Did you know that over half a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, Ida B. Wells was removed from a train for refusing to move into a segregated carriage?
Ida Wells, a skilled writer, and journalist was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862 during the Civil War. She was an activist and researcher who exposed the horrors of lynching and co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).
Wells battled sexism and racism across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, founding the National Association of Coloured Women’s Club. She was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2020.
Now the American toy company Mattel is honouring her in a Barbie doll. The doll clutches Memphis Free Speech, the newspaper she co-owned. Other women Mattel is honouring include Sally Ride, an astronaut, and Maya Angelou, the author who became the first black woman to appear on the quarter coin.
“When I see the same enormities practiced upon beings whose complexion and blood claim kindred with my own, I curse the perpetrators and weep over the wretched victims of their rapacity. Indeed, truth and justice demand from me the confession that the Christian slaves among the barbarians of Africa are treated with more humanity than the African slaves among the professing Christians of civilized America; and yet here sensibility bleeds at every pore for the wretches whom fate has doomed to slavery.” Such testimony would seem to furnish”
― Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Slave Narrative Six Pack 4 – The History of Mary Prince, William W. Brown, White Slavery, The Freedmen’s Book, Lucretia Mott and Lynch Law
