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Great-Granddaughter of Ida B. Wells-Barnett Seeking Monument to
Anti-Lynching Crusader
Pioneer in civil rights, women’s emancipation and social welfare
deserves tribute in Chicago
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
150 years ago on July 16, 1862, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born into the
antebellum slave system in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Wells-Barnett,
who died on March 25, 1931 during the Great Depression, is still
recognized today as one of the early pioneers in the struggle against
lynching and for the rights of African Americans, women and the
working poor.
During late 2011, an effort was undertaken by the great-granddaughter
of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Michelle Duster, to have a sculpture placed
in the location where a housing project named after the anti-lynching
activist once stood on Chicago’s south side. The Ida B. Wells Homes
opened in 1941 and was part of the New Deal era Public Works
Administration construction projects.
The Wells Homes suffered the same fate as other public housing
projects in Chicago and throughout the United States. In the decades
after World War II when larger numbers of African Americans migrated
from the southern states to the northern industrial regions, racist
employment and residential practices led to the systematic segregation
of urban areas in the country.
This de jure and de facto segregation stemmed from the conscious
policies of the ruling class in the U.S. to divide the working class
in order to continue the super-exploitation of the African American
population. Housing projects, although considered progressive for
providing low-income residents when they were first built during the
mid-20th century, later became the dumping-grounds for African
Americans.
The Wells Homes, which consisted of 1,662 units with more than 860
apartments and nearly 800 row houses, deteriorated over the decades.
By the 1990s, the area became a center for drug activity and
gang-related crime and violence.
In an article published by the Associated Press it noted that “In an
infamous 1994 case, two boys, ages 10 and 11, dropped a 5-year-old boy
to his death from a vacant 14-floor apartment. The boys were convicted
on juvenile murder charges.” (Associated Press, December 30, 2011)
This case gained nationwide attention and illustrated the conditions
under which millions of African Americans lived in urban areas. The
Associated Press recalled in the same article that “The same year two
neighborhood teenagers produced an award-winning radio documentary
‘Ghetto-Life 101,’ which aired on National Public Radio.”
Eventually by 2002, the final buildings at the Wells Homes were torn
down. Other housing projects in Chicago such as the Robert Taylor
Homes and Cabrini Green would also be razed in a federal and local
government program purportedly aimed at eliminating blight and
encouraging more humane living conditions for low-income city
dwellers.
Nonetheless, the government policies of eliminating public housing and
refusing to invest adequate sums of public money into building low and
moderate-income communities contributed significantly to the
burgeoning problem of homelessness as well as foreclosures and
evictions. Today the lack of quality and affordable housing is one the
most serious problems facing working people under capitalism.
The Legacy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett
It was not until the emergence of the campaign launched by Ida B.
Wells during the early 1890s that there was widespread attention given
to the genocidal wave of terror inflicted on African Americans
centered in the southern United States, but not necessarily limited to
this region. Wells, whose parents had been enslaved, studied at Shaw
University and eventually became a primary school teacher in
Mississippi as well as in Shelby County, Tennessee.
Her parents died in the yellow fever epidemic of the late 1870s that
struck Mississippi and southwest Tennessee. Soon Wells went to Memphis
to live with the widow of her uncle who had also perished during the
yellow fever epidemic.
It was during her tenure as a school teacher in Woodstock, Tennessee
in 1884 that she became embroiled in a racial segregation lawsuit
after the young educator was forcibly removed from a ladies’ coach
reserved for whites-only on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. After
filing suit in the Circuit Court and winning a favorable judgment
against the railroad company, the firm appealed to the State Supreme
Court of Tennessee, having the lower court’s decision overturned
against Wells.
As a young school teacher in Memphis, Wells participated in the social
life of the African American community during this period. She joined
a lyceum in the city where she read poetry, essays and engaged in
debates on the contemporary issues of the times. After making an
impression on her colleagues at the lyceum, she was asked to take over
the editorship of their literary journal, the Evening Star.
Later she would take partial control of the Free Speech and Headlight
newspaper in Memphis. This was a period of flowering for numerous
African American newspapers which covered issues the white-dominated
corporate publications would never address.
Eventually she would take full control of the newspaper then called
the Free Speech. It was during the course of building her reputation
as a newspaper publisher and editor that a murderous act of mob
violence in Memphis would change the course of the life of Ida B.
Wells. While away from Memphis on newspaper business in Natchez,
Mississippi, word came to Wells on the lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin
McDowell and Henry Stewart who were friends of the Free Speech editor.
According to published newspaper reports of the period, the three
African American men had wounded three whites who had unlawfully
entered a store they owned in order to carry out a robbery. The three
Black men were arrested and placed in the Shelby County jail where
some days later a select group of whites were admitted by the
authorities inside the lock-up in order to remove Moss, McDowell and
Stewart.
The men were forced on to a switch engine rail car which ran in back
of the county jail. The three were taken one mile north of Memphis
city limits and shot to death by the white mob.
Wells was outraged by the killings and wrote fiery editorials
denouncing the authorities in Memphis for allowing such actions to
take place without any attempts at prosecuting the perpetrators. While
away on a speaking tour the offices of the Free Speech were ransacked
and destroyed.
Wells wrote in her autobiography that “I had bought a pistol the first
thing after Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly
retaliation from the lynchers. I felt that one had better die fighting
against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”
(Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice, p. 62)
Wells never returned to Memphis to live after the destruction of her
newspaper offices. She would travel throughout England, Scotland and
Wales in 1893-94 speaking on the atrocities being committed against
African Americans in the U.S. She would continue as a newspaper writer
and public lecturer for the remaining years of her life.
In 1895 she would publish the first serious study on the problem of
racially-motivated mob violence. This book was entitled: “A Red
Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the
United States, 1892-1893-1894.”
Wells would marry Attorney Ferdinand Lee Barnett in 1895, the founder
of the Conservator, the first African American newspaper in Chicago.
She was an early proponent of women’s suffrage and in Chicago, where
she re-located to live the remainder of her life, she worked as a
leader in the African American women’s club movement, the Equal Rights
League and the Negro Fellowship League.
Monument Commissioned in Chicago
The Ida B. Wells Commemorative Committee is attempting to raise
$300,000 in donations to complete the project. Chicago artist Richard
Hunt has been commissioned to create the sculpture, which will combine
an image of Wells along with her writings.
Michelle Duster said of the project that “I want people to remember
Ida B. Wells the woman, not Ida B. Wells the housing community.
Something should be done to remember who she was.” (Associated Press,
December 30, 2011)
Duster went on to comment that “I think who she was as a woman got
lost when it was attached to the housing projects. Her name and what
she did can’t be lost with the housing project.”
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