Ida B. Wells

Her fight began on a train. In 1884 Wells sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad after being forced from the first-class ladies' coach. A circuit court awarded her five hundred dollars, but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed it in 1887. The school board fired her in 1891 over an editorial criticizing segregated schools, which pushed her into full-time journalism at the Free Speech. After a mob in 1892 killed three grocers, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, she wrote Southern Horrors from New York.

What the plaque says

Ida B. Wells 1862-1931 Ida B. Wells crusaded against lynchings in Memphis and the South. In 1892 while editor of the Memphis Free Speech, located in this vicinity, she wrote of the lynching of three Black businessmen. As a result, her newspaper office was destroyed and her life threatened. After moving to New York, she began an international speaking tour where she influenced the establishment of the British Anti-Lynching Society. She cofounded the NAACP in America and organized the first Black women's political organization. A Chicago housing project is named in her honor.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — steps away
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 0.5 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• Sun Studio — 0.8 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Pee Wee's Saloon — steps away
• Danny Thomas — steps away
• Rufus Thomas, Jr. — steps away
• Nat D. Williams — steps away