While teaching school in Memphis, Tennessee, in the early 1890s, she wrote about the inferior education that young African Americans were receiving in the segregated schools. Her writings so irritated the school board that her contract was not renewed. She lost her teaching job, but people did become aware of the seriousness of the problem.
She became an irritant again the next year when three friends of hers were taken from a Memphis jail and lynched on a trumped up charge. Their real crime, she wrote, was that they dared to open a grocery store that put them in direct competition with white merchants. Her articles about the crime led to the destruction of her newspaper. Threats on her life caused her to leave Memphis and go to New York.
Those threats would not quiet Ida. Instead, she became an investigative reporter searching for the truth behind the lynching of black men. Her articles and editorials about the lynchings brought more threats, but also international recognition. In 1898 she was a part of a delegation who met with President William McKinley to discuss the problem.
Her interests in women’s rights put her in the company of Susan B. Anthony. When Ida decided to marry a widowed lawyer with two children, Anthony tried to stop her feeling it might prevent her from continuing her work in behalf of equal rights.
Ida saw it differently. If a man could be a spouse, parent, job holder,and activist, then, so could a woman. She continued her work until her death in 1931. She even found time to be a part of the group that founded the NAACP.
Her work was on the verge of being forgotten until recently. But people who irritate the conscience and remind people of what is right cannot be forgotten forever. Today Ida B. Wells Barnett is remembered in the town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, where she was born a slave. The post office and an art gallery both bear her name., If she took a mind to, Ida B. Wells could be just plain irritating and that’s just what she wanted to do. With her writings, she wanted to irritate the consciences of others to the injustices that were going on around them.
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