years old. Finally, Ida accepted help from her aunts.
That help came at a great cost. Her mother’s sister, Aunt Belle, volunteered to care for Eugenia and to put James and George to work on her Mississippi farm. Aunt Fannie, who had lost her husband in the yellow fever epidemic and was taking care of three children on her own, convinced Ida, Annie, and Lily to move into her Memphis home. Everything the Wells children had known would become a memory. And Ida knew that the possibility of all six of them living together again was remote. She had worked herself to the bone to keep everyone together, but it had finally become too much to bear. They left the only place they had ever known to live with aunts in two different states. It was the last time they ever lived together.
Once in Memphis, Ida found a teaching position in Woodstock, Tennessee, fourteen miles from the city. Her mule-riding days were over. She now traveled back and forth by train. She worked in Woodstock for a few years before securing a higher-paying position in Memphis.
During Reconstruction, southern states were strictly regulated and required to grant certain rights to Black citizens in order to rejoin the union. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, many states enthusiastically took advantage of “states’ rights” and passed Jim Crow laws to resegregate everything.
Ida grew up having white teachers who were kind and generous. Her father had taught her that she needed to fight for her rights and no one could make her feel that she was less than anyone else. Ida had learned from her teachers to be responsible and to serve others. The Christian instructors encouraged Ida to act like a lady at all times, a lesson she took to heart.
A typical rural schoolhouse in the 1880s.
Beale Street Historic District in Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1970.
Formerly enslaved women, like her mother, worked particularly hard to be ladylike. As enslaved workers, they had toiled long, hard hours doing grueling work. At the end of each day, their backs had ached and their hands had become calloused from manual labor. After the war, Black women looked forward to being treated with the same respect as white women. They cherished the opportunity to partake in otherwise commonplace practices they had been denied as enslaved persons, like caring for their own children and households and having control over their living spaces. They wanted to be shown the same level of respect that white women enjoyed. They believed that looking and acting like “ladies” were ways to obtain that respect. White gloves, fine manners, and starched curtains took on enormous meaning.
So of course, when Tennessee passed its first Jim Crow law in 1881, specifying that Black and white train passengers ride in separate cars, Ida was incensed. After all she’d learned and experienced, how could she not fight to remain in her rightful place as a lady?
Ida’s belief that she deserved to enjoy all of the opportunities and freedoms that were the promise of the United States was a driving force in her life. She went on to fight for justice and equality in the law, education, housing, employment, and politics. And her tactic of truth-telling as a weapon to challenge unequal systems and structures has impacted our country for decades since. Countless activists, organizers, journalists, and public officials have drawn inspiration from her life and the work she did to push the country toward a freedom that many people have never kn
own.
V. 400 YEARS OF PROGRESS
The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box, and the Civil Rights Law.
—Ida B. Wells
1619
First Africans who were enslaved arrived in British North America
1775
Quakers created the first antislavery society
1776
July 4 – Declaration of Independence
1808
Congress banned the external slave trade
1816
African Methodist Episcopal Church formally established by former slaves
1838
Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery
1850
September 18 – Fugitive slave law enacted that required that escaped slaves be returned to their owners (even if they were caught in what was technically a “free” state)
1852
February 18 – Ferdinand Lee Barnett born
1857
The Dred Scott v. Sandford U.S. Supreme Court decision stated that slaves were not citizens of the United States, and therefore they could not expect any protection from the federal government or courts.
1860
Abraham Lincoln elected president
1862
July 16 – Ida Bell Wells born
1863
January 1 – Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln, technically freeing only the enslaved African Americans in states that were on the South’s side of the Civil War.
1865
• March 3 – Freedmen’s Bureau established
• April 15 – President Lincoln assassinated
• May 9 – Civil War ended, Reconstruction started
• June 19 – Enslaved people in Texas learned they were free, which is what the Juneteenth holiday is based on
• December 6 – Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime
• Ku Klux Klan formed in Tennessee
1866
Shaw University (now Rust College) established
1868
July 9 – Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all who were born or naturalized in the United States
1870
February 3 – Fifteenth Amendment granted voting rights to citizens regardless of race, color, or previous servitude. This made it so formerly enslaved men could vote, but women could not.
1872
Freedmen’s Bureau disbanded
1877
Reconstruction ended
1878
Ida’s parents and infant brother Stanley died
1881
Jim Crow laws regarding segregation on public transportation implemented in Tennessee
1883
September 15 – Ida removed from Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad train on ride going from Memphis to Woodstock
1884
• May 4 – Ida removed from train going from Woodstock to Memphis. She filed lawsuit against railroad.
• December 24 – Ida won lawsuit against railroad
1887
April – Ida’s lawsuit overturned by Tennessee Supreme Court
1889
Ida became one-third owner of Memphis Free Speech
1891
Ida lost teaching job, put all energy into the newspaper
1892
• March 9 – Ida’s friends Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart were killed. She wrote articles exposing the truth about lynching, lost her printing press, and was exiled from the South.
• May – Ida moved to New York City, worked with T. Thomas Fortune on New York Age, became one-fourth co-owner
• Ida published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
• Ida started speaking at churches in New York and Philadelphia about lynching atrocities
1893
• Ida traveled on speaking tour in the United Kingdom
• Cowrote, edited, and published the pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, cowritten with Frederick Douglass, Ferdinand L. Barnett, and Irvine Garland Penn. Distributed over ten thousand copies at the World’s Fair.
• Ida founded Ida B. Wells Club in Chicago
1894
Ida went on her second speaking tour in England, which lasted four months
1895
• February 20 – Frederick Douglass died
• Ida wrote and published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892–1893–1894
• June 27 – Married Ferdinand L. Barnett at Bethel AME Church. Hyphenated her name to Wells-Barnett
1896
• Plessy v. Ferguson U.S. Supreme Court ruling happened, which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as they were equal in quality
• Ida’s son Charles Aked Barnett born
• Ida cofounded National Association of Colored Women
1897
• Ida’s son Herman Kohlsaat Barnett born
• Ida established first kindergarten in Chicago for Black children
1898
• February 22 – Postmaster Frazier B. Baker and his infant killed in Lake City, South Carolina
• Ida visited President William McKinley to ask him to treat lynching as a federal crime
• Spanish-American War lasted from April to August
1899
Ida wrote and published pamphlet Lynch Law in Georgia
1900
Ida wrote and published pamphlet Mob Rule in New Orleans
1901
Ida’s daughter Ida Bell Barnett Jr. born
1904
Ida’s daughter Alfreda Barnett born
1908
Ida started Negro Fellowship League at Grace Presbyterian Church as extension of Bible study class
1909
• Formation of NAACP in response to 1908 Springfield, Illinois, race riot
• Lynching of Will “Frog” James in Cairo, Illinois—Ida B. met with Governor Charles S. Deneen to discuss
1910
Negro Fellowship League moved into its first space at 2830 South State Street
1913
• January 30 – Ida cofounded the Alpha Suffrage Club
• March 3 – Ida integrated Washington, DC, suffrage march
• June 26 – Illinois passed restricted suffrage for women
• Negro Fellowship League moved to 3005 South State Street
• Ida started working as probation officer
1916
Ida stopped working as probation officer
1917
• April 6 – United States entered World War I
• July – East St. Louis, Illinois, race riot occurred
• Ida wrote and published pamphlet The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century
• August – Houston race riot involving Black soldiers at Camp Logan occured
1918
• Ida visited and investigated by FBI for passing out martyred Negro soldiers buttons
• November 11 – World War I ends
1919
• More than twenty-five race riots took place around the country, including in Elaine, Arkansas, in what was called Red Summer
• Ida investigated by FBI, passport to the Paris Peace Conference denied
1920
• Negro Fellowship League closed
• Ida wrote and published The Arkansas Race Riot
• Ida visited Elaine massacre prisoners in Little Rock
1929
The Great Depression started
1930
Ida ran and lost race for Illinois State Senate
1931
March 25 – Ida B. Wells died
1932
President Franklin D. Roosevelt elected and implemented New Deal in 1933, which lasted through 1939
1936
March 11 – Ferdinand L. Barnett died
1941
Ida B. Wells Homes opened in Chicago
1954
Brown v. Board of Education ruling came down, which desegregated schools in the United States
1955
• August 28 – Emmett Till lynched
• December 1 –Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on the bus started the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted 381 days
1963
November 22 – President John F. Kennedy assassinated
1965
• February 14 – Malcolm X assassinated
• August 6 – Voting Rights Act signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson
1968
• April 4 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated
• Riots across multiple cities
Ida B. the Queen Page 6
