Early Life and Education
Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, just before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Her father James Wells was a carpenter and her mother was Elizabeth "Lizzie" Warrenton Wells. Both parents were enslaved until freed under the Proclamation, one year after she was born.
Ida's father James was a master at carpentry and known as a "race man", someone who worked for the advancement of blacks. He was very interested in politics, and was a member of the Loyal League. He attended public speeches and campaigned for local black candidates, but he never ran for office. Her mother Elizabeth was a cook for the Bolling household before her death from yellow fever. She was a religious woman who was very strict with her children. Wells' parents took their children's education very seriously. They wanted their children to take advantage of having the opportunity to be educated and attend school.
Wells attended a school for freed people called Shaw University, now Rust College in Holly Springs. She was expelled from the college for her rebellious behavior and temper after confronting the president of the college. While visiting her grandmother in the Mississippi Valley in 1878, she received word that her hometown of Holly Springs had suffered a yellow fever epidemic. At the age of 16, she lost both her parents and her 10-month old brother, Stanley, the youngest. The 1878 epidemic swept through the South with many fatalities.
Read more about this topic: Ida B. Wells
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“To approach a city ... as if it were [an] ... architectural problem ... is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life.... The results ... are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)