The Changemakers Series is designed to inform and inspire you with stories of ordinary people who dedicated their lives to spreading God’s Word around the world. Today, meet Ida B. Wells, whose decades-long crusade against lynching and racial segregation found its purpose in the pages of Scripture.

Raised with the Word

Ida B. Wells (later known as Ida B. Wells-Barnett) was born to James and Elizabeth Wells in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862. Her parents were born enslaved, and Wells herself lived the first three years of her life in slavery until the family was freed by President Lincoln’s 1865 Emancipation Proclamation.

While her own enslavement was brief, Wells was influenced by her parents’ experience. In her mother, Wells saw both physical and emotional scars of slavery—Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully for years to find relatives who had been sold to different owners. And Wells watched James work to protect the dignity he had been denied while enslaved. He used his carpenter’s training to avoid the difficult life of a sharecropper and provide for his family. And in 1867, when black men were permitted to vote in Mississippi for the first time, James ignored his white employer and voted his conscience.

James and Elizabeth made learning to read one of their first priorities after being freed. Ida B. Wells and her seven younger siblings grew up valuing education. “Our job was to go to school and learn all we could,” Wells wrote. But Elizabeth also made sure that her children grew up valuing God’s Word. Wells, who recalled reading the Bible with her family on Sunday afternoons, began reading Scripture as a young child. She had read the entire Bible by the time she was a teenager. Wells found that the lessons and values of Scripture provided her with “guidance, strength, and comfort for the rest of her life.”

As a young teenager, Wells attended Rust College. She considered the mostly Northern Methodist Episcopal teachers there “a splendid example of Christian courage” as they sought to provide black Americans with a solid education despite threats and harassment from some in the local community. At Rust, Wells deepened her love for reading as she discovered authors like Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Brontë.

When Wells was 16, her parents and her youngest brother died from yellow fever, leaving her to provide for her six remaining siblings. She found work as a schoolteacher and cared for her siblings while also continuing to study. In 1881, she and her two youngest sisters moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she continued teaching until she was forced into a new calling in journalism.

Confronting Injustice

Wells grew up during Reconstruction as black Americans gained many rights denied to them during slavery, but she saw a setback with the arrival of Jim Crow laws. These laws attempted to reimpose a segregated society, and those who resisted faced intimidation and violence.

Wells experienced segregation firsthand. When she was 22, she purchased a first-class train ticket only to be forcibly removed from her seat for refusing to move to the car reserved for black passengers. Outraged, Wells won a lawsuit against the railroad, but her case was overturned.

In 1886, Wells lost her teaching post for criticizing segregation in Memphis schools. She decided to continue her fight against this injustice by writing for local papers. Three years later, she became a shareholder in the Memphis Free Speech and was appointed editor, making her the first female co-owner and editor of a black newspaper. Under the penname “Iola,” Wells came to specialize in exposing practices used to threaten and punish black Americans striving for equality. One of the most infamous of such tactics was lynching, or executions carried out by mobs outside of the legal system.

In 1892, a mob dragged grocer Thomas Moss and two of his workers, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart, from their jail cells and lynched them outside Memphis. Their “crime” had been to defend Moss’s grocery store from vandalism by white business rivals.

Wells had been a friend of Moss. She responded to the murders by dedicating her career to documenting similar crimes, which often went unreported and unpunished. In the weeks after Moss’s death, she traveled from Texas to Virginia researching lynchings and interviewing witnesses, often risking her life to uncover facts. She wrote editorials and pamphlets that called out the false accusations often made against victims and highlighted the miscarriage of justice that allowed mobs of white agitators to kill without fear of punishment. In total, Wells documented more than 728 lynching cases that occurred between 1884 and 1892.

Wells’s outspoken campaign angered many people in the South. When white newspaper editors reprinted one of her anti-lynching editorials to fan the flames of racial division, the city of Memphis erupted. Well’s newspaper office was burned, her printing equipment destroyed, and her co-editor forced to flee. She had been out of town attending a conference and was threatened with lynching if she returned to Memphis.

Wells settled in Chicago and changed her pen name to “Exiled.” But she continued to document and write against lynching, stating that her goal was “to arouse the conscience of America.” The law, Wells argued in a speech delivered later in her career, should be “a shield to the innocent; and to the guilty, punishment swift and sure.” But she also believed that there was more at stake than a fair legal system. Lynching was not only “mocking our laws,” but also “disgracing our Christianity.” She appealed to the biblical values she had learned as a child, urging Christians to oppose the evils of lynching and segregation and work together to ensure justice for every American.

Pursuing the Truth

As she continued her pursuit of truth and justice, Wells worked alongside many other Americans who championed equality. Frederick Douglass wrote her a letter that she included in one of her most famous pamphlets, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Of Wells’s crusade against lynching Douglass wrote:

Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.

But alas! even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by earth and Heaven yet we must still think, speak and work, and trust in the power of a merciful God for final deliverance.

Wells took Douglass’s words to heart.

In 1895, Wells married Ferdinand Barnett. They had four children together, and Wells made sure that their children received the same biblical training she had. In addition to raising her family and continuing her journalism, Wells founded Chicago’s first black women’s club, kindergarten, and suffrage organization. She also remained active in the church, including ten years teaching a Bible class for young men in a Presbyterian congregation. During this period she also helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, although she resigned soon after, saying it was not sufficiently active.

In 1909, lynchings in Cairo, Illinois sparked widespread unrest. At first, Wells was reluctant to travel to the southernmost tip of Illinois to cover yet another lynching story. “I [didn’t] see why I should have to go and do the work that the others refuse,” she wrote later. But her oldest son, just ten years old at the time, changed her mind:

He stood by the bedside a little while and then said, “Mother, if you don’t go nobody else will.” I looked at my child standing there by the bed reminding me of my duty, and I thought of that passage of Scripture which tells of the wisdom from the mouths of babes and sucklings [Psalm 8:2]. I thought if my child wanted me to go that I ought not to fall by the wayside [Matthew 13:4].

Wells did go, and continued to answer the call to pursue truth until her death on May 4, 1931. She would be honored 89 years later on May 4, 2020, with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her “outstanding and courageous reporting” on lynching.

Wells’s purpose behind her life’s work—found in the pages of Scripture that she read as a child and continued to treasure throughout her life—can still inspire us today as we remember how God’s Word instructs us to live:

The LORD has told us what is good. What he requires of us is this: to do what is just, to show constant love, and to live in humble fellowship with our God.

Micah 6:8 GNT

As we look back on the life of Ida B. Wells and other Changemakers who have guided our history, we thank God for the people who champion the Bible cause around the world. Today, ask yourself how you can share the transformative message of God’s Word with friends, loved ones, neighbors, coworkers, and others near and far, becoming a Changemaker for our own time!

Blog Sources

• The Faith and Liberty Bible. American Bible Society. 2021.
• To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells. Mia Bay. 2009. Google Books.
• “When Ida B. Wells Took on Lynching, Threats Forced Her to Leave Memphis.” Becky Wells. History.
• “Ida B. Wells.” National Park Service.
• “The People’s Grocery Lynching, Memphis, Tennessee.” JSTOR Daily.
• “Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931).” The Gale Group. The Christian Broadcasting Network.