Ida B. Wells - Later Public Career

Later Public Career

Wells received much support from other social activists and her fellow clubwomen. In his response to her article in the Free Speech, Frederick Douglass expressed approval of her work: "You have done your people and mine a service…What a revelation of existing conditions your writing has been for me." (Freedman, 1994). Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to Europe with the help of many supporters. In 1896, Wells founded the National Association of Colored Women, and also founded the National Afro-American Council. Wells formed the Women's Era Club, the first civic organization for African-American women. This later was named the Ida B. Wells Club, in honor of its founder.

In 1899, Wells was struggling to manage a home life and a career life, but she was still a fierce campaigner in the anti-lynching circle. This was illustrated when the National Association of Colored Women's club met that year in Chicago. To Wells' surprise, she was not invited to take part in the convention. When she confronted the president of the club, Mrs. Terrell told her that the women of Chicago wrote to say that if Wells were to take part in the club, they would no longer aid the association. Wells later learned that Terrell's own competitiveness played a part.

After traveling through the British Isles and the United States teaching and lecturing about the problem of lynchings in the United States, Wells settled in Chicago and worked to improve conditions for its rapidly growing African-American population. People were starting to move out of the South to northern industrial cities in the Great Migration. Competition for jobs and housing caused a rise in social tensions because of the rapid changes. African-American migrants also competed with an expanding wave of rural immigrants from Europe, who were now in competition for jobs. Wells spent the latter thirty years of her life in Chicago working on urban reform. She also raised her family and worked on her autobiography. After her retirement, Wells wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928).

She never finished it; the book ends in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word. Wells died of uremia (kidney failure) in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of sixty-eight.