Wells, the courageous.
“Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so." —Ida B. Wells
After graduation from Rust College, Wells secured her first job as at teacher at a county school. “I came home every Friday afternoon riding the six miles on the back of a big mule,” she remembered later.
But it was a ride on a train that pushed Wells into activism, when in 1883 she was denied a seat in the ladies coach. 80 years before Rosa Parks, Ida Wells filed suit, and while her legal victory was overturned, her career and her outlook were forever changed. Writing about her cause convinced her to become a journalist, a post where she would achieve her true greatness in speaking out against the rising tide of violence in the post-Reconstruction South.
So courageous was her opposition to lynching that death threats exiled her from her home for the next 40 years. Wells refused to back down, however, and remained politically active throughout her life, as a suffragist and as a founding member of the NAACP.
For other African Americans in the North Mississippi Hills, life was also fraught with difficulties and the threat of violence, but there were opportunities, as well, in vibrant communities like Shakerag in Tupelo and Freedmen Town in Oxford, and in Columbus, in particular, in an area spreading out from Catfish Row, where the nation’s leading musicians and athletes came to play.