Ida B. Wells
(Courtesy of GPA Photo Archives/Flickr)
Innocence Project
[July 16, 2021]
Today would be Ida B. Wells’ 159th birthday, so we want to take some time to talk about the civil rights icon and share the story of how she risked her life to help save 12 innocent people, and how her fierce commitment to justice inspires us still today.
Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida B. Wells was freed
by the Emancipation Proclamation as a baby. She lost her parents at just
16 years old and moved her family to Memphis, Tennessee for work, where
she eventually became the co-owner of and journalist at the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, covering racial segregation and inequality.
For much of her life, Ida avoided the South because in 1892,
after she wrote about three Black men who were lynched for opening a
grocery store that competed with a white-owned grocery store in Memphis,
her newspaper was destroyed by a white mob. She was threatened with
lynching if she ever came back to Memphis. But about 20 years later, she
returned to the South, determined to continue her investigative
reporting.
In 1919, white mobs murdered an estimated 50 to 200 Black
people in Elaine, Arkansas, over a two-day period of widespread violence
— the event is now known as the Elaine Massacre. But local officials
did the unthinkable. They lied and spread the false narrative that
members of the Black community had planned an insurrection and incited
violence. Dozens of Black people were arrested and twelve Black men —
all of whom were innocent — were sentenced to death by all-white juries
with almost no deliberation.
Ida risked her life to interview the men on death row to expose the injustice and reveal the truth. Thankfully, in part because of her reporting, all 12 men were acquitted with the help of the NAACP, which Ida also co-founded.
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