Transcript: Ida B. Wells: A Lifetime of Activism

NAARATOR: In 1884, Ida B. Wells, a young teacher from Memphis, was quietly reading in a first-class car when the conductor ordered her to move to the Jim Crow car.

IDA B. WELLS: I refused, saying the forward car was a smoker, I proposed to stay. He tried to drag me out of my seat but the moment he caught hold of my arm, I fastened my teeth on the back of his hand.

PAULA GIDDINGS: They are able to get her out of her seat. But she refuses to go in that accommodation car. And she gets off the train walks back to town with her dress torn, her hat now askew.

She will sue the Chesapeake and Ohio. She takes this mighty corporation to court. And she does prevail in the end because the judge does says that indeed she was a lady. She's a school teacher. She was dressed the way she's supposed to dress. She acted accordingly.

NARRATOR: But the victory was short-lived. The verdict was overturned by a Tennessee appeals court.

IDA B. WELLS: I had firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged. If it were possible, I would gather the race in my arms and fly away with them. God, is there no redress, no peace nor justice for us? Teach us what to do, for I am sorely, bitterly disgusted.

PAULA GIDDINGS: She said I wanted so badly to do something great for my people, and I thought I had. But now, with this, I feel that justice is no longer on our side.

NARRATOR: Inspired by her personal confrontation with Jim Crow, Wells decided to fight for the rights of all black people. She taught school by day and at night wrote newspaper articles under the pen name "Iola."

NARRATOR: In the late 1880s, when the Tennessee legislature moved to take the vote away from blacks, Wells attacked.

IDA B. WELLS: The dailies of our city say that whites must rule this country. But this is an expression without a thought. The old southern voice that made the Negroes jump and run to their holes like rats, is told to shut up, for the Negro of today is not the same as Negroes were thirty years ago.

SONG: Swing Low Sweet Chariot

NARRATOR: But a black man or woman standing up for equal justice in 1892 was taking a serious risk. On the night of March 9, when Wells was out of town, her friend Tom Moss and two others were jailed for defending themselves against several white men who had attacked Moss's grocery store.

Masked vigilantes dragged Moss and his two friends from their cells to a deserted railroad yard.

Before he died, Moss cried out, "Tell my people to flee. There is no justice here." This lynching – A term that came to be applied to any mob killing of blacks – disheartened Wells.

PAULA GIDDINGS: When she had come back to Memphis, she saw that the community was absolutely devastated and so was she. No one knew quite what to do. But when she read those words, she said, this is going to be her mission as well. And she begins to talk. Begins to tell Black Memphians, there is no justice for you here. The system is not working for us. No one is trying to get these killers of our young men, and it is one we should go.

NARRATOR: And go they did. At least 6,000 black Memphis residents would heed Well’s call to leave. It was the beginning of an exodus that in the coming decades would number in the millions. The murder of her friend also opened her eyes to who the true targets of the lynch mob were.

KEN GOINGS: When her three friends were lynched ...she began to realize that even black people, middle class black people, were...were...could...could be victims of that. And she talks about how until that happened, she had believed that those excesses, what she called excesses against the race, were only directed against those people who had perhaps done something to deserve it.

IDA B. WELLS: This opened my eyes to what lynching really was - an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and "keep the niggers down."

PAULA GIDDINGS: Ida Wells is one voice, that says that some of these assumptions of black people, that we can actually come to some negotiated settlement with whites in this period is a false assumption. You have to fight. And that the only we were going to do it is to fight.

NARRATOR: Ida B. Wells would eventually leave Memphis for Chicago. There she began her crusade against the murder of Southern blacks which she would continue for the rest of her life.