6 10
Hearing on Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) held Guest Column: Will you show me around?
Arkansas Press Association
Publisher Weekly
By John Foust
Vol.17 | No. 5 | Thursday, February 3, 2022 | Serving Press and State Since 1873
Ida B. Wells, trailblazing journalist and activist, commemorated Ida B. Wells, the 19th century journalist, educator, anti-lynching activist and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is now also a Barbie® doll.
Mattel announced last month that Wells was the newest in its Inspiring Women™ series of Barbie® dolls. The series is designed to inspire “generations of girls to dream bigger than ever before.” Other Barbies® in the series include Maya Angelou, singer Ella Fitzgerald and NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson. The company in recent years has created a numerous Barbies® to honor real contemporary and historical women with inspiring achievements Wells, the eldest of eight children, was in 1862 born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, just months before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Her parents were active in Reconstruction politics and raised Wells to be highly educated. She enrolled in Rust College but was expelled after starting an argument with its president; she later attended summer sessions at Nashville’s Fisk University. In 1878, both of her parents and one of her brothers died in the yellow fever epidemic. At age 16, as the sole supporter of her six younger siblings, she became a teacher. Eventually she moved the family to Memphis, where she could continue to teach. Her activism took the stage in 1884 when she sued a train company over having kicked her off the train despite her having a first-class ticket. She won the case, but a federal court overturned the ruling. Also that decade, a friend of hers was lynched. She began investigating
Black lynchings and published columns in the Memphis Free Speech, a newspaper of which she became editor and partowner in 1889. In 1892, when three of her friends were lynched for allegedly raping white women, Wells published an scathing article denouncing the lynching. A mob of angry white people ran her out of Memphis and burned the newspaper’s offices.
Wells moved north and became a fearless anti-lynching activist. She worked for African-American newspapers across the country, including the New York Age, Chicago Defender, and The Conservator, a Chicago newspaper she co-owned with husband Ferdinand Barnett. She earned the nickname “The Princess of the Press.” Wells traveled as far as Europe to protest lynchings, called for the establishment Continued on Page 2