There is a new monument for civil rights activist and journalist, Ida B. Wells, in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. The city unveiled its tribute to her on Wednesday, June 30, 2021. The commemoration was created by sculptor Richard Hunt and was fittingly called “The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument.” 
This beautiful piece stands in the South Side neighborhood where she lived out her life.
The Birth of an Activist
She was born into slavery on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She received her education at a freedmen’s school called Rust University. When she was 14 years old she began teaching in a country school.
In 1884, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and continued to teach. She began attending Fisk University in Nashville during several summer sessions.
The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed a Circuit Court decision and ruled against Wells in a suit she had against the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad. While riding one of their trains she was forcibly removed from her seat after she refused to move to a “colored only” car.
In 1891, under the pseudonym Iola, she wrote newspaper articles criticizing the education available to African American children. Unfortunately, her teaching contract was not renewed afterward. Wells then turned to journalism and bought an interest in the Memphis Free Speech.
Advocate for African Americans
She started an editorial campaign against lynching after three of her friends were lynched by a mob in 1892. Her campaign quickly led to the closing of her newspaper’s office. This did not stop her anti-lynching efforts.
Wells advocated for lynching to cease as a staff writer for the New York age. Then she became an organizer and lecturer of antilynching societies. She traveled to many major cities in the U.S. speaking out against lynching. Twice she visited Great Britain for the cause.
In 1895 she married a Chicago lawyer, public official, and editor named Ferdinand L. Barnett. Afterwhich, she adopted the last name, Wells-Barnett. She restricted her travels after her marriage. However, she stayed highly active in Chicago affairs.
The activist journalist began to contribute to her husbands’ newspaper, Chicago Conservator, in addition to other local journals. She published a comprehensive look into the horror of lynching called “A Red Record.”
A New Cause
Wells played an active role in organizing local African American women to rally against various causes — from antilynching campaign to the suffrage movement. This movement was a decades-long battle to win the right to vote for women in the U.S. It took reformers and activists almost 100 years to achieve that right.
Wells served as secretary of the National Afro-American Council from 1898 to 1902. She joined in the meeting of the Niagara Movement and the founding of the group that sprang from that meeting the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Initially, she was left off of the NAACP’s controlling Committee of Forty. However, later on, she became a member of the NAACP’s executive committee. She became disappointed by the organization’s white and elite Black leadership and distanced herself from the NAACP.
In 1910, she founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League. This group gave aid to newly arriving migrants from the South. Wells then founded Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club, which may have been the first Black woman suffrage group.
She served as a probation officer of the Chicago Municipal Court from 1913 to 1916. Wells was highly passionate about her demand for justice for African Americans. She was also insistent that it was to be won by their own accord.
A Tribute to Her Life
Her new monument has three bronze columns that support interweaving bronze sheets twisted into spirals and coils. Wells’s great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster, stated they had considered traditional statues and busts of her. However, she and others felt the monument would project the activist better than the literal.
For several years, Duster held a fundraising campaign to finance the monument. It resides on the site of the Ida B. Wells Homes — a housing project that was constructed in the 1930s and torn down in 2011. The city replaced the project with subsidized and market-rate housing.
Duster hopes the monument “becomes a point of pride to Bronzeville, the kind of thing people want to serve as a backdrop to their lives here.”
That’s what I want — a gathering spot.
Written by Sheena Robertson
Sources:
Britannica: Ida B. Wells
NPR: A Monument To Journalist, Civil Rights Activist Ida B. Wells Is Unveiled In Chicago
Inline Image Courtesy of Eric Allix Rogers’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Inline Image Courtesy of no22a’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Featured Image Courtesy of yewchan’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
