New Biography Explores the Life and Many Legacies of Ida B. Wells

The course of Ida B. Wells’ life was completely altered by a deadly and fast-spreading epidemic.

The future journalist, suffragist, and civil rights leader was just 16 when yellow fever began rapidly spreading throughout Memphis and parts of Mississippi in 1878. The cities affected included Wells’ hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi, which saw its courthouse transformed into a makeshift morgue in order to accommodate the sudden and heartbreaking rise of deaths in the city.

Among those who died were Wells’ parents, James and Elizabeth, and one of her brothers — a tragedy that left Ida and her younger siblings orphans. Though she was only a teen herself, young Ida was determined to keep the family together and left college in order to get a job as a teacher to support the family.

“All of us can now relate to that level of tragedy and the danger of an epidemic and how it can ravage a community,” Wells’ great‐granddaughter Michelle Duster told the Women’s Media Center. “I think that shows the strength and courage of her to go from that kind of a loss to becoming the leader that she did.”

Duster recently released the new biography Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells, in which she examines her great‐grandmother’s groundbreaking activism in civil rights and shaping public policy. Wells began writing about civil rights while still a teacher under the pen name Iola, which she used to publish pieces about Jim Crow segregation. As a journalist, Wells’ revolutionary reporting on the lynchings of Black Americans throughout the country showed how lynching was used as a tool by whites to intimidate Black people through terror and threats. Such violence, Wells found, was also a way to curtail Black communities’ development of wealth and social capital, which white people found threatening.

Wells’ dedication to fighting for racial justice could be seen in every aspect of her career. A founder of the NAACP, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and the Negro Fellowship League, she was devoted to ensuring that Black people would have a seat at the table when it came to creating policy. Duster said that while she was writing Ida B. The Queen, she thought extensively about how to “tell her story in a way that relates to what's happening today, but also puts her life and work into a historical context of the over 400 years of Black people in this country who were fighting in order to be considered and enjoy first-class citizenship.”

But while Ida B. Wells was one of the most well-known Black women in the United States during her lifetime, many Americans are unfamiliar with her life and legacy today. “The reason why I wanted to write Ida B. The Queen was to introduce my great-grandmother Ida B. Wells to a younger generation and other people who might not be as familiar with her life,” Duster said. “I wanted people to be able to celebrate who she was and be inspired by her courage and her bravery.”

Wells was born into slavery on a small farm in Holly Springs in 1862. Her father would become a trustee of a local Black college and the owner of a successful carpentry business after the Civil War. As she researched her book, Duster found that much of Ida’s desire to create change and organize her community came from her parents. “Her father was very much a principled man. He was willing to lose anything in order to stand up for himself,” noted Duster, adding that James Wells refused to vote the way he was instructed to by his former enslaver, a move that led to the loss of his carpentry business. “But then he just kept going, he just rebuilt the business,” said Duster. “I think that by growing up in that environment, my great-grandmother just learned to stand up for herself and not compromise.”

One of the most significant ways Ida B. Wells fought for the full citizenship of Black Americans was her work to end lynchings and other horrific violence they were subject to throughout the country. “Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob,” Wells said in a 1900 speech on the urgent need for an anti-lynching law. “It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an ‘unwritten law’ that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.”

In her role as both a pioneering Black journalist and a pioneering woman journalist, Wells saw her advocacy for her people and her role as a reporter as closely tied together. Her anti-lynching advocacy began when she wrote a series of columns about local killings for the Memphis-based Black newspaper Free Speech and Headlight in the 1890s. Wells would later become a part-owner of the paper, making her a leading Black business owner in her community as well.

In one of Wells’ most famous articles, she attacked the supposed justification of many lynchings, which was the rape of white women by Black men. Wells wrote that in the majority of instances, white women accused their Black partners of rape in order to preserve their reputations after their affairs had been discovered. The rape accusations, Wells wrote in May 1892, exposed “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

“She was using her journalism as a form of activism in order to expose the truth about what was going on,” said Duster. “She was countering the false narratives that were prevalent at that time that justified lynching and justified mass murder and mob violence against the Black community.”

But publishing those columns often led to severe consequences for Wells and her newspaper colleagues, especially from their white neighbors. After she published that May 1892 column on rape allegations, the piece was denounced in white newspapers and the office of the Free Speech and Headlight was destroyed by rioters. Wells moved to Harlem, where she lived for three years while working for the African American newspaper New York Age. She would also publish several pamphlets in the 1890s denouncing lynchings, while also going on speaking tours of both the United States and Great Britain.

In addition to putting her life and livelihood at constant risk, Wells’ activism also drew the ire of both white suffragists, many of whom were willing to sacrifice voting rights for Black Americans in Southern states in order to get voting rights for white women, and law enforcement, who saw Wells’ work and its focus on the violence Black people faced by those in authority as a threat.

While Wells had written in her autobiography that she was visited by the FBI after she created buttons to memorialize a group of Black soldiers who were court-martialed and hanged in 1917 during World War I, it wasn’t until Duster began researching her book that she discovered that her great-grandmother had an FBI file.

“It was really interesting actually seeing the FBI files and how she was described as a ‘dangerous Negro agitator,’” recalled Duster. “It really struck me because it showed the extent of the power that she had during her lifetime.”

Duster notes generations of her family have been advocating to properly memorialize Ida B. Wells’ legacy since her death in 1931. The city of Chicago renamed part of Congress Parkway after Wells in 2018, and another effort is underway to commemorate her with a monument in Bronzeville, the Chicago neighborhood in which she lived for 30 years. The New York Times, which failed to run an obituary for Wells after her death, also wrote an official death notice for her in 2018 as part of their “Overlooked No More” series dedicated to historical figures that they originally had neglected.

Ultimately, Duster says she hopes that those discovering Wells’ work for the first time will think about how they can continue her fight for human rights for all people today. “My great-grandmother spent the great majority of her life fighting to help people understand what was going on regarding lynching because she believed Black people in this country are first-class citizens, and that we need to be protected by the law and have all the same opportunities as everybody else in this country,” said Duster. “My hope with this book, Ida B. The Queen, is that people will take those lessons and continue fighting for justice and equality.”