Ida B. Wells: The Black Warrior Woman

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, an African American renowned investigative journalist and an activist, was known for her relentless fight for women’s rights. She is considered a prominent African-American leader of her time. Ida B was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in eighteen-sixty-two in a slave family.

She began her writing journey while she worked as a teacher. From the beginning, her work criticized the system for its injustices on the blacks. It is through her writings on racial injustices that she became a reputable national writer. Her career as an investigative journalist was fueled by the atrocities on African-American men who were perceived to be sexually desiring the married white women. She also strongly fought against African-Americans’ lynching, who seemed to pose an economic competition on the whites or perceived as disrespectful to the white people. Ida started documenting the almost legitimized lynching practices when a white mob lynched her three friends. After the three men opened a grocery, which became successful and became a threat to a white man’s shop, the whites could not withstand a successful black man’s business. They were all arrested during an attack on their grocery by the whites and lynched before standing a trial.

Ida became a victim of the white man’s injustice after one of her editorials elicited anger from white people, which led to the destruction of her offices by the mob while she was away. The editorial praised and promoted acts by the African Americans who were in consensual…