How one journalist risked her life to hold murderers accountable Christina Greer
In March of 1892,
three Black grocery store owners
in Memphis, Tennessee,
were murdered by a mob of white men.
Lynchings like these were happening
all over the American South,
often without any subsequent legal
investigation
or consequences for the murderers.
But this time,
a young journalist and
friend of the victims
set out to expose the truth
about these killings.
Her reports would shock the nation
and launch her career as an
investigative journalist,
civic leader, and civil rights advocate.
Her name was Ida B. Wells.
Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery
in Holly Springs, Mississippi
on July 16, 1862, several months before
the Emancipation Proclamation
released her and her family.
After losing both parents and a brother
to yellow fever at the age of 16,
she supported her five remaining siblings
by working as a schoolteacher
in Memphis, Tennessee.
During this time,
she began working as a journalist.
Writing under the pen name “Iola,”
by the early 1890s she gained
a reputation
as a clear voice against racial injustice
and become co-owner and editor
of the Memphis Free Speech
and Headlight newspaper.
She had no shortage of material:
in the decades following the Civil War,
Southern whites attempted to reassert
their power
by committing crimes against Black people
including suppressing their votes,
vandalizing their businesses,
and even murdering them.
After the murder of her friends,
Wells launched an investigation
into lynching.
She analyzed specific cases through
newspaper reports and police records,
and interviewed people who had lost
friends and family to lynch mobs.
She risked her life
to get this information.
As a Black person investigating racially
motivated murders,
she enraged many of the same southern
white men involved in lynchings.
Her bravery paid off.
Most whites had claimed and
subsequently reported
that lynchings were responses to criminal
acts by Black people.
But that was not usually the case.
Through her research,
Wells showed that these murders
were actually a deliberate,
brutal tactic to control or punish
black people who competed with whites.
Her friends, for example,
had been lynched when their grocery store
became popular enough to divert business
from a white competitor.
Wells published her findings in 1892.
In response, a white mob destroyed
her newspaper presses.
She was out of town when they struck,
but they threatened to kill her
if she ever returned to Memphis.
So she traveled to New York,
where that same year she re-published
her research in a pamphlet titled
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law
in All Its Phases.
In 1895, after settling in Chicago,
she built on Southern Horrors in a longer
piece called The Red Record.
Her careful documentation of the horrors
of lynching
and impassioned public speeches
drew international attention.
Wells used her newfound fame
to amplify her message.
She traveled to Europe,
where she rallied European outrage against
racial violence in the American South
in hopes that the US government and public
would follow their example.
Back in the US,
she didn’t hesitate to confront powerful
organizations,
fighting the segregationist
policies of the YMCA
and leading a delegation
to the White House
to protest discriminatory
workplace practices.
She did all this while
disenfranchised herself.
Women didn’t win the right to vote
until Wells was in her late 50s.
And even then, the vote was primarily
extended to white women only.
Wells was a key player in the battle
for voting inclusion,
starting a Black women’s
suffrage organization in Chicago.
But in spite of her deep commitment
to women’s rights,
she clashed with white leaders
of the movement.
During a march for women’s
suffrage in Washington D.C.,
she ignored the organizers’ attempt
to placate Southern bigotry
by placing Black women in the back,
and marched up front alongside
the white women.
She also chafed with other
civil rights leaders,
who saw her as a dangerous radical.
She insisted on airing, in full detail,
the atrocities taking place in the South,
while others thought doing so would be
counterproductive
to negotiations with white politicians.
Although she participated in the founding
of the NAACP,
she was soon sidelined
from the organization.
Wells’ unwillingness to compromise any
aspect of her vision of justice
shined a light on the weak points
of the various rights movements,
and ultimately made them stronger—
but also made it difficult for her
to find a place within them.
She was ahead of her time,
waging a tireless struggle
for equality and justice
decades before many had even begun
to imagine it possible.