In the latter part of nineteenth century, public theories from Ida B. Wells-Barnett were forceful blows against the mainstream White male ideologies of her time. Ida Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. It was the second year of the Civil War and she was born into a slave family. Her mother, Lizzie Warrenton, was a cook; and her father, James, was a carpenter. Ida's parents believed that schooling was very foremost and after the War, they enrolled their children in Rust College, the local school set up by the Freedmen's Aid society (Hine 1993). Founded in 1866, the society established schools and colleges for recently freed slaves in the South, and it was at Rust College that Ida learned to read and write.
Everything changed for Ida the summer she turned sixteen. Both of her parents and her child brother died during a yellow fever epidemic, and Ida was left to care for her remaining five siblings. She began teaching at a rural school for a month and, a year later, took a position in Memphis, Tennessee, in the city's segregated black schools. Upon arriving in Memphis were teaching salaries were higher than Mississippi, Wells-Barnett found out that even though there was a stronger query for literate individuals to teach, there was a stronger need for considerable ones. Agreeing to Salley (1993), because she needed qualifications in order to teach, she enrolled into Fisk University and gained her qualification in under a year. While returning to Memphis from a teaching practice in New York, she was met with racial provocation for the first time while traveling by railway. Ida was asked by the conductor to move to the segregated car, even though she had paid for a marker in the ladies coach car.
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She refused to leave, and bit the conductor's hand as he forcibly pushed her from the railway car. She sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and was awarded 0 by a local court. Even though she won the case, the headlines read, "Darky Damsel Gets Damages," and the decision was appealed to the Tennessee consummate Court and was reversed (Bolden, 1996). She was ordered to pay court frees in the whole of 0. This incident infuriated Ida and spurred her to investigate and report other incidents of racism. Outraged by the inequality of Black and White schools in Memphis and the unfairness of Jim Crow segregation, Ida became a society activist and began writing articles calling attentiveness to the plight of African Americans. She wrote for a weekly Black newspaper called The Living Way. Wells-Barnett's teaching career ended upon her "dismissal in 1891 for protesting about the conditions in Black schools" (Salley, 1993, p.115). during her time as a school teacher, Wells-Barnett along with other Black teachers was said to have gathered and "shared writing and conference on Friday evening, and produced a newspaper face the week's events and gossip." (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998, p.151). The newspaper was officially established and published and distributed under the name Memphis Free Speech and Headlights throughout the Back society a year after she was dismissed. It has been said that her motivation to become a public analyst was the results of her involvement with the Memphis Free Speech and Headlights both as editor and columnist under the pen name Lola and as part owner. Unfortunately, her printing press was destroyed and she was run out of town by a White mob (Sally, 1993). After getting dismissed from her teaching position, her attentiveness then shifted from schools to the issue that would dominate her work for most of her life; lynching. Lynching was the brutal and lawless killing of Black men and women, often falsely accused of crimes, and normally perpetrated by gigantic violent mobs of Whites.
It was during this Reconstruction Era, after the Civil War, that Black men made immediate civil gains such as voting, holding public office, and owning land. Yet, groups like the Ku Klux Klan (Kkk) advanced at the turn of the century as a response. They made it difficult for Southern Blacks to vote or live in peace, attempting to enunciate White supremacy straight through coercion and violence, together with lynching (Salzman, 2004) . Infuriated by the Memphis lynching in 1892, which complicated a close friend, Ida expressed her grief in an editorial: "The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the White man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are outnumbered and without arms. There is therefore only one thing left we can do; save our money and leave town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, when accused by White persons" (Hine, 1993).
At the same time Wells saw what lynching admittedly was; an excuse to "keep the nigger down" and execute Blacks "who acquired wealth and property." (Duster, 1971) This sparked her investigation into the causes of lynchings. Since Whites could no longer hold Blacks as slaves they found in mob violence a different means of maintaining a principles of "economic, psychological, and sexual exploitation" (Duster, 1971).
In addition, the consequent of her investigation and editorial sparked the Black society to retaliate and encourage all who could to leave, and those who stayed to boycott the city compel Company. Ida saw the success of the boycott, and asserted, "the appeal to the White man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all appeals ever made to his conscience." (Duster, 1971.)
As mentioned earlier, because of Well-Barnett's racial identity, her public principles was well shaped by the events unfolding within her society as experienced by the first generation of African-Americans after Emancipation (Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998). Agreeing to Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley (1998): "This society took as one assumption that White dominance and its together with religious doctrine of White supremacy had to be confronted. American public Darwinists were giving religious doctrine of White intellectual legitimacy to Whites, which at this time meant Anglo-Saxon, imperialism abroad and supremacy at home, providing dogma such as that in James K. Hosmer's"Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom"(p. 159). Wells-Barnett's public principles is thought about to be a radical non-Marxian disagreement principles with a focus on a "pathological interaction in the middle of differences and power in U.S. Society. A health they variously label as repression, domination, suppression, despotism, subordination, subjugation, tyranny, and our American conflict." (Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998, p.161).
Her public principles was also thought about "Black Feminism Sociology," and Agreeing to Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley (1998), there was four presented themes within the theory: one, her object of public diagnosis and of a formula acceptable to the project; two, her model of the public world; three, her principles of domination and four, her alternative to domination. Although those four themes were present in her theory, one could assume that the major theme above the four was the implication of a moral form of resistance against oppression, which is not farfetched seeing that oppression was the major theme in her life.
She used an amazingly straight-forward writing style to prove a very bold conference against lynching, discrediting the excuse of rape and other excuses. Wells used specific examples and sociological theories to disprove the justifications of lynching made by Southerners. Within her pamphlets, Wells portrays the views of African-Americans in the 1890s. Southerners allowed allembracing lynchings while hiding behind the excuse of "defending the honor of its women."(Jones-Royster, 1997).
The payment of rape was used in many cases to lynch innocent African-American men. The victim's innocence was often proved after his death. Wells states that the raping of White women by Negro men is an outright lie. Wells supports her statements with any stories about mutual relationships in the middle of White women and Black men. White men are free to have relationships with colored women, but colored men will receive death for relationships with white women (Duster, 1971). As shown by Wells, the excuses used by Whites to torture and murder African-Americans were false. In no way can these kinds of crimes ever be truly justified because of the victim's crimes. Maybe the most clear reasons these crimes happened are hate and fear. Differences in the middle of groups of habitancy have all the time caused fear of the unknown, which translates into hate. Whites no longer depended on African-American slave labor for their livelihood. When African Americans were slaves they were thought about "property" and "obviously, it was more profitable to sell slaves than to kill them"(Jones-Royster, 1997). With all restraint of "property" and "profit" lifted, Whites during and after Reconstruction were able to freely give into their fear and hate by torturing and killing African-Americans.
Wells' investigations revealed that regardless of either one was poor and jobless or middle-class, educated, and successful, all Blacks were vulnerable to lynching. Black women, too, were victimized by mob violence and terror. Occasionally they were lynched for alleged crimes and insults, but more often these women were left behind as survivors of those lynched. Up to this time, African-Americans had approximately never been free from some form of persecution; the duration of Reconstruction was particularly difficult. With the occurrences of lynching steadily addition with no hope of relenting, their new found leisure ensured slight safety. Eventually, Wells was drawn to Chicago in 1893 to protest the racism of the exclusion of African Americans from the World's Fair. With the help of Frederick Douglass, she distributed 20,000 pamphlets entitled "The suspect Why the Colored American is Not in the Columbian Exposition." On June 27, 1895, she married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, lawyer and editor of the Chicago Conservator, and prolonged to write while raising four children with him (Duster, 1971).
Ida believed firmly in the power of the vote to consequent convert for African-American men and women. She saw enfranchisement as the key to reform and equality, and she integrated the Women's Suffrage movement by marching in the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., with the all White Illinois delegation (Sterling, 1979). She prolonged to write in her later years, and remained one of the most widely syndicated Black columnists in America. She published articles on race issues and injustices that were printed in African-American newspapers nationwide. Toward the end of her life, Ida worked to address the public and political concerns of African-Americans in Chicago. She made an unsuccessful run as an independent candidate for the Illinois State Senate in 1930, and died the next year of the kidney disease uremia (Duster, 1971). Wells-Barnett's affect was profound. When the federal government built the first low-income housing scheme in Chicago's "Black belt" in 1940, it was named in her honor (Sterling, 1979). Her autobiography was published posthumously by her daughter, Alfreda Duster in 1971. In Chicago, she helped to found a whole of Black female and reform organizations, such as the Ida B. Wells Club, the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, and the Chicago Negro Fellowship League. She also served as director of Chicago's Cook County League of Women's Clubs. These clubs were a means for Blacks to join together for withhold and to design to consequent convert (Duster, 1971). At the national level, Wells-Barnett was a central shape in the founding of the National relationship of Colored Women, a descriptive assosication that worked for sufficient child care, job training, and wage equity, as well as against lynching and communication segregation.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett's passion for justice made her a tireless crusader for the rights of African Americans and women. She was a public reformer, a suffragist, a civil rights activist, and a philanthropist. Her writings, regardless of the risk to her protection and life, raised public awareness and involvement to address a whole of public ills resulting in the oppression or murder of African Americans. Her aid of time straight through the creation of myriad clubs and organizations improved the lives of her people. Her work in Chicago, in her final years, focused on providing for the needs of the city's African American population. Modeled after Jane Addams' hamlet House efforts, Wells created urban houses for Black men, where they could live safely and have access to recreational amusements while they searched for employment (Hines, 1993). Ida B. Wells-Barnett is sometimes referred to as the "Mother of the Civil rights movement." She refused to be moved from the Whites only railway car eighty years before the famed Rosa Parks held her seat on an Alabama bus. She encouraged the Black society to take steps to gain political rights, using the same means that would successfully be used much later during the Civil rights movement such as economic and communication boycotts (Hines, 1993).
In similar fashion to Margaret Sanger (of the Birth control movement) and Susan B. Anthony (of the Women's Suffrage movement), Wells-Barnett was a woman who dedicated her entire life to upholding her firm beliefs about public reform. She began by writing about the disparity in schooling and school conditions for Black children and spent much of her life working to abolish lynching straight through public awareness (Hines, 1993). Ida, straight through her example, writings, speaking, and aid in discrete organizations, elevated the voice of women's equality and suffrage. She was a pioneering Black female journalist, and led a very public life in a time when most women, Black or White, did not actively participate in the male political realm. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was linked to many foremost leaders and reformers, male and female, during her lifetime. Among them: Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a public reformer, public employee and the founder of Chicago's Hull House, the most famed of the hamlet houses. Addams and Wells-Barnett successfully worked together to block the segregation of Chicago's public schools (Sterling, 1979). She was also linked to W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) who was a famed Black scholar, sociologist, researcher, writer, and civil rights activist who voiced opposition to the accomodationist views of his contemporary, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915). Washington urged African Americans to focus on self-improvement straight through schooling and economic occasion instead of pressing Whites for political rights.
Ida B. Wells outwardly disagreed with Booker T. Washington's position on industrial schooling and was mortified with his implication that "Blacks were illiterate and immoral, until the coming of Tuskegee." (Hine, 1993) Outraged by his remarks, she thought about his rejection of a college schooling as a "bitter pill." (Hine, 1993). She wrote an report entitled "Booker T. Washington and His Critics" regarding industrial education. "This gospel of work is no new one for the Negro. It is the South's old slavery practice in a new dress." (Hine, 1993).
She felt that focusing only on industrial schooling would limit the opportunities of aspiring young Blacks and she saw Washington as no best than the Whites that justified their actions straight through lynching. Wells-Barnett joined DuBois in his belief that African Americans should militantly query civil rights, and the two worked together on any occasions, most substantially as co-founders of the Naacp. The National relationship for the Advancement of Colored habitancy (Naacp), of which Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a founding member, is still a thriving assosication with thousands of members nationwide (Hines, 1993). The relationship continues to advocate and litigate for civil rights for African Americans.
Two of the customary issues on which Wells-Barnett worked on, anti-lynching and women's suffrage, are now defunct issues. Lynching is a federal crime and women received the vote in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. For this reason, linked groups that arose at the time, such as the Anti-lynching League, the Freedmen's Aid Society, and the National relationship of Colored Women are no longer in existence. Yet, the League of Women Voters was created as an outgrowth of the suffragist movement, and is an assosication that still educates men and women about their responsibilities as voters. Wells-Barnett's gift to the field of sociology is so needful that her work "predates or is contemporaneous with the now canonized contributions of White male thinkers like Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, George Simmel, and George Herbert Mead, as well as the contributions of White female sociologists like Adams, Gilman, Marianne Weber, Webb, and the Chicago Women" (Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998, p.171). Ms. Wells-Barnett is an piquant example of the power of the written word and the estimation to consequent despite the odds. She was an African American woman, the daughter of slaves and thought about the lowest of the low on the historical totem pole in American society and her tenacity, ambition, courage and desire for justice changed history. She was direct and possessed vigor during a time when this was unheard of by a woman, especially a Black woman. A reformer of her time, she believed African-Americans had to design themselves and fight for their independence against White oppression. She roused the White South to bitter defense and began the awakening of the conscience of a nation.
Through her campaign, writings, and agitation she raised crucial questions about the hereafter of Back Americans. Today African-Americans do not rally against oppression like those that came before. Gone are the days when Blacks organized together; today Blacks live in a society that does not want to get complicated as a whole. What this generation fails to perceive is that although the days of Jim Crow have disappeared, it is foremost to perceive that the fight for equality is never over. In the preface of On Lynching: Southern Horrors, A Red report and A Mob Rule in New Orleans (a compilation of her major works), she writes, "The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can lead in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American habitancy to a query for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance" (Wells, 1969).
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