Ida B. Wells effect on lynching in the South

Ida B. Wells was born in Holy Springs, Mississippi. She was the first born of seven children. Her father was a carpenter and a respected black civic leader in the community, and her mother was a cook named Elizabeth. She lived in a poor African American neighborhood until age sixteen when her mother and father died within 24 hours of each other due to yellow fever. As the oldest child she was now responsible for her siblings. In 1880, she moved to Memphis with the rest of her family. This move started her civil action career. When she arrived in Memphis, the town was different then many southern towns as it was acceptable for blacks and whites to live alongside each other. The city believed it could move past slavery and be a united community. However, organizations such as the KKK broke up that idea with protest and ultimately lynching. Ida B. Wells is most well known for her anti lynching campaign, but within the city of Memphis she has many other heroics. She was one of the first woman investigative journalists or “muckrakers.” She was the first black woman to be the proprietor of a newspaper and established a trolley car boycott before the turn of the century. This event led the trolley car company to go bankrupt and was one of the first successful African American boycotts in history. The boycott went on for a year. The event that turned Wells’s career around was the lynching of one of her best friends, Thomas Moss. In 1892, Moss and other coworkers that worked in neighborhood grocery were lynched after a rival grocer made provocations against them. They were jailed and then broken out by white racists and lynched in a nearby train track. Wells looked into this incident and found out that Moss and his companions were tortured before being killed. Wells helped to make the incident a public issue and after it happened 20% of the black population of Memphis left the city. Moss’s last words were “to go west because there is no justice here.” Although Wells made the public aware of the crime, no arrests were made. After this, Wells was banished from Memphis and went on to New York before going off to England. Wells’s campaign started the anti-lynching movement and with the help of the NAACP it became a national issue. Wells figured out that one of the most effective ways to attack lynching was to use and economic strategy. Her visit to England was not just a coincidence, England was the number one consumer of American cotton and Wells attempted to hurt the southern economy with her protests. During her lifetime, an anti-lynching law was never passed, but her ideas and efforts were an incredible jumpstart to the civil rights movement that started to gain momentum during the 20^th century. Ida B. Wells was an incredible woman and without her efforts, lynching would have never taken center stage as a civil rights issue.