Ida B. Wells | ClassicMotivation.com

Before the Work

Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation. She was the eldest of eight children. Both her parents and one of her siblings died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1878 when Ida was sixteen. She told the doctor treating her family that her parents were still alive, dressed herself in her mother's clothes, and convinced the community that she was capable of keeping the family together. She got a teaching job, passed for older than she was, and raised her siblings.

She moved to Memphis in 1883, continued teaching, and began writing articles for Black newspapers under the pen name Iola. In 1892 three of her close friends — successful Black grocers — were lynched by a white mob that resented their competition with white businesses. The lynching transformed her. She began a systematic investigation of lynching in the American South, reviewing hundreds of cases and publishing the results in two pamphlets — Southern Horrors and A Red Record — that demolished the justification commonly offered for lynching (that it was a response to the rape of white women) by documenting that the overwhelming majority of lynching victims had been accused of no sexual offense at all but were targeted for economic or political reasons.

The publication of Southern Horrors in 1892 provoked a white mob to destroy her newspaper office and threaten her life. She left Memphis and never returned. She continued her anti-lynching campaign from New York and then Chicago for the next forty years, helped co-found the NAACP, and was never recognized with the honor her work deserved during her lifetime.

The Philosophy

Ida B. Wells's philosophy is the philosophy of witness — the insistence that injustice, once documented accurately and publicly, cannot indefinitely maintain the justifications that sustain it. Her investigation of lynching was not primarily an emotional appeal. It was a systematic empirical refutation: she examined the evidence, categorized the cases, identified the actual causes, and published the results. The facts, she believed, would speak.

She was not naive about power — she had experienced enough of it to know that facts do not automatically produce justice. But she understood that the first requirement of any campaign for justice is accurate knowledge of what is actually happening, and that the suppression of accurate knowledge is itself a form of oppression. The lynching of Black Americans was being justified by a narrative. She replaced the narrative with the facts. The facts were more disturbing than any accusation.

Her account of the relationship between economic power and racial violence — her demonstration that the three Memphis grocers were killed not for any crime but for the crime of economic success in competition with white businesses — is one of the earliest and most precise analyses of the relationship between racial violence and economic interest in American history. This connection between racism and economic exploitation runs through Du Bois, through Wright, and into the contemporary analysis of structural racism. Wells documented it first.