Browse Items (26 total)

Memphis was rebuilding when Ida B. Wells arrived in the 1880s. After the yellow fever epidemic, the city levied a tax to build drainage systems & fight mosquitoes. The city fathers were white, but a growing Black population garnered some power:…

The belief that “women” would vote as a block about alcohol animated support and opposition re: suffrage. (It wasn’t ever really true.) The liquor industry lobbied against women’s votes at many junctures, though historians debate how much…

Thomas Moss’s murder changed #IdaBWells’ life. Moss was a close friend & fellow business leader, and his death demonstrated that Black self-defense in Memphis was futile. Ida👇with Betty Moss and her children Maurine & Thomas Moss, Jr.,…

If we had to pick just one person to represent the genius and tenacity of American women, it would be #IdaBWells. I only wish it were permanent. A huge new Ida B. Wells mosaic in Union Station will honor the 19th Amendmenthttps://t.co/zt5GQTd9Jx…

When Ida B Wells arrived in Brooklyn, it was still its own city. (The 5 boros consolidated in 1898.) How imposing the massive metropolis must have felt to Ida, forced to flee Memphis in 1892 after publishing “The Truth About Lynching.” Ida’s…

Soon after the US Centennial, teenage Ida B. Wells’ family was decimated by a yellow fever epidemic. Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne virus, fatal 10-15% of the time. Her father James and her mother Lizzie, who had survived slavery, died along with…

I am particularly fond of Josephine St Pierre Ruffin because she was an avid defender of Ida B Wells. Josephine moved among society women both white and Black and wasn’t afraid to disagree with them, especially in defense of unpopular or…

Black women in Louisville, Kentucky. 1887. IdaBWells was a rising newspaper star with a weekly column in the American Baptist. That August her publisher, Wm J Simmons, paid Ida’s way from Memphis for the annual convention of the National Colored…

Within weeks of the murders, so much of Black Memphis had left town that the streetcar ridership collapsed. Men from the City Railway Co came to Ida B Wells' office, seeking to understand why Black riders had disappeared. Quotes from IBW's book…

Janice Ruth opens by reminding that we weren't _given_ the vote, we fought for it. #Suffrage100 #WomensVote #CenturyofStruggle Library of Congress: Shall Not Be Denied - Curator: Janice Ruth #WomensVote100 #TOHOdc pic.twitter.com/cGyNZYraIR — A Tour…