Ida B Wells example essay topic

Idas background was strengthened when she became part owner, editor, and writer for a weekly paper, The Free Speech. This paper based in Memphis, Tennessee allowed Ida to learn, by research, the details of lynching. Her energetic campaign for truth and justice gave her a lot of attention to fuel her crusade. All these factors support the fact that her background made her an ample spokes person for the anti-lynching campaign.

Adding to her credibility, personal experiences also gave her more of a drive to continue her crusade. She became a leading community activist through a sequence of events. In 1884, Ida was riding a train in a first class car, when she was asked to move to the smoking car. When she refused, two conductors tried to physically move her. She instead got off the train and filed a discrimination lawsuit. The lawsuit was initially won, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict.

After the train incident, in 1889, Ida went to The Free Speech paper; this is where her most promising worked developed. In 1892, three of her friends were brutally killed during a lynching. This one particular event opened the eyes of Wells and prompted her to write some of her most controversial works yet. However, this type of writing got the Free Speech office ransacked and destroyed. The other owner of the Free Speech barely escaped with his life, but he carried the message that if Ida were to show her face ever again in Tennessee she would be killed. Now with all this ammunition based on personal experience, even as an African American woman, she had gained credibility to be able to speak with authority.

As Ida B. Wells was going through this, it was at the same time that all women, black and white, were experiencing suffrage. There was a striking similarity between slavery and woman oppression. The bottom line was that women had no authority. An example of this is that even if a woman worked outside the home, all her earnings would legally go to the head of the household. However, Wells emerged as one of the best known of these new women that chose to speak out. People were beginning to listen to these accusations of unlawful lynching, but more impressive was the fact that non-Americans were starting to listen.

These non-Americans interests were peaked because the United States, as a world power, tried to silence all issues such as lynching and mob violence. Now, these issues were becoming known, writers from other countries contacted Ida. Wells received an invitation from Isabella Fy vie Mayo, a Scottish writer, to come speak about lynching in Great Britain. This was a great opportunity to bring British support back to the U.S. Many people ask a question what is mob violence. Today, mob violence has a different meaning if to compare with its initial one of the nineteenth century. After the end of Civil War African Americans suffered a lot of mistreatment.

Ida B. Wells was a young African American journalist, who investigated and accounted for the violence influence upon the African Americans during the period of Post-Reconstruction. Wells was writing about her own investigations because she thought that it was the first step to tell the world the facts and to make lynching a crime against American values. (27) In the book Southern Horrors and Other Writings, Royster discussed the mob violence of the lower South and the steps that were taken by Wells in order to end the violence. In the nineteenth century, many different acts of mob violence were done to African Americans that lived in the South. Wells primarily focused on lynching of African Americans by the mob.

The reasons for lynching were allegations of murder, burglary, arson, poisoning water and livestock, insulting whites, being insolent, and other perceived offenses. (29) In many cases, African Americans were lynched for no reason at all or these reasons were not legitimate.