Hi, I’m Jackie Strohm, the Prevention & Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Welcome to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly Black women, we are sharing a series of shorter episodes so you can learn all about the people and events that contributed to our movement During today’s episode we’re going to learn about Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement, most known for her organizing of anti-lynching campaigns. As a warning, this episode contains descriptions of racial and sexual violence. Please take care of yourself while listening. Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16th, 1862. She was born into slavery during the Civil War, but a short while later she and her family were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. After the war, her parents became politically active in Reconstruction Era politics, started a successful carpentry business, and her mother became known as a famous cook. Ida was the oldest of eight children. In September 1878, when she was just 16, she lost both her parents and her infant brother to yellow fever. Friends and relatives wanted to separate her siblings and send them to foster homes; Instead, Ida found work as a teacher in a Black elementary school, and enlisted help from her grandmother and other friends and relatives to look after her siblings. In 1883, Ida and her two youngest sisters moved to Memphis, TN. She worked at the local school, and on summer vacations attended Fisk University and Lemoyne-Owen College, both historically black colleges. In May 1884, she filed a lawsuit against a train car company in Memphis for unfair treatment. A train conductor ordered her to give up her seat in the first-class ladies car and move to the smoking car, which was already crowded with passengers -- even though she had a ticket. When she refused, the conductor and two men dragged her off the train. She wrote about her treatment on the train in a newspaper article for The Living Way. She hired a Black lawyer to sue the railroad, and when he was paid off by the railroad company, she hired a white attorney. In December of the same year, she won her case, though the ruling was eventually overturned in federal court. While Wells continued to teach elementary school, she began writing weekly articles, and used the pen name Iola, in which she attacked racist Jim Crow policies. In 1889, she became editor and co-owner of The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, a Black-owned newspaper established by the Reverend Taylor Nightingale and based at the Beale Street Baptist Church. Two years later, she was fired from her teaching position due to her articles that criticized conditions of Black schools in the region - so she focused her energy on writing more articles that covered incidents of racial segregation and inequality. After a white mob lynched one of her friends, she began investigating lynching cases. Throughout the 1890s, Wells traveled the South to collect stories and document the lynching and imprisonment of Black men accused of raping white women. She did this through her pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch the Law in all its Phases. After an editorial she published in May 1892, a white mob destroyed the Free Speech office. Threats continued, and eventually she was forced to move to Chicago. In 1895, she married Chicago attorney, journalist, and civil rights activist Ferdinand Lee Barnett, who had founded The Chicago Conservator, the first Black newspaper in the city. After their marriage, Wells became the editor. Wells and Barnett had four children together, and she continued to work after the birth of their first child, traveling around the country. At the time she said, “I honestly believe I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches.” In 1895 she also published The Red Record, a 100-page pamphlet with more detail that described lynching in the US since the Empancipation Proclamation in 1863. In The Red Record, she connected lynching to sexual violence, showing how the myth of the Black man’s lust for white women led to murder of Black men. Wells also fought to combat existing rape laws that did not protect black women, but did justify the lynching of black menwhen they were accused of raping white women. At that time, rape was a capital offense only when a Black man raped a white woman, yet the rape of a Black woman was not even considered a crime. She’s quoted as saying, “White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.” The Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4084 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. 25 percent of these lynchings were based on accusations of sexual assault. The mere accusation of rape, even without an identification by the alleged victim, often aroused a mob and resulted in lynching. From 1880 to 1930, at least 130 black women were murdered by lynch mobs. When most of us imagine lynching, we rarely think of a black woman, quote, “stripped naked and hung.” Wells, however, was well aware that black women were victims of Southern mob violence and also targets of rape by white men. Wells was also an advocate of the women’s movement, and in 1896 became a founder of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club, which was created to address issues dealing with civil rights and women’s suffrage. She openly confronted white women in the suffrage movement who ignored lynching, and because of this, she was often ridiculed and ostracized by women’s suffrage organizations in the US. In 1909, Wells was in Niagara Falls for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP. However, her name was excluded from the original list of founders. In his autobiography, W.E.B Du Bois implied that Wells chose not to be included; but in Wells’ autobiography, she stated that Du Bois deliberately excluded her from the list. Wells-Barnett continued her anti-lynching campaign and organizing in Chicago despite being labeled a dangerous “race agitator” and being placed under surveillance by the US government. She began writing her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, in 1928, but did not finish. She passed away due to kidney failure on March 25, 1931 at the age of 68. Her daughter edited and published the autobiography in 1970. In 2020, Wells-Barnett was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize special citation for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching. Ida B. Wells-Barnett said, “If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.” While most Americans may remember Wells solely as a campaigner against lynching, we recognize and honor her work for women’s rights, and making the connection between economic exploitation, lynching and sexual violence. Thanks for listening to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To learn more about Ida B. Wells-Barnett, check out the resources shared in the episode description. To learn more about the history of the anti-sexual violence movement, check out PCAR’s free History and Philosphy eLearning course at campus.nsvrc.org.