Ida B Wells, African American activist, honored by Google
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Version 0 of 1. As civil rights past and present remain in focus after the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, and the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, Google is celebrating journalist and activist Ida B Wells-Barnett’s 153rd birthday with a “Google doodle”. Wells-Barnett, more commonly known as Ida B Wells, was an African American newspaper editor, suffragist and anti-lynching activist at a time when avenues were thoroughly blocked for women – especially African American women. Thursday’s doodle – which replaces the usual logo at google.com – shows Wells-Barnett working at a typewriter. Wells-Barnett is considered an unsung American hero, and Google said it chose to commemorate her “journalistic mettle and her unequivocal commitment to the advancement of civil liberties” with its doodle. The activist’s name was one of those suggested as part of the recent campaign to get a woman on the $20 bill. Wells-Barnett was born in Mississippi in 1862, the oldest of eight children. Her parents, who were born into slavery, were very active in the Republican party during Reconstruction but died during an outbreak of yellow fever when Wells-Barnett was 16, leaving her to support her siblings by working as a teacher in Tennessee. Shortly after arriving in Memphis, Wells-Barnett was involved in an “altercation” with a white train conductor, who ordered her to move from the ladies car to the Jim Crow section of the train, despite Wells-Barnett’s having purchased a first-class ticket. When she refused and the conductor tried to forcibly move her, Wells-Barnett, in her words, said she “fastened her teeth on the back of his hand”. Wells-Barnett sued after being ejected from the train and won her case, though the decision was later reversed in court. By the time Wells-Barnett turned 25, she had become the co-owner and editor of the Memphis-based Free Speech and Headlight, a local black newspaper, a platform which allowed her to decry racial inequality and violence. After one of her friends was lynched by rival white store owners, Wells-Barnett denounced the act in her paper’s pages, and spent two months traveling in the south, gathering stories about other such lynchings. While she was away from Memphis, a mob destroyed her printing press. In 1895, Wells-Barnett published a 100-page pamphlet, the Red Record, the first statistical record documenting the history of American lynchings, which became a seminal text. Wells-Barnett later moved to Chicago, where she became a full-time correspondent for the Daily Inter Ocean, the newspaper depicted in Thursday’s doodle. She later assumed control of the Chicago Conservator, the oldest black newspaper in the city. She wrote prolifically and traveled to Europe where she lectured widely on civil liberties, which is why she was drawn with a suitcase by her side, Google said. She helped organize and found the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, and later the NAACP. She married Chicago lawyer and editor Ferdinand Barnett and, uncommonly for the time, hyphenated her name rather than take his. Wells-Barnett died at the age of 69 in 1931 and was survived by four children. She continued to fight for the rights of African Americans and an end to lynching until her death. |