Fighting for Change

Worksheet Description

Ida B. Wells was born in Mississippi in 1862 as a slave. A year later, the Emancipation Proclamation freed the Confederate slaves. She first worked as a teacher. But when Ida was about twenty years old, she moved to Tennessee and worked as a writer for Black newspapers. She wrote about the injustice of segregated schools, as well as other forms of discrimination taking place at the time in the southern states. When one of her friends was lynched by white people, she set out to do even more.

She travelled all over the South, conducting interviews with people and reading public records about similar attacks. The information she collected became the basis for articles she published in a Tennessee newspaper she co-owned. The articles, which told the truth about what was happening to Black people, turned some white people against her. She eventually had to leave the South to escape the violence directed at her.