Ida B. Wells

July 16, 1862- March 25, 1931

Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, newspaper co-owner and suffragist who launched the nation's first anti-lynching campaign from Memphis, Tennessee in 1892. Exiled to Brooklyn, it is here, on what was once 395 Gold St., that Wells lived for three years, writing the first study of lynching and inspiring the formation of the first Black Women's National organization. In 1909, she was also one of the original founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

While traveling to Memphis as a 22-year-old school teacher in 1883, Wells refused to give up her seat in the first class ladies' car of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company. Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that banned discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color in theaters, hotels, transports and other public accommodations, local state "Jim Crow" laws made the enforcement of the federal mandates very difficult in the southern states. When Wells was forced out of the ladies' car, she sued the railway company in circuit court and won. Although it would be later overturned in the Tennessee Supreme Court, the suit led a number of newspapers to ask her to write about her experiences, sparking her career as a journalist.

By 1889, Wells was known as the "Princess of the Press" and became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper. Three years later, she began her anti-lynching campaign and transformed into an investigative journalist after the racially-motivated lynching of her friend, Thomas Moss. The co-owner and president of People's Grocery, a cooperative, Moss and two of his partners, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, were attacked in a shootout. A group from a nearby white establishment attacked them in retaliation for the cooperative taking business away from the white establishment. The black men fought back, wounding three white men. Moss, McDowell and Stewart were arrested, then later dragged out of their cells by 75 masked white people and brutally lynched. In response, Wells wrote anti-lynching editorials, led a trolley car boycott and convinced nearly 20 percent of the city's black population to leave Memphis for Oklahoma or to go west.

Forced to leave her home, she settled in Brooklyn. Here, she wrote the first study of lynching for the New York Age, a black newspaper. Her findings proved that lynching was often used as a way to control black people who competed with white people. She was befriended by prominent black women activists, including Dr. Susan McKinney, Sarah Garnet, Victoria Matthews and Maritcha Lyons, who helped her raise money for the pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in all its Phases. Her work became the catalyst for the formation of The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) - the first national black women's organization in the nation.

Taking her anti-lynching campaign to the British Isles in 1893, she gained the support of prominent activists, newspaper editors, religious leaders - and even members of the Royal Family. Upon her return to the United States in 1895, she settled in Chicago where she married Ferdinand Barnett, an editor of the Chicago Defender. Barnett would, in 1896, become the first black assistant state attorney. Taking her husband's name, Ida Wells-Barnett helped to develop numerous African American women's and reform organizations. In 1913, she created the Alpha Suffrage Club (ASC) in Chicago, which aimed to make black women a force in politics. The influence of the ASC was responsible for the election of the first black alderman in Chicago. Wells-Barnett also fought against the incarceration and death sentences of black people, organized a settlement house for black migrants, and allied with white reformers, like Jane Addams, to block school segregation.

Shortly before her death, Wells-Barnett became the first black woman to run for a state Senate seat. While unsuccessful as a candidate, her leadership in politics, women's rights, criminal justice, and especially as an anti-lynching reformer made her one of the most important African American leaders and Brooklynites in our history.

Therefore it is with heartfelt pride, that we now honor her legacy by Co-Naming the location on Gold Street where she lived, here between Willoughby Street and Myrtle Avenue (now 4 Metrotech).