Organizing Together
Many people who face a hostile social environment form or join groups and organizations in order to collectively combat injustice rather than try to do things alone. Ida was no different. Even though she fought against the railroad on her own in the early 1880s, she was part of a community that was supportive. In Memphis, she belonged to social groups called lyceums, where people gathered to share creative works and political ideas with like-minded individuals. The environment energized Ida, providing an outlet she did not find within the confines of her teaching career. It was where she began to realize the power of collective action and see her own potential as a leader.
After she left Memphis, she both founded and participated in a variety of organizations, including but not limited to the National Association of Colored Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Ida B. Wells Club, Universal Negro Improvement Association, the National Equal Rights League, the Negro Fellowship League, the Alpha Suffrage Club, and the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association. Engaging in and exchanging ideas, talents, perspectives, and tactics, Ida was part of a critical moment in the United States’ progression to a more perfect union.
Ida B. moved to New York City in 1892 and started working with T. Thomas Fortune on his New York Age newspaper. Thomas also introduced her to the nascent National Afro-American Council, of which Ida became the inaugural secretary. The group was formed in 1898 after a spate of violent lynchings and is considered the nation’s first nationwide civil rights organization. They lobbied actively for the passage of a federal antilynching law (there have been over two hundred attempts within the last century to pass such laws—the most recent introduced by the 116th Congress in 2019).
T. Thomas Fortune, depicted in The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, circa 1891. Fortune was the leading Black economist of his time and the publisher of the New York Age, America’s leading Black newspaper of its time.
Ida’s travels in this period had a profound impact on her worldview and understanding of what was possible. An 1893 trip to the United Kingdom opened her eyes to a more progressive society, strengthened by women coming together to form social clubs that elevated their voices and provided real influence over politics. When she arrived in Chicago for the World’s Fair later that year, a women’s club was formed in Chicago and Ida was selected as chairman. In September it was chartered as the Ida B. Wells Club. In 1896, Ida cofounded the National Association of Colored Women, and Mary Church Terrell was elected as the first president.
More than a decade later, in 1909, Ida became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), along with W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell. The group was formed in response to a Springfield, Illinois, race riot.
But Ida quickly grew frustrated with the organization when she realized that most of its leaders were wealthy white moderates who wanted to “study” the race problem rather than get involved in concrete action and activism. She considered their approach to be too passive and gradually disengaged from their supposed mission. She also was insulted when the organization adopted her antilynching platform without giving her the credit she deserved and then selected the younger W. E. B. Du Bois over her to edit its national Crisis magazine. The selection was made despite Ida’s status as one of the most prolific and well-known journalists of her time.
LIFTING AS WE CLIMB
Founded under the motto “Lifting as We Climb,” the National Association of Colored Women (later renamed the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs) advocated for women’s rights as well as sought to “uplift” and improve the status of all African Americans. During the early years of the organization, the largely educated and middle-class constituency supported temperance, positive images of women through moral purity, and women’s suffrage—issues also pursued by white women’s groups. But they eventually expanded to include many social services targeted to the needs of economically disadvantaged communities, including raising money for kindergartens, libraries, orphanages, and homes for the elderly. The organization also raised awareness around lynching, segregation, and other issues specific to the Black community.
Banner with the motto of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.
Despite Ida’s differences with this early iteration of the NAACP, its work in the years that followed is not to be ignored. Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall, and thousands of other activists have been part of the NAACP in the fight for equal rights in voting, housing, education, health care, and public accommodations.
Medgar Evers.
Thurgood Marshall.
After gradually disengaging from the NAACP over a few years, Ida got involved in the National Equal Rights League (NERL) in 1913 and worked with William Monroe Trotter, the editor of the Boston Guardian. The organization pursued equal rights through the courts, arguing that these institutions were more sympathetic to Black rights than federal or state governments. During World War I, the NERL took up Ida’s signature cause to make lynching a federal crime. It was this effort that brought her and Trotter to President Woodrow Wilson’s White House with a 25,000-signature petition in hand. Wilson was unmoved, and more than a century later Congress has still failed to pass law on this measure.
The concept of unionizing in order to participate in collective bargaining has also been something that Black people have engaged in for over a century. In fact, Ida B. Wells wrote an entire pamphlet titled The Arkansas Race Riot about a group of sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, who tried to form a union in 1919. Their demand for fair compensation for their crop and attempt to organize around it was met with violence—dozens of deaths and extensive destruction of property.
The spirit of rising up against economic injustice still rings true today, from the 2019 teachers’ strikes that took place in several states to sick-outs at Amazon warehouses taking place in 2020. Collective action has a long history.
During the late 1950s to mid-1960s, several organizations were formed in order to fight against racial oppression. These include the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), just to name a few.
William Monroe Trotter.
In 1971, another organization formed that still is functioning today. Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) began with the focus of uniting people in the fight for economic equality for African Americans. Operation PUSH, which was established by Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., expanded into areas of social and political development. Based in Ida’s adopted home of Chicago, the organization merged with the Rainbow Coalition to create the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and has been working on campaigns ranging from antipoverty advocacy to voter registration and enfranchisement for more than forty years.
When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, trusted associate Jesse Jackson Sr. was at his side. Jackson went on to become a civil rights icon in his own right, founding the Rainbow/PUSH social justice organization and becoming a serious contender for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1988 presidential election.
A Chicago-based politician and civil rights leader, Oscar De Priest was the first African American elected to the United States Congress in the twentieth century.
In 1913, Illinois granted women limited suffrage. Ida saw a rare opportunity to fully utilize the force of both of her life’s great causes: combating racism and sexism. She founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and it quickly developed a block system to canvass the neighborhood and register African American women to vote. Their work saw immediate returns in 1914 as Oscar De Priest was elected as the city’s first Black alderman. In 1928, he became the first African American congressman elected to the House of Representatives from a northern state and a national symbol for racial pride.
After fighting for so many years to gain respect and equal rights as citizens of the United States, an African American mov
ement focused on the African diaspora took hold during the second decade of the twentieth century. Marcus Garvey formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914. Its motto, “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!,” and its slogan, “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad!,” reflected its global orientation.
Ida got involved because she truly believed that Black people needed to be self-sufficient. On top of that, Marcus Garvey was not intimidated by her outspokenness. He invited Ida to his meeting in December 1918, and she was selected as a delegate to attend the group’s 1919 Paris Peace Conference in France as a follow-up to the end of World War I. Unfortunately, she and close ally Madam C. J. Walker, who had financially supported antilynching work, were both denied passports to attend.
The controversial Jamaican-born activist, publisher, journalist, and philosopher Marcus Garvey became known for his view that Black Americans could not truly be free until they had achieved full self-sufficiency. Many interpreted this as a separatist ideology. He was also an advocate of Pan-Africanism, the idea that all people of African descent should unite to build power and create distinct spaces of their own for safety and prosperity.
Black activism stretches across the globe. In 1977, Randall Robinson founded TransAfrica Forum, which focused on influencing American foreign policy toward Africa and the Caribbean. Going in the opposite direction, in 2019, Ghana implemented the Year of Return, in remembrance of the four hundred years since Africans were first enslaved in what would become the British colonies that later formed the United States. The country welcomed African Americans back “home,” and many took advantage of that offer in response to their feeling that gaining full equality in the United States was more of a distant dream than a potential reality.
Taking Control of Our Narrative
When Ida wrote about the realities of her friends being lynched, she was countering false narratives about Black people. She took control of the narrative and presented the Black perspective to counter propaganda that framed Black people as biologically or sociologically inferior, dangerous, and violent.
The prevailing narrative at the time was that Black men were sexual predators who targeted white women and therefore deserved to die in a most brutal way. Other victims of lynching had been framed as dangers to the social order, specifically threatening to white people, or robbers. Horrific acts against Black people were normalized over time: torture, collecting their teeth and bones as souvenirs, or even burning them alive for the enjoyment of spectators.
Ida investigated these atrocities with the goal of humanizing their victims. Time and time again, she found that the victims were misidentified scapegoats targeted to be punished for a crime that was committed by someone else or swept up in an act of terror intended to institute social control over unwanted Black communities and neighbors. When Ida wrote her articles in the Free Speech about the lynching of the three grocers, she highlighted how the murders’ implication of violence against any Black person, at any time, kept the surrounding community terrorized and economically disenfranchised for a generation.
Her landmark pamphlets Southern Horrors in 1892 and A Red Record in 1895 outlined in great detail individual cases and statistics to convey the vast scale of America’s lynching problem. Pioneering what is now called “data journalism,” Ida collected this information from a wide variety of sources. She scoured articles by white correspondents and in white-owned newspapers, combining those findings with the statistics she was able to pull from sources that she ultimately democratized by putting them in one place. In A Red Record, she listed the various “crimes” committed that resulted in lynching:
Rape, attempted rape, alleged rape, suspicion of rape, murder, alleged murder, alleged complicity in murder, murderous assault, attempted murder, attempted robbery, arson, incendiarism, alleged stock poisoning, poisoning wells, alleged poisoning wells, burglary, wife beating, self-defense, suspected robbery, assault and battery, insulting whites, malpractice, alleged barn burning, stealing, unknown offense, no offense, race prejudice
And in 1899’s Lynch Law in Georgia, she wrote thus to summarize the murders of over a dozen people:
The real purpose of these savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that in the South he has no rights that the law will enforce. Samuel Hose was burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must not resist.
A year later, in 1900, she wrote Mob Rule in New Orleans, which chronicled the widespread mob violence inflicted on the Black community and the horrible demise of Robert Charles, who was murdered in retaliation for defending himself against a police officer.
Ida B. Wells’s Lynch Law in Georgia, a document used to inform political and organization leaders about the scope of unchecked violence against Black Americans in the late nineteenth century.
THE GREAT MIGRATION
The Great Migration saw six million African Americans leaving the South beginning in the early twentieth century. Many fled the region to escape the kinds of racial violence that Ida spent her life fighting. These journeys echoed the exodus from Memphis that was made following her editorial about the city’s lynchings. The Great Migration resulted in a wider dispersal of Black people across the country, in places ranging from the Northeast to the West Coast, all in search of something approximating safety.
In 1917, she wrote The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century, a chronicle of the horrific violence against an entire Black community. She also outlined oft-overlooked tensions that existed in the American North, where the first waves of the Great Migration tested the Union states’ full belief in their cause.
During World War I, with the shortage of workers in the North, there was an effort to employ recent migrants from the South. This led to labor displacement in certain areas and a fight for equal wages. In East St. Louis, Illinois, this battle between the white community and Black migrants led to the death and destruction of an entire Black community. The National Guard was called into the area, but they proceeded to do nothing to protect the Black residents. Thousands of people were killed, and those that survived were displaced and lost all of their property.
Ida went around in the aftermath of the riot and interviewed people firsthand to learn what had happened to them. She then wrote her pamphlet describing the reality of the situation and met with Illinois governor Frank Lowden in order to make sure that those who created the situation would be held accountable.
By investigating the situation herself and chronicling personal accounts of what happened, Ida was taking control of the narrative. Instead of allowing white people to spin and skew reality to justify their annihilation of Black people, she documented the brutal truth about the violence being inflicted on the Black community. Her influence helped reduce retaliatory sentencing for a few Black people but did little to have white instigators punished for the destruction.
Ida’s project of amassing the details of anti-Black crime nationwide through data journalism continued when she went down to Arkansas in 1920 to investigate the deaths of a slew of Black sharecroppers and the sentencing of twelve to death row. By talking to people herself, she learned that their supposed crime had been an effort to form a labor union and secure better pay for cotton industry workers. One of their meetings had been besieged, and a white person died in the fighting that ensued. The sharecroppers present at the meeting were accused of murder, and hundreds of innocent Black people were murdered in retaliation. Their property was destroyed, and descendants of the victims insist to this day that a great land theft took place.
Ida’s pamphlet The Arkansas Race Riot countered the prevailing narrative at the time—that the whites raiding Black people’s property were simply defending themselves. She told the story from the Black people’s point of view, leaving behind a firsthand account that still survives to this day. Elaine is still struggling to reconcile with that past. An uptick in interest has seen these riots come under renewed scrutiny in recent years, but the history w
as largely buried for nearly a century. And almost nothing has been done yet to bring about justice for the victims or their families who had their lives and wealth stolen.
JOHN H. JOHNSON
In 1942, John H. Johnson was an office clerk at a Chicago life insurance company. He used a $500 loan to start the Johnson Publishing Company, printing the Negro Digest later that year and eventually adding the famed Ebony and Jet magazines. But Johnson Publishing also brought The Ebony Cookbook, by the columnist Freda DeKnight, and The New Ebony Cookbook, by the author Charlotte Lyons, into homes around the country. Through standard news, commentary, or preserving Black food traditions, Johnson Publishing helped chronicle Black life in America.
Many people have followed Ida’s example of taking control of disputed history—most often shaped by the wealthy and powerful—and telling those stories through the lens of Black people’s perspective. From the first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, started in 1827, to Frederick Douglass establishing the North Star newspaper in 1847, to John H. Johnson founding the Johnson Publishing Company in 1942 (the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines), Black people have had to write, create, and own dozens of other media outlets to have their own stories heard.
In more recent history, several Black women have emerged as leaders in creating corrective works. Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times Magazine spearheaded the narrative-altering “1619 Project,” which reexamined the legacy of slavery in the United States and its ongoing impact on the structures of the country. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020, the same year that Ida was awarded her posthumous Special Citation.
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