Rosa
Parks wasn't the first African-American to make a stand by sitting down. Eight
decades before Parks' famous bus ride, newspaper writer and teacher Ida B.
Wells literally fought tooth and nail for equality.
Born
a slave in Mississippi in 1862, both of her parents died of yellow fever when
she was a teenager. Her five siblings stayed with her grandparents, while Wells
worked as a teacher to support her brothers and sisters.
"I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six
miles on the back of a big mule," she recalled. "I spent Saturday and
Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my
country school on Sunday afternoon."
Dressed Like a Lady
Separate-but-equal
railway accommodations angered her, as did the oppression blacks faced in all
aspects of their lives. Now living in Memphis, the 21-year-old Wells went to
the train station carrying a parasol and dressed like a lady, wearing a hat,
gloves, and a corseted dress. She wanted there to be no question that she
deserved to be treated with dignity.
She
deliberately sat in the whites-only car with the first-class ticket she had
bought. The conductor told her he wanted to treat her like a lady but that she
would have to go to the 'colored' car.
"I
replied that if he wished to treat me like a lady, he would leave me
alone," Wells recalled.
He
asked again. When she would not budge, he tried to yank her out of her seat.
But he succeeded only in ripping off the sleeve of her dress. Then things got
serious. She bit the hand that fed her, so to speak.
She Drew Blood
"The
moment he caught hold of my arm, I fastened my teeth in the back of his
hand," Wells wrote. "I had braced my feet against the seat in front
and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten, he didn't
try it again by himself."
In fact, she bit him so hard she drew blood. Finally,
the conductor and several passengers dragged her out. Incensed at the thought
of sitting in the colored car, she left the train.
Later, Wells filed suit against the
railroad and won $500 in compensation. "darky
damsel gets damages" declared a local paper. Three years later,
however, a higher court ruled against her, and she had to pay $200 in court
costs.
Fearing reprisals, local blacks did
not rally behind her. "So I trod the winepress alone," she wrote.
By the time she was 25, she had
become editor and co-owner of a local newspaper. She won the nickname
"Princess of the Press," thanks to her hard-hitting reporting and
editorial appeals for justice. Her bravery, however, would eventually force her
exile from Memphis.
“Die Fighting”
In 1892, a white mob dragged three
black men from jail and lynched them, even gouging out one victim's eyes. A
furious Wells wrote that lynchings were an abomination whose one and only
purpose was to make it easier to subjugate blacks.
"Lynchings," she said, are
"an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property
and thus keep the race terrorized." She led a black boycott of the city's
trolley cars that crippled downtown businesses, infuriating white merchants.
Then in 1895 while out of town, her
newspaper offices were looted. She was warned that if she returned, she would
be lynched. Her response? She bought a pistol and vowed to "die fighting
against injustice [rather] than die like a dog or a rat in a trap."
Reluctantly, she then took up her
fight in Chicago, becoming editor of that city's first African-American
newspaper. She crusaded against voting discrimination, fought for women's
rights, and wrote scathing diatribes against lynching.
Someone "must show that the
Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning," she wrote.
"And it seems to have fallen to me to do so."
MORAL: Dress like a lady, but prepared to use your teeth.
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