Tennessee should honor Ida B. Wells with state Capitol statue
If you’re good at what you do in life, somebody will surely remember you.
That’s the case with Ida B. Wells, who wasn’t just good at what she did, she was great. And more than that, Ida B. Wells had to be one of the most courageous people in American history.
Wells, a journalist and an educator, died in 1931, however, on May 4, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for her crusade against lynching and the unlawful treatment of black people in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The Pulitzer Prize is the highest award given in print journalism.
Wells gave voice to a people who had none
“If you don’t have a voice, you are most effectively censored,” Samuel Adams, then a journalism professor at the University of Kansas and who oversaw the Ida B. Wells Award for the National Association of Black Journalists, told me in December 1991.
“Ida Wells sought to give us a voice by using the First Amendment to speak out against lynching and other injustices,” added Adams, who is now deceased. She certainly did.
Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, Ida B. Wells was a firm believer in free expression. Twenty-eight years after her birth, in 1890, Wells was fired from her job as a Memphis public schoolteacher for writing a newspaper article protesting against “the few and utterly inadequate buildings” for black children.
In the article, written in the Free Speech and Headlight of Memphis, which she partly owned and served as
editor, Wells also spoke out about the poor teachers assigned to teach black children.
Two years later, Wells’ newspaper office and her press were destroyed after she wrote several articles and editorials about the lynching of three black men who operated a grocery store in Memphis.
“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,” Wells said in one of her editorials. “There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are outnumbered and without arms...”
A warning and an attack
Wells, who had attended Fisk University, was in Jersey City, New Jersey, when told of the attack on her newspaper office.
According to her autobiography, Wells said a newspaper article she had been given by T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, said anyone trying to publish the paper again would be punished with death.
“Although I had been warned repeatedly by my own people that something would happen if I did not cease harping on the lynching three months before, I had expected that happening to come when I was at home,” Wells said in her autobiography. “I had bought a pistol the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers. I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked.”
Wells never returned to Memphis before her death, but she continued to speak out and write about injustices in the South and elsewhere.