Remember When: She Refused to March in the Back

She was told to march at the back of the parade, out of sight, so Southern suffragists wouldn't feel uncomfortable marching next to a Black woman. She said no.

Born into slavery in Mississippi on July 16, 1862, Ida B. Wells grew up to become one of the most fearless investigative journalists in American history. She spent her entire life refusing to accept the place society carved out for her.

Her crusade began in 1892 when her close friend Tom Moss was lynched in Memphis. His offense was running a successful Black-owned grocery store that competed with a white business. Turning her pen into a weapon, Wells independently investigated lynchings across the South, publishing explosive exposés like Southern Horrors. She dismantled the lie that lynching victims were criminals, proving terror was used to maintain economic dominance. A white mob burned her newspaper office to the ground for it. She kept writing anyway.

Years later, that unyielding spirit met the women's suffrage movement. During the 1913 National Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C., organizers requested that Black delegates march in the rear to appease Southern marchers. Wells flatly refused. She waited on the sidewalk until the all-white Illinois delegation marched past, then calmly stepped into the street and took her place at the front of her state’s line—exactly where she belonged.

Wells knew the fight for the ballot and racial justice were the same fight. She co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and organized Chicago’s powerful Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913, mobilizing Black women to use their collective political power.

In 2020, nearly ninety years after her death, Wells was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for "outstanding and courageous reporting" on the violence she spent a lifetime exposing. She never waited for permission to tell the truth, and she never waited for an invitation to stand where she belonged.