BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : IDA B. WELLS - JOURNALIST, NEWSPAPER EDITOR SUFFRAGIST AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST : GOES INTO THE " HALL OF BLACK GENIUS "

Ida B. Wells - Barnett  - born 16th July 1862 and died March 25th 1931, was an African American Journalist, Newspaper Editor, Suffragist and with a husband, News Paper Owner Ferdinand L. Barnett and early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She documented Lynching in the United States showing how it was often a way of control or punishing blacks who competed with whites. She was active in the woman rights and the women suffrage movement establishing several notable women organization. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician and traveled internationally on lecture tours. Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Spring, Mississippi in 1862 just before President Abraham Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation.  Her father was James Wells and her mother was Elizabeth "Lizzi" Warrintion Wells. Both parents were enslaved until the freed under the Proclamation.

Ida father was a master carpenter and a "Race Man"  who worked for the advancement of blacks. Her parents died when she was sixteen from the malaria fever that swept the southern states and Ida dropped out of Shaw University to take up a teaching job at a black elementary school to help keep all her six sibling together. The school were segregated and white teachers were paid $80 a month and black teachers $30 a month. Ida bitterly resented this and other discrimination by the state and this made her more interested in politics of race and improving the education of black. She went to Memphis with three of her siblings were she got a teaching job. Her experience of racism in the hands of the state, local bus companies and street level racist would see this Lady fight for equality all her life.