Biography
Ida B. Wells: Feminist Activist
00:00 - 05:56
This video unpacks the life of Ida B. Wells and her role in activism against racism. This is highlighted specifically in the case of three black men being lynched.
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Video Transcript
0:02
I'll be Wells was born in 1862
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in the middle of the Civil War
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in Holly Springs Mississippi which was actually contested territory and Kim
0:11
being claimed by the Confederates and then by the union
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she lived free really
0:16
tumultuous times
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she was also
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orphaned an early age her parents were killed in the yellow fever epidemic of the 1870s that
0:26
swept through the Mississippi Valley
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and she was left at 16 years old to take care of her five surviving brothers and sisters
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after her parents passed
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their friends were going to take the children and split them up and I
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did not want this to happen
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she became a teacher essentially to support her brothers and sisters and keep the family together she's only 16 but she had
0:54
basic education which was enough in those days to teach
0:58
at a rural Country School
1:00
where she'd educate black children
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she had a lot of responsibility an early age and she managed to somehow rise to it
1:10
well seems to have been a sort of natural feminist from the beginning she
1:15
never really seemed to see
1:16
any reason why she couldn't do everything a man could do
1:20
and the fact that she had to
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support her brothers and sisters from an early age may have sort of shaped her
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idea of herself as someone who was you know sort of head of a family
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by the early 1880s I had a head
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to Memphis and she was still teaching and Rural schools so she was traveling back and forth to work on what was that a newfangled saying which was a trade
1:44
one day she took her seat and what was then known as the lady's car was
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the second car on the train they typically only had two and they were reserved for women they were non-smoking they were sometimes more comfortable
1:56
and Wells had written in them previously but this particular day
2:01
she was told that she could not sit in
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in it
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she
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insisted that she could she had bought a ticket for that car and she ended up having an enormous fight with a conductor he tried to pull her out physically
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she bit him
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they cast her out she
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got a ride home in a wagon and immediately sued the railroad
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hirsute wound through the courts
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for several years
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in the lower Court's she won the judge said that she was a respectable-looking
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person she
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in fact a lady so there's no reason why she shouldn't ride in the lady's car but when it got to the
2:40
state supreme court she lost
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Tennessee was in the process of implementing segregation during this time
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which really took shape after the Civil War so she couldn't win
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she was devastated by not winning but
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it turned her into an activist that was sort of the beginning of her activism
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and it was also the beginning of her being a journalist because she wrote up her experience
3:03
in a
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church newspaper called The Living way
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to be Wells was not alone there were few black women journalists during her time
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but she was distinctive in the fact that she wrote about a variety of subjects she didn't just write for the woman's page she was
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political Independence
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she weighed in on things like disenfranchisement and segregation and so forth
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she
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rapidly became really the most prominent black female journalist
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she actually
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wrote during her early years under the pen name Iola
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which she chose as a sort of countrified name to evoke her Rural upbringings and speak to the fact that she wanted to speak to the common people she wanted
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to speak to everyone
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she was known for being
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very outspoken and live
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Lee
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she got this nickname Iola princess of the press
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Wells became a leader in anti-lynching
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and essentially almost invented it I would say
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because of a sort of terrible personal experience she had
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was a terrible lynching in Memphis in which three black men were killed and one of them was
4:12
a man named Thomas Moss a local businessman as well as the local mailman who was a friend of Wells along with his wife
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Wells as out of town with this happens and she comes back to find black people fleeing Memphis
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her friend Thomas
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dead along with two other men
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she had been thinking that you know she would live in the south and
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she would work to make it a better place
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but when she looked at someone like Thomas Moss who had been
4:39
devout churchgoer taught Sunday school
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invested in his own business done everything that the sort of world said that blacks needed to do
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to get ahead and then had ended up being
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lynched
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she began to question whether you could really do anything in the south
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she published an editorial that went essentially too far in saying all this
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and a white mob stormed the office of the free speech and destroyed the printing press
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Wells
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was fortunate she wasn't there
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but the mob left a note
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basically
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telling whoever was printing the newspaper that they should leave town
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and putting a death threat
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she ended up in New York where she was hired by T Thomas Fortune the publisher of the New York aged and led what was
5:26
basically
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sort of the first anti-lynching campaign where she
5:31
identified lynching as a crime and was trying to push
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the government
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and social reform is to take action about it
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and to lynching would become
5:42
a major commitment for the NAACP the National Association for the advancement of colored people
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and it would also be
5:50
a major commitment of
5:52
black women's clubs and other civil rights organizations
