In today’s moment in Women's History, we will highlight Ida B. Wells, born July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and who passed on March 25, 1931, in Chicago.
This former teacher turned sharp-eyed journalist refused to look away from the horror of lynching. After a mob killed three of her close friends in Memphis in 1892, she started digging, published the explosive pamphlet Southern Horrors, and took her findings on lecture tours across America and England.
She helped birth the NAACP, attending the founding conference in 1909. While Wells is widely recognized today (including by the NAACP) as a founder for her anti-lynching work and contributions, her name was controversially omitted from some early official "Founding Forty" lists (likely due to tensions over leadership and her outspoken style). She later distanced herself from the group, feeling it wasn't aggressive enough on action.
She was also a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896 alongside trailblazers like Mary Church Terrell (its first president), Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin…creating a powerful platform for Black women to uplift their communities through education, moral reform, and the fight against injustice.
She marched for women’s suffrage and kept fighting even after threats forced her out of the South…all while building a home and raising four kids with her husband.
Her courage still hits hard.
Fun Fact: In 1884…nearly 70 years before Rosa Parks; she sued a railroad company after being forcibly removed from a first-class train car she’d paid for, simply because she refused to move to the segregated "smoking" section. She won the case in circuit court and was awarded $500 in damages (a hefty sum back then), though the victory was later overturned on appeal. That bold stand marked one of her earliest public fights against injustice and foreshadowed the fearless activist she’d become.
Remember…Education is freedom of mind and never should be colorblind.
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