Undaunted by these threats, Wells-Barnett con-
tinued her campaign, writing continuously over
the next 10 years and buying an interest in the
New York Age. Some of her best-known publica-
tions included Southern Horrors: Lynching in All
Its Phases (1892), A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics
and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States,
1892, 1893, and 1895 (1895), and Mob Rule in New
Orleans (1900). In all of her writings and speeches,
Wells-Barnett resists the tradition of claiming the
rape of white women by African-American men
as a justification for lynching. Instead, she focused
her arguments on lynching as a form of terrorism
perpetrated by whites against African Americans,
particularly African-American men.
Wells-Barnett collaborated with FREDERICK
DOUGLASS, J. Garland Penn, and F. L. Barnett, who
protested the exclusion of African Americans from
the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition by con-
tributing a chapter to The Reason Why the Colored
American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposi-
tion—the Afro-American’s Contribution to Colum-
bia Literature (1893). Her essay is indicative of her
methodical style; her relentless use of concrete
evidence in the form of firsthand accounts, let-
ters, and statistics; and her frank, vivid description
of lynching scenes. In all of her accounts, Wells-
Barnett linked racial oppression with gender and
economic oppression. Also in 1893, Wells-Barnett
went on the first of two lecture tours of Great Brit-
ain; she kept a journal that was later published
in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. She
returned a year later, writing a series of articles
for the Chicago Inter-Ocean titled “Ida B. Wells-
Barnett Abroad.”
After marrying F. L. Barnett on June 27, 1895,
Wells-Barnett bought the Chicago Conservator
and settled into a short “retirement.” However, she
continued to write blistering essays critiquing the
government’s continued denial of lynching as ter-
rorism and the disconnect she saw between Afri-
can-American public intellectuals, such as BOOKER
T. WASHINGTON and W. E. B. DUBOIS, and the com-
munity at large. Broadening her activism to in-
clude women’s suffrage, Wells-Barnett became one
of the founding members of the National Associa-
tion of Colored Women in 1896. She played major
roles both in the Niagara Movement and in the
National Afro-American Council’s evolution into
the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT
OF COLORED PEOPLE) in 1909. In 1910 she founded
the Negro Fellowship League to help southern mi-
grants gain solid footing in Chicago.
Throughout her later years, Wells-Barnett con-
tinued her community-based fight against racism,
founding a kindergarten for black children, lead-
ing community campaigns against police harass-
ment, and conducting voter registration drives.
Seeing a less than satisfactory ballot of candidates
for the 1930 Illinois state legislature, she even
ran for office, becoming one of the first African-
American women to do so. Her writing from this
period included coverage of the East St. Louis,
Illinois, race riots of 1918 in The Arkansas Race
Riot (1922), an investigative report on the mur-
der of 12 Arkansas farmers, and the beginnings
of her autobiography, Crusade for Justice: The Au-
tobiography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Though she
did not live to finish her autobiography, begun
in 1928, it was published posthumously by her
daughter, Alfreda Duster.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bogues, Anthony. “The Radical Praxis of Ida B. Wells-
Barnett: Telling the Truth Freely.” In Black Here-
tics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals,
47–67. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Duster, Alfreda, ed. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiog-
raphy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1972.
Harris, Trudier, ed. Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Bar-
nett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Miller, Ericka M. The Other Reconstruction: Where
Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings
of Wells-Barnett, Grimké, and Larsen. New York:
Garland, 2000.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, ed. Southern Horrors and
Other Writings: The Anti-lynching Campaign of
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 1892–1900. Boston: Bedford
Books, 1997.
Rydell, Robert W., ed. Why the Colored American Is
Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: TheWells-Barnett, Ida B. 539