The movement to honor Ida B. Wells gains momentum

Across the top, the grave marker at Oak Woods Cemetery reads BARNETT. Along the bottom, “Crusaders for Justice.” On the left, there is her name: Ida B. Wells, beside her husband’s. 

This stone is the rare marker in Chicago that honors Wells, a hero in an unending battle against racial injustice who died in 1931. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Miss., Wells became a crusading African American journalist who exposed the crime and shame of lynching and fought for women’s suffrage.

After a white mob reacted to one of her anti-lynching editorials by destroying the presses of her Memphis newspaper, the Free Speech, she carried the struggle to Chicago in the early 1890s and lived half of her life here.

Yet her pioneering work is all but unrecognized in the city, which has no shortage of statues and monuments to leading white men.

Michelle Duster, her great-granddaughter, aims to change that. For the past decade, Duster and a few friends have labored, dollar by dollar, to raise $300,000 to build a monument to Wells. They’re still barely halfway there, but the word is getting out.

“You can’t just gloss over this history,” said Duster, a writer and lecturer who sees a need for Wells’s example these days. “She not only believed in certain principles and values but she sacrificed herself over and over and over again. She was called fearless. I don’t believe that she had no fear. I believe she had fear and she decided to keep going forward.”