(dramatic music) Coming up.

She was the ultimate agitator and feared because of it.

[Narrator] As racial terror reigned over the South.

There were close to 200 lynchings in Tennessee alone.

[Narrator] A young African American woman struck back with her pen.

She was writing not just to inform, but to shame.

She says I'm going to challenge you on this threadbare lie that African American men are lynched because they rape white women.

[Narrator] She fled to Chicago.

Where she emerged as a radical black leader.

There was never a time when Ida B.

Wells was not getting pushed back, especially so in Chicago.

[Narrator] And became an inspiration to a new generation.

Black Lives Matter!

Black Lives Matter is addressing the same issues that Ida B.

Wells took up in the 1880s and '90s.

[Narrator] Ida B.

Wells next on Chicago Stories.

Lead support for Ida B.

Wells: A Chicago Stories Special is provided by the Negaunee Foundation Additional support is provided by Jim and Kay Mabie Strategic Growth and Transformation Partners and by the following donors (light music) [Narrator] It seemed the entire world had come to Chicago in the summer of 1893.

Most were so captivated by what they saw at the World's Fair, they were oblivious to what was missing.

For one visitor, a 31 year old African American woman from Mississippi, the omission was glaring.

The fair itself was a monument to extravagance.

Building after building constructed to display to the world how far America had advanced.

[Narrator] Ida B.

Wells had come to Chicago to point out what the fair's organizers had ignored.

She was angry about the exclusion of the African American story, especially the progress that African Americans had made.

Post slavery African Americans started doing a lot of phenomenal things.

They were elected to Congress.

They were elected to public offices locally.

They became doctors and.

business people.

[Narrator] But the signs of black culture, Ida B.

Wells found at the fair were mostly along the Midway, and they represented stereotypes, not progress.

Nancy Green, a 59 year old former enslaved woman, proved a crowd favorite playing the role of a Southern mammy to promote a new pancake mix.

Non-white nations were presented as savages or even sideshow acts.

The slight was all the more appalling to Ida because she herself was a testament to the strides made by slavery's survivors.

Since her emancipation, she had become a widely published journalist.

So I was like let's show the world what a great country we are without showing any of the contributions of Black Americans.

[Narrator] Ida's friend Frederick Douglass was the notable exception.

He was the only black American in charge of a pavilion, one built by the nation of Haiti.

The Haitian government are the ones that invited him, so he wasn't even invited by the United States.

And he was one of the most famous you know people in the country at that time.

[Narrator] The irony didn't escape Ida B.

Wells.

[Actor] It seems strange to me that but for an accident, Mr. Douglas would have had no part in the World's Fair because of race prejudice in this country.

Yet whenever he went out into the grounds, he was literally swamped by white persons who wanted to shake his hand.

[Narrator] And so Ida just stood at the entrance to the Haitian pavilion, handing out copies of a pamphlet.

[Actor] A clear plain statement of facts concerning the oppression put upon the colored people in this land of the free and home of the brave.

It's around 90 pages.

It's really like a little book.

And Ida is the only woman represented in the book.

[Narrator] Wells had written it with Douglas and two other men.

She's also the one who raised the majority of the money to have the pamphlet published.

so you have these three men, that are willing to sort of be led by a woman.

So this, to me, is her publication.

The exhibit of progress made by a race in 25 years of freedom against 250 years of slavery would have been the greatest tribute to the greatness and progressiveness of American institutions, which could have been shown the world.

[Narrator] The preface was written in English, French, and German.

She was standing in front of the Haitian Pavilion every single day handing out the pamphlet with the idea that people would go from this fair all over the world and say "What the heck is going on in United States?"

It was simply savvy strategy, and Ida was a savvy woman.

[Narrator] Ida B.

Wells' battles at the World's Fair were just getting started, but if there was one thing she had shown in her 31 years before coming to Chicago, she never went down without a fight.

Ida B.

Wells was born into slavery six months before emancipation in Holly Springs, Mississippi to James and Lizzy Wells.

James was actually the product of the slave owner going into slave quarters.

So allegedly he did receive better treatment than other slaves.

Lizzie was one of 10 children.

All of them were parceled out and so did so to different places and she didn't see her siblings after that happened.

[Narrator] When freedom came Ida and her parents remained on the estate of their former enslaver and James continue to work there.

But now he was paid for his labor.

There was extreme ambition during this period.

African Americans were really committed to moving into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible with as many skills as they could acquire.

James Wells joined the Board of Trustees of the newly founded Rust College.

Ida's mother attended school alongside her eight children until she could read.

James had you know, friends of his come over to the house and they would read the newspaper.

They asked Ida to read the newspaper to them because you know, a lot of people were not literate.

[Daphene] Ida B.

Wells doesn't come out of nowhere.

She had parents who were very excited about their newfound freedom, and she observed her father, especially his political activism.

[Actor] I heard the words Ku Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant.

I knew dimly that it meant something fearful by the anxious way my mother walked the floor at night when my father was out to a political meeting.

Four years after emancipation, her father got his first opportunity to vote.

Suddenly James Wells found himself at odds with his now employer.

He challenged even his employer, who demanded that James Wells vote on the Democratic ticket, and James Wells refused, and then he found that his former master had locked him out of the shop where he was working, and James Wells didn't argue with him.

He just went to town, bought a new set of tools, and opened up a new trade as a carpenter.

There was optimism and hope as far as every citizen is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And Ida took that seriously.

[Narrator] But Ida's world would be turned upside down when she was 16 years old.

It was the summer she left home to visit her grandmother's farm.

There was an epidemic of yellow fever that went throughout the country, and particularly in the South.

She knew that people had fled Holly Springs and assumed that her parents and siblings were among those people.

But then one day some people came to her grandmother's farm and handed her a note saying that both of her parents had died.

Ida was 16 years old at the time and against her grandmother and several other peoples advice, she decided to get on a train and go back to Holly Springs.

[Narrator] She returned to find that her youngest brother had also died.

Well-meaning charity workers were already there and busy making plans.

There was talk of how different people were going to take different responsibility for Ida's siblings.

and Ida was like, "No, no, we're not not dividing the family.

We don't do that."

[Michelle] She had grown up hearing stories from her mother about being separated and sold from her family.

So there was supposedly a shotgun on the mantel and she got the shotgun and was like, "Look, I'm going to take care of family."

Like oh, why don't you say so?

(music) [Narrator] 16 year old Ida found work as a teacher and took on the role of breadwinner with the help of her grandmother.

[Actor] After teaching a country school all week, I came home Friday afternoon, 6 miles out from town and spent the time from then until Monday morning, washing clothes, cooking food and preparing things so they could do without me until the end of the next week.

[Narrator] Ida's Aunt Fanny saw the family was struggling and eventually invited them to live with her.

They hopped on a train bound for the big city.

She moves to Memphis and Memphis is the place to be.

It's it's a metropolitan city.

It is a transportation center even in the 1800s for the entire world.

She saw it as exciting as a young woman.

We shouldn't be surprised by this.

She was a shopper.

She like to look nice.

She often talks about her expenses exceeding her income, in part because she was supporting siblings.

But the other part too is that Ida was a clothes horse.

You know she enjoys shopping downtown.

[Narrator] Although Ida had hoped to secure a teaching post in Memphis, she'd settled at a small school in Woodstock, Tennessee, A short train ride away.

But a fateful ride along the Chesapeake Rail line would carry her on a much different path.

Just weeks after her 21st birthday Ida boarded the morning train to Woodstock, a first class ticket in hand.

She was dressed in white gloves and a corset carrying a parasol.

She was petite.

She was little under 5 feet and very well dressed.

Very obviously very well spoken.

During Reconstruction, blacks had the rights.

So she had ridden on that car several times over the past couple of years and was entitled to do it.

[Narrator] She chose the seat towards the back of the first-class rail car, but minutes later, the trains conductor brusquely informed her that she was seated in the ladies' car, a fact Ida was well aware.

The conductor insisted she moved to the smoking car, a lower class carriage where men could often be found cussing and gambling.

[Actor] As I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay, he tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm, I fastened my teeth to the back of his hand.

It took three men to forcibly remove her from the rail car in which she put up a fight, literal fight.

When she was removed from the car, the passengers cheered.

You talk about something that infuriates someone that absolutely infuriated her.

[Narrator] Ida struck back.

By filing suit against the railroad company.

She sued the Chesapeake Railroad and won and was awarded $500.

[Narrator] The judge found the railroad company had violated the law by forcing Wells to ride in a car that was separate but unequal.

But the lower court's decision would not stand.

The Tennessee Supreme Court essentially attacked her personally to say that she was just being disruptive, that she wasn't a lady as she pretended to be.

[Actor] I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would when we appeal to it, give us justice.

I feel shorn belief and utterly discouraged, and just now if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.

When we think about the modern Civil Rights movement, or Rosa Parks, she had the NAACP behind her.

In 1884, is just Ida B.

Wells and her attorney.

Ida B.

Wells was starting to make a name for herself.

She took a teaching job in Memphis and joined a Lyceum founded by black teachers.

It was a community of sort of thinkers an artist and she actually took elocution classes, which is speaking classes, and in her diary, she writes about how she was like trying to scrape up the money to pay for her next lesson.

And so you wonder, like what in the world is she preparing herself for?

But she was honing her skills.

[Narrator] Each program ended with a reading from the Evening Star, a gossip filled newspaper which Ida called a spicy journal.

She was shocked when asked to start writing for it.

As Ida B.

Wells first put pen to paper, she found writing to be nothing short of a revelation.

She felt like she could sort of explore more of who she was and express what she was through writing more than she ever could and teaching.

[Actor] I wrote in a plain common sense way on the things which concerned our people.

Knowing that their education was limited, I never used a word of two syllables where one would serve the purpose.

I signed these articles, Iola.

When Ida B.

Wells first starts writing, she was writing about the things that one would expect a woman who's writing for a church publication to write for, but that started to change pretty early on.

As a school teacher, Ida started to document the segregation in the schools and how the black schools were not getting the same resources and the educational inequities.

She wrote an article in 1889 about the Memphis school system, which is unfortunate because the article could be literally printed today and you wouldn't know the difference.

[Narrator] She railed against her fellow educators.

[Actor] Some of these teachers had little to recommend them save an illicit relationship with members of the school board.

You have to think about the type of person who will start writing editorials and news articles about their own employer, but that's what she was doing.

She did not get fired immediately when the next school year came up.

They didn't under contract.

While teaching had served a practical purpose, writing was now Ida's true passion.

She bought a partnership in the most radical black newspaper in Memphis, the Free Speech and Headlight and became its editor.

The paper circulation tripled.

Unique about that moment is not only is she African American at this time, but she's also a woman, and being a woman in Victorian America where she is essentially playing the role of what was then considered what men do.

Ida B.

Wells was ascending at a precarious moment.

As she and other newly emancipated African Americans made waves, white supremacist fervor flooded the South.

We kind of gloss over this.

As if once the South is beaten in the Civil War that all of a sudden white Southerners just acquiesce to the people whom they had enslaved.

Now coming into power, serving in political office.

That is not the case.

Black freedom, black political power was always contested and so all across the South we saw black men, women and children being lynched.

It wasn't a secret, it wasn't considered shameful.

Newspapers would advertise that a lynching was going to occur.

To give these crowds a chance to come and watch.

[Narrator] One such murder would change the course of Ida's life.

She was spending the week in Natchez, Mississippi on newspaper business, when word came that three men had been lynched in Memphis.

Calvin McDowell, will Stewart and Thomas Moss.

Moss was like a brother to Ida.

Thomas Moss and Moss' wife were essentially her best friends here in Memphis.

She was so close to Thomas Moss, Tommy.

She was godmother to his child.

Everybody in town knew and loved Tommy, an exemplary young man.

He and his wife Betty were the best friends I had in town.

[Narrator] Three years before their murders, Moss and his friends had opened a store called the People's Grocery.

The People's Grocery was located in South Memphis, an area that at the time was called the Curve.

The Curve was a predominantly black community and so you have these three black men that decide they're going to open up a grocery store in their own community.

But their new grocery put them in direct competition with William Barrett, a white store owner making money off the black community.

William Barrett was infuriated like how can these people take business away from him?

[Narrator] What started as an innocent game of marbles outside the people's grocery grew heated.

And the interesting part is this was the integrated game of marbles with white children, white boys and black boys.

There was a fight and eventually adults joined into this skirmish.

[Narrator] The white store owner was injured.

He convinced the County Sheriff to deputize him and he gathered a posse.

They came late at night, this group of white men.

The People Grocery owners, including Thomas Moss, they knew that they were coming.

They've gotten word.

So they were prepared for this and they armed themselves, and they were in the store when they got there and there was a there was a fight.

[Narrator] Several white deputies were wounded.

The headlines talked about rounding up every Negro that was involved.

[Narrator] Ida's friend Thomas Moss was arrested with Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell and held at the Shelby County Jail.

But then a lynch mob decided that they were going to exact their own justice.

And so they went to the jail and took them to a sort of a rail yard north of there and killed them.

Shot them, beat them, just lynched them.

I do think that we should take a second and really explicate what that word means.

Lynching was not simply tying a rope around someone's neck and hanging them, though that is brutal and inhumane enoug.

Lynching was designed directly to send a message to the larger black population.

In the South, in many places black people were in the majority.

So how does a white minority that Has lost power and wants to gain that power back do that when they're in the minority, it was through terrorism.

[Narrator] Lynching had become a common and accepted punishment for black men, who had allegedly raped white women.

But now, Ida B.

Wells, who'd grown accustomed to the brutality of Southern justice, began to wonder.

[Actor] Like many, another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserve death anyhow, and the mob was justified in taking his life.

After Thomas Moss, who really was lynched because he was competing with a white business owner, something clicks in Ida, a vengeful spirit I think.

And she decides that she's going to focus on the lie of lynching, really, for the rest of her career.

[Narrator] Ida set out in search of the truth.

Notebook in hand, she traveled across the South interviewing eyewitnesses.

There was no grasp of exactly how many black people were being lynched.

She would find where lynchings were occurring by looking through white newspapers and she began to keep basically spreadsheets.

[Narrator] Of the 728 murders she investigated, Wells found that only a third of the victims had actually been accused of crimes.

She sat down to pen a blistering editorial.

[Actor] Eight Negroes lynched since the last issue of the Free Speech.

Three were charged with killing white men and five with raping white women.

Nobody in this section believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women.

Her writing was used to create a sense of outrage, and every word was chosen for that manner.

Her writing had this simmering rage, she was writing not just to inform, but to shame.

[Actor] If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves.

And a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

[Narrator] Within days, Edward Ward Carmack, editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, reprinted Ida's editorial.

And she got the attention of the white community and certainly the white press.

[Narrator] Unaware that the author of the editorial was a woman, Carmack called on the men of Memphis to avenge the honor of Southern ladies quote "The black wretch who had written that foul lie should be tied to a stake at the corner of Main and Madison streets, a pair of tailors shears used on him, and he should then be burned at the stake.

The white community of Memphis was outraged.

[Narrator] A mob of angry whites converged on the offices of the Free Speech on Beale Street.

Finding the newspaper deserted, they demolished the presses and destroyed the offices.

But by then, Ida B.

Wells had already fled Memphis.

By the time Ida arrived in Chicago for the World's Fair, she had been traveling more than a year.

She had lost everything at age 30, not only her physical property and her printing press, but also her friends, which is no small thing.

[Actor] Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life and been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth.

I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth.

Now that I was where I could do so freely.

[Narrator] Ida B.

Wells circulated 10,000 copies of "The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition."

Her plea for inclusion was largely ignored, though the fair's organizers made one token concession.

August 25th was designated Colored American Day.

Frederick Douglass arranged the program, but Ida refused to even attend.

[Actor] We resented this sop to our pride in this belated way, and we thought Mr. Douglas ought not to have accepted.

I was among those who differed with our grand old man.

[Narrator] But Ida had another mission at the World's Fair.

With the eyes of the world on Chicago, she would use the international stage to expose the terror of lynching.

She was probably more looking at it as an amazing opportunity to get the message out and hit thousands of people all at the same time from all over the world.

[Narrator] Her message was growing more militant.

Sharpened through her internationally published works, "Southern Horrors" and "A Red Record."

She pulled no punches in describing how armed blacks had beaten back lynch mobs.

[Actor] The lesson this teaches and which every Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.

I would call Ida B.

Wells someone who was very comfortable hanging out in the left.

which was not very comfortable for people who were sort of straddling the middle or to the right.

[Narrator] At the close of the World's Fair, Ida B.

Wells set out to find allies for her anti-lynching campaign.

For a year, she crossed the globe.

Her motivating factor was to inform the world about how this country was treating its own citizens.

If you're going to go to the root of the problem, you've got to find support among whites, so she was very good at building allies and very strategic.

[Narrator] By the time I returned to Chicago in 1895, she'd been a refugee from the South for three years.

Despite her many successes, she was financially strained and weary in need of an anchor.

She found just that in Ferdinand Barnett.

He was ten years older than than Ida when they got married, so that would have made him 43.

Ferdinand was a widower.

He liked strong black women.

He met Ida and he was like "Yeah, we're gonna need to get married."

His first contact with Ida B.

Wells is because she needs a lawyer.

Frederick Douglass recommends Ferdinand Barnett.

[Narrator] Barnett was the third African American lawyer admitted to the Illinois Bar, and the owner of Chicago's first black newspaper, The Conservatory.

Their wedding was announced in black newspapers nationwide and in a highly unusual move, in the New York Times.

This was the same newspaper that A few years earlier had called Ida a slanderous and nasty-minded Mulattress because of her writing about lynchings.

And now her wedding announcement occurs in that very same paper.

The New York Times, the paper of record.

[Narrator] Wells took the hyphenated name, Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

And she also took over Ferdinand's newspaper.

[Actor] Having always been busy at some work of my own, I decided to continue work as a journalist or this was my first and might be said my only love.

[Narrator] The Conservator's circulation of about 1000 readers represented a healthy chunk of Chicago's roughly 6000 African Americans.

But the city's black population was growing.

Ida B.

Wells and two dozen more arrive in Chicago in the 1890s and thus put themselves in a position to be the institution builders of Black Chicago.

[Narrator] Ida in Ferdinand lived alongside most of the city's African Americans in a narrow strip of Southside land known as the Black Belt.

Its boundaries were often enforced by violence.

[Charles] If you go west of State Street, you're in the stockyards community, a largely Irish community, and you're likely to get beaten or killed.

You're not going too Far East because middle class whites don't want you there, and they certainly don't want you on the lakefront.

So it's about four blocks wide, but it keeps moving southward.

This will be the hub of the African American community.

And what's important here is that it is entirely self sufficient.

African Americans find employment within their own community.

African Americans build businesses, newspapers, their political leadership.

African Americans are virtually institutionally complete within these southward migrating communities, which came to be called Black Metropolis.

[Narrator] Ida took delight in the communities cultural riches.

There were churches, Olivet Baptist, Bethel AME, and Quinn Chapel AME.

And there were black social organizations.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett took her place among the cream of the 400, a social registry of Chicago's black elite.

[Charles] Ida B.

Wells and Ferdinand Barnett were the political power couple, certainly in the African American community in Chicago.

[Narrator] The couple gave birth to their first child, Charles, in 1896.

Ferdinand hired a nurse so Ida could be turned to the lecture circuit with their newborn baby.

Ferdinand was attracted to the fact that she was out there doing things and he provided the support for her to continue doing that.

[Actor] I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches.

[Narrator] The following year I then gave birth to Herman, then Ida Junior and finally Alfreda in quick succession.

This is a woman who was quite aware of the sacrifices she was making as a mother and the sacrifices her children had to make because she was often on the road.

[Narrator] While Ida B. Wells-Barnett continued to shine a light on injustice through journalism, she also started looking to politics as an agent for change.

In this new arena, she faced the same obstacle as every other American woman, she could not vote.

So instead, women like Wells made their voices heard through women's clubs.

These were enormously popular and also beginning to be very influential and powerful.

They were really the means by which women could have some influence in society.

[Narrator] Ida helped found the League of Colored Women.

Her supporters even created an Ida B.

Wells Club.

The women's clubs were an opportunity for women to pursue some self-education.

And then they began to move from there into improving education for children, beginning kindergartens, beginning libraries, and ultimately to lobby government about getting the right to vote.

[Narrator] As Ida B. Wells-Barnett found opportunities in Chicago civic life, she now started urging Southern blacks to flee North as she had.

Literally, she'd tell people in the South like, "Look, come north.

It's not perfect.

I'm telling you it's not perfect but it's way better than what you're experiencing."

And so people would come.

[Narrator] Because the new migrants had only one neighborhood to choose, the Black belt was swelling.

The beating heart of the Black Belt was now a strip of South State Street known as The Stroll.

This was where the action took place.

There were juke joints, restaurants, hidden gambling dens, and people constantly walking or promenading from about 2700 South down to about 3500 South and so people could prominently show off their clothes, their gate, you didn't walk, you strutted.

[Narrator] But cracks were forming in the Black Belt.

As new migrants met up against the forces of segregation, housing became scarce and crowded.

The Barnetts refused to be contained.

They moved to a new home at 3234 Rhodes Avenue, making them one of the first black families to move east of State Street.

Ida B.

Wells was known to keep a gun in the House for protection.

It's a political statement that they're going to live anywhere they can.

People like Ida B.

Wells were committed to the idea that segregation, in any form was a insult to African Americans.

[Narrator] The Southern migrants still stuck in the Black Belt were often viewed as outsiders in their own community.

Hordes of "ignorant and dissolute," said one white reformer to describe the Southern Blacks who quote, "lowered the standard of the colored population in our midst."

To distance themselves from such insult, longtime black Chicagoans formed a society limited to those who could prove their families had lived in the city at least 30 years.

They called themselves the Old Settlers Club.

[Charles] Many of the old settlers are successful, largely because of relations they've established with wealthy whites.

These African Americans find the new African Americans as a threat to their leadership.

They're not as polished.

They're not as mannered.

As somebody once told me, the problem is they didn't work for white people.

[Narrator] Ida B.

Wells would make it clear which side of this social divide she stood on in 1906.

She had been elected to organize a charity ball for the Frederick Douglass Center, built in memory of her old friend who had passed.

The previous year's Gala had been held at the prestigious Masonic Temple downtown.

But Ida instead set her sights on the boisterous Stroll and a rich South side hustler named Robert E. Motts.

Now, Robert T. Motts was a gambler, fairly shady person, but Robert Motts went to Paris, discovered Parisian entertainment, decided that his community needed something like that.

A place where African Americans could put on plays, write comedies, enjoy African American music.

[Narrator] Motts already had the location, a disreputable saloon in the heart of the Stroll.

Robert T. Motts, however, he gained his money, was rich and so he had the money to invest in something that he could be proud of.

Narrator] Mott's Pekin Theater was his chance to turn over a new leaf.

When he gave Ida B.

Wells a tour, she saw the makings of a first class establishment.

The place was beautiful.

She thought it provided class because it moved him away from selling booze.

She liked the idea that it provided an opportunity to see African American artistic excellence.

[Actor] I felt that the race owed Mr. Motts a debt of gratitude for giving us a theater in which we could sit anywhere we chose without any restrictions.

[Narrator] When Ida announced her event will be held at The Peking, many in black high society were outraged, citing Mott's reputation.

The Chicago Daily News refused to even print the announcement.

But the loudest assault came from the neighborhood churches.

African American ministers spearheaded by Archibald Carey, Sr. campaigned against holding an event for the African American elite in a place like the new Pekin Theater.

He gave sermons about it, Not only at his own church, he gave sermons at other churches.

Ida B.

Wells hated hypocrisy.

She had been a member of Bethel AME and she remembers when a former pastor had been guilty of inappropriate relations with members of his congregation and had been expelled, only to be brought back with the support people like Archibald Carey.

[Narrator] Ida moved ahead with Her charity ball and despite threats of a boycott, it raised $500.

[Charles] It was eminently successful.

It cemented a friendship between Robert E Motts and Ida B.

Wells until his death.

The Peking was the first black owned theater in Chicago.

It would give the city some of its first taste of Ragtime, making way for other jazz clubs on the Stroll where the likes of Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway played.

And Ida B.

Wells had supported it despite the objections of African American leaders.

She challenges the black elite.

She challenged the black political organization.

She challenged White leadership, but she was willing to step on toes because she had a larger purpose.

[Narrator] The black migration from the South that exposed fault lines in Chicago was also ratcheting up tensions across America.

In 1908, the nation saw more than 80 lynchings in every corner of the country.

It happens in the Northeast.

We hear a lot less about lynchings, but of course wherever black people go, lynching follows as a tool of social control.

[Narrator] A lynching in Springfield, Illinois that summer would once again change the course of Ida B.

Wells' career.

In Abraham Lincoln's hometown 2, black men were jailed.

One accused of murdering a white man, the other falsely charged with the rape of a white woman.

A lynch mob of roughly 5,000 whites assembled.

They stormed the East side of the city where blacks lived, lynching innocent men and burning the neighborhood to cinders.

At least seven people were killed before the Illinois Guard brought the riot under control.

[Actor] I had such a feeling of impotence see through the whole matter Which seem to be becoming as bad in Illinois as it had hitherto been in Georgia.

[Narrator] The following Sunday, Wells was hosting her weekly Bible study for young men when the conversation turned to the horrific events in Springfield.

The young people she was meeting with were so appalled by the violence that took place, the nature of those meetings goes from being more about their faith and more and more about what they can do about racial oppression.

[Narrator] They continue to meet every Sunday, calling themselves the Fellowship League, and the group turned its attention to the needs of black men who had come North in search of opportunity, only to lose their way on the Stroll.

The Stroll could have a negative effect on the life of a young male migrant because beyond the cigar shop along State Street, beyond the outer doors in the back was a place where you could gamble.

[Narrator] Ida's friend, Jane Addams had been concerned with the plight of immigrant women and children, and she had created Hull House to serve them.

But there was nowhere for young African American men to turn for help.

They weren't welcome at institutions like the YMCA.

[Actor] All other races in the city are welcomed into settlements.

YMCAs, YWCAs, gymnasiums, and every other movement for uplift if only their skins are white.

Only one social center welcomes the Negro and that is the saloon.

Being from the South, she knew what kind of conditions people were coming from.

I think she felt like she could relate to them on a personal level.

Her dream, you know was to create sort of the Black Hull House, if you want to call it that.

[Narrator] Ida B.

Wells unexpectedly found a sponsor for her visions at a Palmer House luncheon.

Jessie Lawson was the wife of the wealthy editor of the Chicago Daily News.

The Lawsons, who were donors to the YMCA, were unaware that it was not serving blacks in Chicago.

[Narrator] Ida told Jessie Lawson about her dreams for the Fellowship League, and they set out to find a location.

That location and in her mind had to be in the midst of where the greatest need lay.

And that was along State Street at the North end of the Stroll.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett opened the Negro Fellowship League on a warm Sunday with a program for the neighborhood.

As the room filled, they left the back door open to let in the breeze.

But before long, the program was interrupted by the boisterous sounds of a group of drunken men outside shooting dice with a pail of beer.

[Narrator] Rather than call the police Wells, set out to invite them to the next Sunday meeting.

And so when she goes into the alley to talk to those men who are drinking and playing dice, you know she doesn't have any aires about her.

[Narrator] Wells recalled their surprise when she extended her white-gloved hand to shake on their promise to return.

[Actor] They all said they didn't want to dirty my white gloves by shaking hands, but reiterated that they would go away and also repeated their promise to come next Sunday.

There were black people who were from "upper class" who wouldn't even come visit the center, because it was in a location that they didn't feel comfortable visiting.

My great-grandparents were unique.

They were both educated but at the same time they were willing to go into the hood.

[Narrator] Ida had built a beacon on the Stroll, a place where men could find jobs, housing legal help and moral upliftment.

I think she felt a tremendous responsibility.

She's telling black folks leave the South, and yet she sees where people come from and they're suffering and no one is looking out for them, not even other black Chicagoans.

[Narrator] But Ida B.

Wells, would feel the impact of that awful Springfield riot in another way.

In the riot's wake, Ida and other activists received an invitation from Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

His letter, known as "The Call," proposed a conference to discuss present evils.

The following spring, luminaries like W.E.B.

Du Bois and Jane Addams gathered in New York.

On first day of the conference, Ida B. Wells-Barnett delivered a forceful speech on her 20 years of lynching research.

This is what Ida B.

Wells was doing around the issue of lynching.

She takes lynching from a fringe issue that no one really black or white will touch, and she turns it into a central issue.

[Narrator] At the close of the conference, the activists agree to start a new organization.

It would become known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Although Ida was initially chosen to be on the NAACP's founding committee, at the last minute, Du Bois substituted her name.

My guess is that people like W.E.B.

Du Bois were sexist.

And I think we have to call it that.

He did not promote easily African American female leadership.

Secondly, the leadership of the NAACP from the beginning, largely addressed the African American middle class and to the African American upper middle class.

But Ida B.

Wells' campaigns had become increasingly geared toward the poorest of the poor.

And despite her impassioned speech about lynching, the NAACP was not ready to confront the crisis she's dedicated her career to.

The NAACP, which Ida helped cofound, even though she doesn't often get the name recognition and credit for that, didn't want to touch that issue.

It was something about the ideas that Ida had about, for example, lynching having its base and sexual relations.

Though it was their thought that this was a no no.

This in fact was something blacks like Du Bois wouldn't approach because he knew that white people would be offended by this discussion.

Ida B.

Wells, now 50 years removed from slavery, still did not have the power to vote, but she had joined Illinois women in a partial victory.

In June of 1913, women in Illinois can vote in the presidential election, and they can vote in local municipal elections, but they cannot vote, for example, for Governor or for Senator.

[Narrator] Encouraged, Ida B.

Wells took up the suffrage calls with new fervor, noting that white suffragists were working like beavers.

She established the Alpha Suffrage club.

Their slogan, "Race interest first, last, and all the time" The club mobilized black women in the Black Belt second ward and eventually helped elect Chicago's first black Alderman.

Those are ordinary women, not the high polluting black women of Chicago.

Ordinary women were told they had worth and could make a change in society.

[Narrator] That spring Ida B.

Wells set her sights on Washington DC on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.

She boarded a train bound for the National Suffrage Parade.

Wells travels with the Illinois delegation.

She gets to Washington DC.

There are state delegations from all over the United States and Illinois's is very large.

I've got drum majors.

[Narrator] Wells and 250,000 women approached Pennsylvania Ave, but Alice Paul, the lead parade planner, had a last minute concern.

Southern white women wouldn't march if they had to do so alongside black women.

Planners suddenly asked that the black delegates march separately in the back.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was struck by the news.

So Wells says, "Of course, I'm not going to do that.

I came here with my delegation from Illinois.

I intend to march with my delegation."

And they march anyway all together and so the march is integrated.

And it's just classic Wells.

I mean she stands for her principles, no matter what.

[Narrator] Though her Negro Fellowship League had now been serving men on The Stroll for 20 years, Ida B.

Wells was struggling to keep it afloat.

Her wealthy friends admired her dedication, but wouldn't venture to The Stroll and work among the uneducated unemployed black men.

I don't know if she originally thought she would be doing this work by herself.

I think she expected and was hoping for other people to be as outraged as she was and to get in the trenches and fight.

[Narrator] And she had never received the kind of wealthy patronage Jane Addams secured for Hull House.

By the winter of 1920, the Negro Fellowship League's rent was in arrears and Ida B.

Wells was finally forced to close its doors.

It is important that when we think about the strength of this black woman, when we think about the strength of black women, that we never forget that it always comes with a cost and it certainly took a toll on her.

It took a toll on her physically.

[Narrator] When Ida B. Wells-Barnett was 68 years old, she attended a book reading with her oldest daughter.

The subject was a book by Carter G. Woodson, the man who created Black History Month.

But Ida was dismayed to discover that her anti-lynching efforts weren't even mentioned.

She met a young woman who had heard her name but didn't know what she did.

That was stunning for her that she herself was not known by a new generation.

[Narrator] So she sat down to put her story on paper.

In the first pages of her autobiography, Ida B.

Wells explained: [Actor] The history of this entire period, which reflected glory on the race, should be known.

Yet most of it is buried in oblivion, and so because our youth are entitled to the facts of race history, which only the participants can give, I am thus led to set forth the facts.

[Michelle] I guess it was her story, but it's also the history of our country.

[Narrator] Ida B.

Wells unfinished autobiography ended mid-sentence.

A fitting reflection perhaps of a woman who knew there's still more work to be done.

In March of 1931, Ida B. Wells-Barnett awoke with a worrisome fever.

She died a few days later.

She is buried next to Ferdinand Barnett, her partner, for more than 30 years.

Ida B.

Wells and Ferdinando Barnett, crusaders for justice.

[Michelle] I am a native Chicagoan and there was an Ida B.

Wells Homes on the South side of Chicago.

Most people had heard the name, but it got to a point where it was just a disconnect between who Ida B.

Wells as a woman was and the work that she did and what people associated with her name.

[Narrator] In February of 2019, Ida B.

Wells Drive became Chicago's first street named for an African American woman.

The next year, Wells was posthumously honored with the Pulitzer Prize.

New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones won her Pulitzer Prize the same day.

When I found out that I had won the Pulitzer on the same day as my spiritual godmother, Ida B.

Wells, a woman who did not receive that type of recognition in her life and never would have, I cried like a baby.

No justice no peace Recently, a multitude of young activists and justice seekers are taking up the work of Ida B.

Wells.

[Narrator] For older historians, the reason why is simple.

[Crowd] Black Lives Matter!

Black Lives Matter is addressing the same issues that Ida B.

Wells took up in the 1880s and 90s.

Moreover, Black Lives Matter has a considerable component of black female leadership.

I need for these Racist systems to be dismantled.

What we need is equity, what we need is recovery.

[Charles] They're taking to the streets, [Charles] They're writing essays, they're organizing cadres.

Black Lives Matter!

Women are faith and we believe in fighting.

[Charles] They are addressing systemic violence more broadly than simply the issue of police brutality.

I want jobs and resources in Black and brown communities on the South and West sides of Chicago.

Violence is caused by economic disparity, it's caused by the increasing gap between the rich and the poor man that is exemplified by this city.

[Charles] This is Ida B.

Wells.

[Narrator] In the last and unfinished chapter of her autobiography, Ida B.

Wells offered words of wisdom to future generations writing: [Actor] Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Ida B.

Wells is clearly outstanding and unique.

There's no doubt about that, but I think what she would say is use your talent to the best of your ability, to see her life as an example of what it takes to create change and the price, but not to glorify her or make her out of reach of the actions of ordinary people.

Lead support for Ida B.

Wells.

A Chicago story special is provided by the Negaunee Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Jim and Kay Maybie, Strategic Growth and Transformation Partners and by the following donors.