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Ida B Wells
Ida B Wells was an investigative journalist, educator and early leader of the civil rights movement. She was born into slavery in 1862, among the tobacco fields of Mississippi, but was freed the same year by the Emancipation Proclamation. Her parents gazed at their tiny daughter, shiny with the promise of a new life, yet they both died of Yellow Fever when she was only 16. Relatives wanted to send Ida and her siblings away to separate foster homes, but she refused, choosing to take on work as an elementary school teacher, chalking blackboards and marking exercise books to support her brothers and sisters.
In 1883 she moved to muggy, smoky Memphis, in search of a higher wage. She was enraged by the racial inequality she found there and refused to give up her seat in the 1st class ladies’ carriage on a packed train, 71 years before Rosa Parks’ historic refusal to leave her bus seat for a white man in Montgomery. She was dragged out of the carriage by the conductor, in front of a gasping crowd but later sued the railroad for their actions and won the case. Buoyed by her success and furious at the injustice she faced every day, she founded the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, where she reported on lynching, racial segregation and inequality, until a white mob ransacked her office in 1892, forcing her to leave for New York, where she started working for prominent Black newspaper, the New York Age.
She was outspoken in her beliefs as a Black woman activist and faced regular disapproval from leaders of the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. At 24, she wrote, ‘I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge.’ She travelled across the world, standing proudly in front of large crowds in lecture halls, theatres, classrooms and streets, speaking the truth about her lived experiences and the lives of those around her.
A community of Quaker women who were active in the anti-racism movement invited her to speak in the UK, which brought her to Sunderland. She befriended Celestine Edwards, a well-known anti-racist campaigner living in the city and took over his magazine, Fraternity, after his death. She spoke frequently in Newcastle about the unlawful lynchings of innocent black men and black women who were publicly hanged for crimes they did not commit. She famously said, ‘The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them’ and she devoted her life to exposing the truth about the way black people were treated, in an attempt to forge a better world.