Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Ida Bell Wells was a noted activist for the civil rights of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She made headlines after her 1884 lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad. Wells made great strides in her work for desegregation, anti-lynching, and voting rights throughout her life. Wells married activist Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895 and both campaigned for social justice in their hometown of Chicago, Illinois, as well as nationally and internationally.

She participated in the founding or was a member of the National Association of Colored Women, the National Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In 1884, the journalist Ida B. Wells filed a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad after being forcibly removed from the ladies’ train car because she was black. Wells, who had been traveling from Memphis to the nearby town of Woodstock, won the trial in Shelby County but lost the appeal at the Tennessee Supreme Court. After this, she focused on advocating for the civil rights of African Americans—including suffrage.

In 1913, at the suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., she famously refused to march in the back with the other African American women. Instead, she marched at the front of the Illinois suffrage delega- tion. Her gumption distinguished her. Among the most famous black authors of the late nineteenth ...