Excerpt from "Lighting the Way"

Chapter 1

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

One evening in september 1883, a young schoolteacher named Ida B. Wells bought a first-class railroad ticket in Memphis, Tennessee, and boarded the eastbound Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern train to Woodstock, Tennessee. In some ways, Ida was a model of proper Southern womanhood—petite, poised, pretty, and a bit vain about her appearance.

But Wells was no Scarlett O'Hara. For one thing, she had been born a slave in 1862, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation. Her parents died in a yellow fever epidemic when she was sixteen, and after that, she'd struggled to help support her younger siblings. She was a conscientious but unenthusiastic teacher and longed for a dramatic and wide-reaching career. She had no interest in "sugaring" young men to snare a beau, but she worried that she'd never fall in love and never have a family. She was a devout Baptist with impeccably high standards of social behavior, and yet her powerful sense of justice and her refusal to tolerate abuse overrode her notions of propriety, as the conductor on that train headed to Woodstock, Tennessee, would soon discover.

Shortly after the train left Memphis, the conductor informed Wells that she would have to move to the crowded and dirty smoking car, which also served as the "Negro car." Wells refused, pointing out that she'd bought a first-class ticket and was in the only first-class car. Writing her memoirs fifty years later, Ida recalled the scene:

He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the back of the seat in front and was holding to the back and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggage man and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out. They were encouraged to do this by the attitude of the white ladies and gentlemen in the car; some of them even stood on the seats so that they could get a good view and continued applauding the conductor for his brave stand.

Furious and humiliated, Wells left the train at the next stop. But she was far from defeated, and she thought that Tennessee law might offer her some recourse. In 1881, the legislature had passed a law requiring railroads to provide "separate but equal" accommodations for African-American passengers. The law was passed over the objections of the four African-American members of the legislature, who'd pushed for a ban on discrimination but had been overwhelmed by the growing power of white conservatives who were regaining seats as federal support for Reconstruction waned.

Ida hired an African-American attorney named Thomas Cassells to file suit. Cassells, working with a white attorney named James Greer, argued that the treatment of Wells violated the legal standard because there was no equivalent first-class "colored" car. In May 1884, Memphis Circuit Court Judge James O. Pierce, a Union veteran from Minnesota, found in Wells's favor and awarded her $200 in damages. The railroad immediately filed an appeal.

Cassells urged Ida to settle, assuring her that the railroad had promised she wouldn't be bothered anymore. Angered by his defeatism and suspecting he'd been bought off, she promptly fired him and hired Greer to fight the appeal. Soon after, on another train trip, Wells was again asked to leave the first-class car for which she had bought a ticket. She had Greer bring another suit, this time alleging both assault and discrimination. This second case was argued in November 1884, again in Judge Pierce's court. Pierce dismissed the assault charge but ruled in Wells's favor on the discrimination charge and awarded her $500 in damages (roughly equivalent to $9,000 today). The Memphis Daily Appeal noted the verdict in an article headlined, A DARKY DAMSEL OBTAINS A VERDICT FOR DAMAGES AGAINST THE CHESAPEAKE & OHIO RAILROAD.

Again the railroad appealed, and in the spring of 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict. The railroad's attorneys carried the day with their argument that the accommodations offered to Wells were "alike in every respect as to comfort, convenience, and safety" and that her true purpose was "to harass with a view to this suit." Wells was even held liable for court costs, which exceeded the amount she had originally been awarded.