Ida B. Wells-Barnett—journalist, suffragist and anti-lynching activist—is Thursday’s Google doodle, in honor of her 153rd birthday. An often unsung American icon, Wells was an outspoken woman who fought with the national president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances E. Willard, about intersectionality before the word was even invented.
Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, Wells was the eldest of eight children. Her parents were active in the Republican party during Reconstruction and the board of Rust College, but died of yellow fever when Ida was just 16. Instead of allowing her siblings to be split up between her parents’ friends, Ida became a country teacher to support herself and her five remaining siblings.
Later, when her siblings were older, the Wells family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Ida attended Fisk University and worked as a teacher. During her stay, she got into an altercation with a train conductor. Wells had purchased a first class ticket which was not in the Jim Crow segregated section and the train’s conductor tried to forcibly remove her from her seat. Ida wasn’t having that and “fastened her teeth on the back of his band,” according to PBS. Wells was kicked off the train that day but she sued and won $500, though her victory was ultimately overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court.
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