“RESISTANCE”: THE BLACK PRESS Ida B.Wells-Barnett, Journalist, Publisher and Activist

By Jaylen Scott Winter Intern New Journal and Guide

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a prominent AfricanAmerican journalist and activist. She played a big part in the anti-lynching campaign in America, with a goal to fi nd the real reason behind the lynchings of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South. Despite her life being in danger numerous times, Wells stepped up to the plate and showed true bravery as a Black journalist, speaking out about the injustices that Black People were going through during this time, so that everyone could be informed about the true nature of lynchings.

Wells was born on July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, into slavery in the midst of the Civil War. She didn’t remember being enslaved due to being so young by the time the Civil war ended and slavery was abolished, but she has her parents’ stories and the marks on her mother’s back that allowed her to see the suffering that her parents and those like her experienced. She was the eldest of 8 children and was born to James and Elizabeth Wells, who, after slavery was abolished, learned how to read and became politically active during the Reconstruction period, which took place during most of Ida’s childhood. Her parents made sure to instill the importance of education to all of their kids, and she even attended Rust college before she moved on to become a teacher at the age of 14. Two years later, she would unfortunately learn that her parents and her youngest brother both died of yellow fever. With the remaining siblings left orphaned, she and her siblings moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she would take up a teaching job to help care for her family, as well as continue her own studies at Fisk University in Nashville.

During this time, Wells, at age 22, would start to experience the beginnings of the Jim Crow Era of the South. In 1884, Wells fi led a lawsuit against the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad company due to being kicked out of the fi rst class train despite having bought a ticket. While winning her case, it was later revered in federal court, and 2 years later she would lose her teaching job after her contract wasn’t removed.

It was here that she would have her footing in journalism, writing a few newspapers artifices under the pen name “Iola” and going into journalism full time. This would be the start of her beginning of making Black History, becoming the fi rst female co-owner and editor of a Black Newspaper in the U.S. after she bought a share in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and was appointed as the editor.

In 1892, Well’s friend Thomas Moss, who was a Memphis letter carrier and grocer, was lynched by a white mob. The event caused Wells to urge Black people to leave Memphis for their own safety. It also caused Wells to focus her attention on the causes and reasons given for the lynchings in her area, leading her to investigate the true reasons for these lynchings.

She started to report her fi ndings in the newspaper, and because of this, the residents of Memphis were enraged. A white mob ended up burning the press down, causing Wells and James Flemming, the coowner of the newspaper, to fl ee Memphis. But this would not be the ending of her journalism career and activism – it was only the beginning of her antilynching campaign.

She would continue the anti-lynching campaign in New York taking a job with the New York Age as a staff writer and changing her pen name to “Exiled.” Wells would go on to document about 728 lynching cases in America that occurred between 1884 and 1892, going on to publish a pamphlet known as “Southern Horrors,” that 3 years later would be published as “The Red Record.”

Wells’ 100-page pamphlet contained a more detailed description of

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Continued from page 5A the lynchings happening in America, as well as a closer look at the struggles Black people had to go through after the civil war. She also would take her activism all across America, as well as outside of America, traveling around the country to speak about these cases, and even traveling to Great Britain to express these findings.

In the decades before the American Civil War, however, increasing numbers of slaves resisted bondage and managed to escape to the North or to Canada via the Underground Railroad network of antislavery advocates.

Virginia had among the greatest number of fugitives, by sea, to North Canada.

During this time, Wells also married Ferdinand Lee Barnett on June 27, 1895, and had two children with him. Wells would go on to accomplish more in her life as an activist, making history again when she became a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also known as the NAACP. A year later, she founded and became the fi rst president of the Negro Fellowship League and in 1913 she would go on to form what was possibly the first Black women’s suffrage group, Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club.

On March 25, 1931, Wells passed away to kidney disease in Chicago, Illinois. In 2020, she was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrifi c and vicious violence against African-Americans during the era of lynching.”

A posting in the Norfolk Southern Argus on April 22, 1854, complained about the “outrageous thefts that are daily being committed upon us, in the running off of our slaves.” The paper assumed “that secret agencies are at work in our midst, for the purpose of offering inducements to our slaves to make their escape to the North,” and estimated that in the last year, slaveholders there had lost $75,000 in the form of runaway slaves. “A man may be wealthy today,” the editors wrote, “but tomorrow his property may have vanished into empty space.”

Several factors made Virginia a place where the Underground Railroad flourished. It had the largest enslaved population of any state and a large free Black population. It also bordered the free states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. And from Wellsville, Ohio, it was only 90 miles to Lake Erie, across which lay Canada.

Virginia also boasted a number of sizable port cities, in Portsmouth, Newport News, and Hampton.

Slaves were hired out to work in the maritime industry as unsupervised pilots and in other jobs, supported the escapees.

Also, Black churches and free Black neighborhoods hosted escapees and helped them board ships to freedom.

The congregation of Portsmouth’s 250-year-old Emanuel AME Church was one of the sites in the city

Harriet Tubman “Black Moses”

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c.March 1822[1] – March 10, 1913), also known as “Black Moses,” was a freedom fighter who resisted slavery and helped deliver a number of Blacks (some estimates as high as 300) to freedom in the North, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years.Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.

Source: Wikipedia

Virginia 3rd District

Congressman Robert Scott said in a statement, “As people across the country protest the violent arrest of Nichols, demonstrators are also calling on lawmakers to do more to reform policing.

Scott said he is asking Congressional Republicans to work with Democrats to pass “critical” police reform legislation.

“This is the latest in a lengthy and disturbing list of incidents of police brutality and we cannot let this kind of behavior continue to go unanswered,” Scott said.

Scott said he voted twice for the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and is asking Congressional Republicans to “stop blocking” the legislation.

“There is a continuing drumbeat of these kinds of cases and everybody says: ‘Well, something has to be done!’ Well, we need to just do something,” Scott said. “We need to make sure that bill gets revived so these incidences don’t happen again.”

“There are a lot of things it does,” Scott said. “First of all, making sure they get the appropriate training, and funding for training –particularly on implicit bias, and profiling.”

Scott said the legislation would lead to “real police accountability” and safer communities.

Former Policeman Rick James, who was in law enforcement for 27 years, lectures Norfolk Police trainees on the conditional rights of citizens and how they should be addressed when they are encountered.

“If there is one word to describe this situation it is ‘disappointment,’” James said. “This has set community-police relations

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In contrast, the Memphis officers were immediately fired and arrested, and the police unions did not offer them any support.

“What I witnessed in that video was horrific. It was a barbaric assault on another human being and is sickening,” Maryland State Fraternal Order of Police President Clyde Boatwright said.

“This does not represent policing or the men and women who wear a badge and dutifully protect their communities. I hesitate to even call these men police back 10 years. I am glad that the police chief’s response to fire the officers was swift and she released the video ... which would have taken a year before.”

“They have all of the evidence before them,” he said. “As a Black police officer, it is hard ... hard because we should have a better cultural understanding and empathy.”

He noted that there the officers in Memphis should have been better supervised by someone on the scene who could have told their colleagues “To stop.”

“It was far more rampant in the ’80s when I started doing police work than it was in the ’90s or 2000s,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina.

To mitigate the potential for escalation and confusion during police encounters, today’s police training typically calls for a single officer at the scene to issue clear and specific commands.

“They don’t even have to go back decades,” said state Delegate Angelia Williams Graves. “Just go back a few years to see what has happened to Black folks at the hands of law enforcement in the last few years.”

Graves said fellow Democrats in the state House and Senate have called for better training, support, and stiffer penalties for law enforcement officers.

Before the GOP took over the House of Delegates, legislation was passed that ended “pretextual traffic stops” for violations such as no light illuminating a license plate, defective and unsafe equipment, no brake lights or a high mount stop light, or objects hanging from the rearview mirror.

Now that the GOP controls the House, she said they are working on abolishing that law. But she said it “will die in the State Senate.” officers, because what I saw on that video is not policing. They deserve the strongest punishment allowed by Tennessee law.”

Boatwright added that in his state, “we have had historic police reform in our state over the last 5 years to ensure these types of actions don’t occur in Maryland. We will continue to be a partner with our communities as we work to protect those we serve.”

Patrick Gaspard, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, called driving while Black “one of the most dangerous acts in America.”

“As we all just witnessed in the searing video of the brutal slaughter of Tyre Nichols at the hands of police who are paid by us