Ida B Wells Research Paper

Ida B. Wells: A lifetime of Fighting for Absolute Equality
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an anti-lynching crusader, women’s rights advocate, journalist, editor, activist and a speaker. She believed in complete equality among all races despite the fact that her experiences were after the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ida B. Wells is an important figure in history because she fought for equality between whites and blacks almost her entire life, and she accomplished many great things throughout her life that impact us up to this day in our daily lives.
Ida B. Wells, the first of the seven children was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862, six months before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation was born …show more content…
Wells was extremely against lynching. Lynching had been used a lot in the south after the Civil War. The word "Lynching" comes from the late 1700s when a judge named Charles Lynch became known for speedy trials and hangings. The word later evolved to the meaning of mob violence where someone was put to death, mostly by hanging. Wells gained lots of reputation through writing about lynching in various press newspapers. Like many others, Wells thought “that there were usually two reasons why a black man was lynched — because he had raped a white woman or killed a white man” (The Christian Broadcasting Network), but when she was in Natchez, Mississippi, she found out that three of her friends had been lynched. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart who were the owners of People’s Grocery Company. Their only “crime” was that they had been competing with a white grocer, and for this, he and his partners were brutally murdered. Because of this, a group of angry white men attacked the three men. When owners tried to fight back, one of them was shot. The owners of People’s Grocery Company were then arrested and put in jail. In the jail, a lynch mob broke into the jail and took the three men out of town and brutally murdered all three. She then understood that lynching was used to enforce white supremacy and not to perform

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