Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation. Her father, James Wells, was a carpenter who was the son of his master. Her mother, Elizabeth, as a cook, who worked for the same man as her husband did. Both kept working for him after emancipation. Her father worked in politics and became a trustee of Rust College, a freedman's school, which Ida attended.
Ida B. Wells was orphaned at 16 when her parents and some of her brothers and sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic. To support her surviving brothers and sisters, Ida B. Wells became a teacher for $25 a month, leading the school to believe that she was already 18 in order to obtain the job.
In 1880, after seeing her brothers placed as apprentics, she moved with her two younger sisters to live with a relative in Memphas. There, Ida B. Wells obtained a teaching position at a black school, and began taking classes at Fisk University in Nashville during summers.
Ida B. Wells also began writing for the Negro Press Association. She became editor of a weekly, Evening Star, and then of Living Way, writing under the name Iola. Her articles were reprinted in other black newspapers around the country.
In 1884, while riding in the ladies' car on a trip to Nashville, Ida B. Wells was forcibly removed from that car and forced into a colored-only car, even though she had a first class ticket. She sued the railroad, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and won a settlement of $500. In 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict, and Ida B. Wells had to pay court costs of $200.
Ida B. Wells began writing more on racial injustice and she became a reporter for, and part owner of, Memphis Free Speech. She was particularly outspoken on issues involving the school system, which still employed her. In 1891, after one particular series, in which she had been particularly critical (including of a white school board member she alleged was involved in an affair with a black woman), her teaching contract was not renewed.
Ida B. Wells increased her efforts in writing, editing, and promoting the newspaper. She continued her outspoken criticism of racism. She created a new stir when she endorsed violence as a means of self-protection and retaliation.
Lynching in that time had become one common means by which African Americans were intimidated. Nationally, in about 200 lynchings each year, about two-thirds of the victims were black men, but the percentage was much higher in the South.
In Memphis in 1892, three black businessmen established a new grocery store, cutting into the business of white-owned businesses nearby. After increasing harassment, there was an incident where the business owners fired on some people breaking into the store. The three men were jailed, and nine self-appointed deputies took them from the jail and lynchec them.
One of the men, Tom Moss, was the father of Ida B. Wells' goddaughter, and she knew him and his partners to be upstanding citizens. She used the paper to denounce the lynching, and to endorse economic retaliation by the black community against white-owned businesses as well as the segregated public transportation system. She also promoted that African Americans should leave Memphis for the newly-opened Oklahoma territory, visiting and writing about Oklahoma in her paper. She bought herself a pistol for self-defense.
She also wrote against lynching in general. In particular, the white community became incensed when she published an editorial denouncing the myth that black men raped white women, and her allusion to the idea that white women might consent to a relationship with black men was particularly offensive to the white community.
Ida B. Wells was out of town when a mob invaded the paper's offices and destroyed the presses, responding to a call in a white-owned paper. Wells heard that her life was threatened if she returned, and so she went to New York, self-styled as a "journalist in exile."
