[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i41XlRQ5Xc&rel=0]
EZE JACKSON: What’s up y’all. I’m Eze Jackson for the Real News Network.
In celebration of Women’s History Month, we highlight journalist, activist, and suffragist Ida B. Wells. As a black woman in the late 19th and early 20th century, Ida B. Wells faced adversity and a full spectrum of American inequities. Born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells became the most prominent black woman journalist of her time.
She’s considered one of the first true investigative reporters, investigating over 200 lynchings. She was inspired to do that work after her good friend Thomas Moss, Will Stewart, and Calvin McDowell, were lynched in 1892. The three men owned People’s Grocery Store, a black-owned grocery store in a mixed neighborhood in Memphis called the Curve. People’s Grocery began to compete with the white grocery store in the neighborhood. One night, while guarding the grocery store from an angry white mob attack led by William Barrett, the white store owner, Moss, Stewart, and McDowell shot some of the white men in self defense. They were arrested, but never tried for their crime. A mob kidnapped them from the jail and lynched them.
The incident ignited Wells’ anti-lynching campaign. She quickly noticed that while the press reported the lynchings as justice for committing crimes like rape, theft, and assault against white people, the truth was often that these men did no such thing, and many were upstanding members of society who may have stood up for themselves, or posed a threat to white men in some way. In Wells’ day, much like today, some white suffragists and feminists didn’t see the point in raising black women’s issues as a part of the women’s movement. Many of the early white feminists supported segregation and Jim Crow laws, so Ida B. Wells stood in the middle of quite a fight for equality as a black woman.
Wells once said, “One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.” Since her death in 1931, Ida B. Wells remains one of the strongest voices in the history of journalism. Her work brought worldwide attention to the United States’ violent history of torture, murder, and discrimination. We salute you and thank you, Ida B. Wells.