Ida B Wells

Ida Bell Wells Barnett is best known as an anti-lynching crusader, civil rights activist and suffragist. Born into slavery in Mississippi on July 16, 1862, Ida Bell Wells worked as a teacher starting from age 14 before attending Fisk University in Nashville. After refusing to cooperate with segregationist railroad policy, Wells sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in a case that went to the Supreme Court. Following the case and her resulting dismissal from her teaching job, Wells began her prolific career in journalism, writing fearlessly in opposition to racial injustice generally and lynching in particular. In 1895 Wells married Chicago lawyer and editor of The Chicago Conservator Ferdinand L. Barnett. That same year, Wells-Barnett published one of her most significant works, “A Red Record,” which exposed the horrors of lynching to a wider audience. Ida Bell Wells Barnett was an important figure in the founding of the Niagara movement and the NAACP.

Wells also played an important role in Hyde Park and Chicago History during the Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair. Anti black practices during the time almost erased the history of slavery and the lives of Black Americans. Ida B Wells took a stand by publishing: The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Standing in front of the Haitian building at the fair, she and fellow activists distributed thousands of booklets each day to protest this injustice and systemic erasure.

Ida B Wells Barnett and her husband Ferdinand L. Barnett are buried in Oak Woods Cemetery. To learn more about Oak Woods and find the location of their graves visits our Oak Woods Cemetery Project Page.