This article is a reprint of a recent published New York Times article, focused on historic wedding announcements in the the newspaper.
It looked rather unremarkable, just one short paragraph tucked at the bottom of Page 1 with the headline “Ida Wells Married.” Yet the wedding announcement, published in The New York Times in 1895, was anything but unremarkable. That the nuptials of a black woman, born into slavery 33 years earlier, could make the front page of The Times, speaks to a woman who was, by definition, remarkable.
By the time Ms. Wells married Ferdinand L. Barnett in Chicago, she had risen from being orphaned as a child to one of the most forceful voices against the lynchings of black Americans. A muckraking journalist, she investigated the true motivation behind a vicious lynching in Memphis — a white businessman’s retaliation against a successful black store. In 1892, she was run out of the city, after she wrote about her discovery that white mobs often murdered black men under accusations of rape to cover up consensual sex between white women and black men.
At a time when women still did not have the vote and black Americans were fighting for basic civil rights, Ms. Wells, outspoken and passionate, refused to live within the roles defined for people like her. Three decades before Rosa Parks was born, Ms. Wells was arrested after refusing to give up her seat in a whites-only railroad car and then took her case all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court, where she lost.
She was a feminist long before it was popular and “a race woman” when the leadership of the growing civil rights organizations of the time were resoundingly male. She refused to be sidelined by white feminist organizations, which worried that working for the equality of black women would slow down progress on rights for white women, and was marginalized by organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she helped found.
A sharp-tongued career woman uninterested in being tied down, Ms. Wells had many suitors before meeting her match in Mr. Barnett, a lawyer, “a race man” and a fellow feminist. Still, once she agreed to marry, she postponed the wedding three times in order to keep up with her rigorous antilynching speaking schedule.
Read “Ida Wells Married” on Page 1 (June 28, 1895)
When the day finally came, the 27th of June, 1895, the event was fitting for an icon. “The interest of the public in the affair seemed to be so great that not only was the church filled to overflowing, but the streets surrounding the church were so packed with humanity that it was almost impossible for the carriage bearing the wedding bridal party to reach the church door,” Ms. Wells wrote in her autobiography.
The bridesmaids wore lemon crepe dresses set off with white ribbons, slippers and bows, and the bride strolled down the aisle in a white satin trained gown trimmed with orange blossoms. Newspapers, for both white and black readers, reported on the affair.
Ms. Wells, an originator of “leaning in,” did not allow marriage or motherhood to change her focus on career. “Having always been busy at some work of my own, I decided to continue to work as a journalist, for this was my first love,” she wrote. “And might be said, my only love.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. In 2016, she co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting.