Ida Bell Wells-Barnett

In the Chicago’s Loop there are two streets named Wells. Wells Street is a major north–south street. It is named in honor of William Wells, a United States Army Captain who died in the Battle of Fort Dearborn. And then there is a street named Ida B. Wells Drive. On February 2019, Congress Parkway, which runs east-west, was changed to Ida B. Wells Drive. The first street in Chicago to be named after a black woman.

Who is this Chicagoan named Ida?

Ida Bell Wells [1862-1931] was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in the midst of the U.S. Civil War. She would go on to become a pioneering journalist, anti-lynching activist, suffragist and crusader for justice for women and people of color.

After emancipation, her parents were active in the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which established Rust College, the oldest of the historically Black colleges and universities. Ida began her advanced education at Rust College, however, the death of her parents and a younger brother from a Yellow Fever outbreak in 1878 led her to leave college and take a job as a teacher to support her siblings. 

One of the results of Reconstruction in the South had been integration of all public facilities, including transit. Not all transit companies complied, however. In 1884, while seated in a “ladies car” [for which she had purchased a ticket] on a train bound for Memphis, she was asked to move to a smoking car to accommodate a white woman. She refused. When the conductor started to drag her from the car, she bit him. She was ultimately forcibly removed from the train. She sued the railroad, initially winning her case, but losing it on final appeal in the Tennessee Supreme Court. The story made headlines and helped launch her journalism career. The 25-year-old schoolteacher who sued a railroad company became a sought-after writer.  

In 1889, she became a partner in Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis newspaper with wide circulation among Black and Christian audiences. This launched another career focus: the investigation, exposure and crusade to end lynching in the South. Following the lynching of three friends in Memphis, Wells-Barnett wrote arguably her most important work, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.”

Her fearless criticism of lynching forced her to leave Memphis in 1892 for a less dangerous home base in Chicago. There, she worked alongside Jane Addams to block segregation in Chicago’s public schools and was one of the most seasoned veterans in the fight for women's suffrage. During the landmark 1913 national suffrage parade in Washington, fellow suffragists asked Wells-Barnett not to walk alongside them, fearing alienating white support. But when a mob overtook the parade route and began beating women marchers, Wells-Barnett rejoined her fellow suffragists in the chaos.

While Chicago would be her home for the rest of her life, she remained highly sought-after nationwide as a speaker, mentor and organizer with pro-suffrage, pro-civil rights and anti-lynching organizations. She also became one of the two Black female co-founders of the NAACP — though considered by many to be too radical to hold leadership. She remained active in urban reform in Chicago until her death in 1931.

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