via Wikimedia
In 1862, Ida B. Wells was born into slavery - six months before the Emancipation Proclamation.
Her parents, with their newfound freedom, actively fought the racial prejudice that emancipation couldn’t extinguish. Wells would soon follow in their footsteps.
Working as a teacher in 1884, Wells encountered a life-altering experience that would change the trajectory of her career forever:
Despite possessing a first-class ticket, crew members aboard a train attempted to force Wells into the segregated “Black car.” Decades before Rosa uttered, “No,” Wells refused to give up her seat.
This incident led to Wells’ journalistic reporting on the racial and political inequities of the day. But another horror would catapult Wells into her most important work yet.
The murder and lynching of three Black grocers by a mob of resentful whites was an all-too-familiar tragedy in 1892. But the People’s Grocery lynchings touched Ida B. Wells personally - her close friend, Thomas Moss, was one of the victims.
Incensed by his and countless other Black people’s deaths by lynching, Wells channeled her rage towards publishing her groundbreaking pamphlet, “Southern Horrors,” which launched her international anti-lynching crusade and changed America forever.
When tragedy struck, Ida B. Wells was there to report, inform, and fight for justice.
The next time anti-Blackness strikes, take a page from this civil rights pioneer’s book. Channel your rage and fight for justice.