Jim Crow Stories

People

Ida B. Wells

was an African American and women's rights activist and suffragette. While traveling by train to

her teaching job in Tennessee, she was ordered to move from the ladies' car where she was seated to the subpar black car, although she had bought a first class ticket. Wells refused to leave, so she was promptly thrown off the train and arrested.

She continued to fight for African American rights all her life, becoming a journalist and writing many articles and columns on her cause. When a man was lynched in Memphis, where she was living, Wells wrote angrily about the subject for her newspaper and encouraged the African Americans in Memphis to leave. Wells herself then relocated to England. Later, she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women and the NAACP.