Introducing Ida B. Wells

Introducing Ida B. Wells

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 three of their children.

To keep her surviving siblings together, Ida “let down her skirts, put up her hair, and inflated her age to 18” to get a job teaching school. Six years later she moved the family 50 miles from small-town Mississippi to Memphis, where her career as a journalist and leader began.

Ida B. Wells is not just a towering figure in American history, she’s a link between the 1st gen of women’s suffrage & the next. Her activism began before the rip in the white women’s movement had mended. Her influence was felt through the ratification of the 19th A. and beyond.

I am grateful to @MichelleDuster for permission to use her great-grandmother’s image as an avatar of this project, and excited to dig in to more of #IdaBWells story in the days ahead. #Suffrage100 #BlackSuffragists 

Daily Suffragist

18/11/2019