Author: Claire Farrington, Civic Engagement Intern

“With no sacredness of the ballot, there can be no sacredness of human life itself.”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

Many of us are familiar with Ida B. Wells-Barnett because of her revolutionary work on lynchings, especially Southern Horrors (1892), which revealed that lynchings prevented upward mobility and were a form of economic retaliation against Black people. However, fewer of us may know that Wells-Barnett was also a dedicated suffragist.

Born a slave, Wells-Barnett knew very well that Black women seeking suffrage were fighting a battle against both sexism and racism. She refused to be pushed aside by white women fighting for white women’s suffrage alone. Wells-Barnett’s public activism began in 1884 when she was forcibly removed from a train because she refused to give up her seat. In response, Wells-Barnett sued the train company and won. Sadly, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned this decision in 1887.

In 1896, Wells-Barnett became a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, and in 1909, she co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Interestingly, her name did not appear on the official list of co-founders. Many years later, Wells-Barnett severed all ties with the NAACP as she thought they were failing to take a strong enough stance against issues of racism.

In 1913, Wells-Barnett co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club. That same year, she participated in the first Suffragist parade, organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association and held in Washington D.C. Immediately before the parade began, Wells-Barnett and other Black women were asked to move to the back of the group. Wells-Barnett disobeyed and remained steadfast in her position. She was the only Black woman in the Illinois delegation.

Many years later, in 1930, Wells-Barnett ran for Senate and lost. During her life, she was also a teacher, a newspaper editor, and a newspaper article writer for significant newspapers like the New York Age. Wells-Barnett further became the first female African American probation officer in Chicago, established the first Black kindergarten in Chicago, and founded the Negro Fellowship League.

In 2020, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was awarded the Posthumous Pulitzer Prize in the Special Citations and Awards category for her investigative journalism and reporting on lynchings. Thank you, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for your enduring contributions and tireless efforts to achieve racial equality and women’s suffrage.