Ida B. Wells-Barnett House

“Besides Ida B. Wells, other newcomers to Chicago in the 1890s included Robert Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender, Jesse Binga, founder of the first black-owned bank in Chicago, and Reverend Archibald Carey, pastor of Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church (designated a Chicago Landmark in 1977) who, as historian Allan H. Spears noted, "successfully used his congregation as a base for personal political power." What brought Ida B. Wells to Chicago was the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.”

“Meeting her at the National Afro-American Press Convention in 1889 (where Wells was unanimously elected secretary), T. Thomas Fortune, then the foremost black journalist, commented, "She has become famous as one of the few of our women who can handle a goose quill with diamond point as easily as any man in newspaper work.”

“Another innovation on Wells' part was her commitment to the development of political awareness among black women. The Alpha Suffrage Club, founded in 1913, had matured to a point of influence by 1915, the first election in Illinois in which women had a limited vote (for trustees of the University of Illinois) and the one in which the first black alderman, Oscar DePriest, was elected in Chicago.”

“Impressed by the civic organizations of progressive English women, Wells inspired American black women to follow suit. The first civic club for black women, the Women's Era Club, was founded in Boston with the most prominent black woman of that city, Mrs. Josephine St.”

“True to form, Wells went to Oklahoma to see for herself and returned to dispel the myths. As she stated in her autobiography, "For the first time in their lives the white people of Memphis had seen earnest, united action by Negroes which upset economic and business conditions." Retail establishments that depended on black patronage began to fail.”

“Barnett was a graduate of the law school that later became affiliated with Northwestern University and was the founder of the Conservator, the first black newspaper in Chicago.”

“Ida B. Wells: Civil Rights Advocate Motivated to share her personal experience with the legal system, Wells penned an account of the case for The Living Way, a black church weekly.”

“Relocating to New York City, Wells was immediately hired as a columnist for the newspaper New York Age. The paper in a special issue gave front page coverage to her story, and thousands of copies were distributed across the country.”

“Wells, who had changed her wedding date three times in order to fulfill speaking engagements, fully expected to combine marriage and motherhood with her professional responsibilities as editor of the Conservator and president of the Ida B. Wells Club.”

“Once compared in the 1890s to the Biblical prophet Deborah for her crusading leadership, Ida B. Wells, as Linda Peavy notes in Women Who Changed Things: was courageous enough to lead the way moving into the heat of conflict, going where no man or woman had dared to go before, setting an example that would only be followed years after her death when the activists of the '50s and '60s launched the nationwide campaign that culminated in the sweeping civil rights legislation of the 1960s.”