Ida B. Wells was born a slave in 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. About six months after Ida's birth, she and her family, as well as the rest of the slaves of the Confederate states, were decreed free by the Union thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation.
Her father was active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction, and was involved in starting what is now Rust College. It was here that Ida received her early schooling. Unfortunately, tragedy struck her family when she was only 16. Both parents and one of her sibling died in a yellow fever outbreak, leaving Wells to care for her other siblings.ever resourceful, she convinced a nearby country school adminstrator that she was 18, and landed a job as a teacher.
Later on, Ida B. Wells attened Fisk College, where she wrote about issues of race and politics. Some of her articles were published, and her career as a journalist began. While working as a teacher in a segregated public school in Memphis, she became a vocal critic of the condition of blacks only schools.
She became an anti-lynching activist when three African American men opened a grocery store, taking business away from a white-owned store in the neighborhood. The African American men were arrested while trying to guard their store against attack and sent to jail. While in jail, a lynch mob took them from their cells and murdered them. Wells wrote an editorial that incensed some of the city's whites, and she was warned that if she ever returned to Memphis, she would be killed. She staid up north, and wrote an in-depth report on lynching in America for the New York Age, and African American newspaper run by former slave T. Thomas Fortune.
Wells went on to become a co-founder of NAACP. She created the first African American kindergarten in her community and fought for women's suffrage. In 1930 she made an unsuccessful bid for the Illinois state senate.
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