Ida B. Wells & Coretta Scott King

Ida B. Wells was an African-American activist and journalist that created and led an anti-lynching campaign in the United States during the 1890s. Ida was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862. Her mother's name was Elizabeth "Izzy Bell" Warrenton and her father name was James Wells. By the time Ida was born, President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation which made Ida and her family free. At the age of 14, Ida started her teaching career and continued to teach after moving to Memphis. Tennessee in 1884.Two years later, Ida's parents died from yellow fever. After her parents' death, Ida continued to work as a teacher and took care of her brothers and sisters. One day Ida was taking a train ride. She bought a first-class ticket, and when she boarded the train, the conductor told her she had to move. The first-class section was for white people only. Ida refused to move and was forced to leave her seat. Ida didn't think this was fair. She sued the train company and won $500 but, unfortunately the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision later. This brought Ida to write articles about the racial injustices of the South and later on led her to begin her own newspaper called the Free Speech. The Free Speech is a newspaper that Ida created where she wrote freely about racial segregation and discrimination.

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In 1892, one of Ida's friends, Tom Moss was arrested for murdering a white man. Tom was protecting his grocery store when a group of white men broke in and destroyed his store, putting him out of business for good. Before Tom could go to trial, he was killed by a mob. During those times, this type of killing without a trial was called a lynching. Ida wrote about the lynching in her paper. This caused many people to become upset. The offices of the Free Speech in Memphis were destroyed and Ida decided to stay in New York and go to work for a New York newspaper called the New York Age. There she wrote articles about lynching that let people throughout the country understand how often innocent African-Americans were being killed without a trial. Ida's efforts had a great impact in lowering the number of lynching's that occurred throughout the country. Over time, Ida B. Wells became famous through her writings about racial issues. She worked with African-American leaders such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to fight discrimination and segregation laws. Ida also believed in women's rights, including the right for women to vote. She founded the first black women's suffrage association in 1913 called the Alpha Suffrage Club. She even got married in 1898 to Ferdinand L. Barnett and they had four children; two boys and two girls. From 1898 Into 1902 Wells-Barnett served as secretary of the National Afro-American Council, and in 1910 she founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League, which aided newly arrived migrants from the South. From 1913 to 1916 she served as a probation officer of the Chicago municipal court. Ida is remembered as one of the early leaders in the fight for African-American Civil Rights. Her campaign against lynching helped to bring to light the injustice of the practice to the rest of the United States and the world. Ida died from kidney disease in Chicago on March 25, 1931.

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Coretta Scott King was an African-American civil rights activist and the wife of 1960s civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta Scott King was born on April 27, 1927 in Marion, Alabama to the parents of Bernice McMurray Scott and Obadiah "Obe" Scott. While working toward a degree in voice, she met Martin Luther King, Jr. They got married in 1953 and had four children. After both had completed their studies, the Kings moved to Montgomery, Alabama where Martin Luther King had accepted a position as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Coretta Scott King joined her husband in civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s, taking part in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and efforts to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. After the assassination of her husband in 1968, Coretta continued to be active in the civil rights movement. She founded in Atlanta, Georgia the Martin Luther King Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, also known as the King Center. She wrote a memoir, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1969 and edited with her son Dexter. In 1969 she established an annual Coretta Scott King Award to honor an African American author of an outstanding text for children, and in 1979 a similar award was added to honor an outstanding African American illustrator. Coretta Scott King died on January 30, 2006 in Rosario Beach, Mexico to respiratory insufficiency problems.

There are many similarities and differences between the two influential women I chose to do my "Women's History Month Project'' on. Ida B. Wells and Coretta Scott King were both African American women who were activists and journalists that led many people to open their eyes and ears towards racial injustices that were happening, not just in the area they lived but everywhere around the country. Ida B. Wells was a more violent civil rights activist than Coretta Scott King, who was a more laid-back nonviolent type of person. Ida B. Wells had to get her point across in an aggressive way through her newspapers, letters, and speeches. Coretta Scott King made her point across through the assassination of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., and through her books about African-American people and the unfair situations they were in at that time. Ida B. Wells was born into slavery and had more experience with racial injustices than Coretta Scott King, who was not born into slavery. Both women went through traumatic experiences. Coretta Scott King was there when her husband got assassinated and Ida B. Wells was there when her friend Tom Moss was lynched by a white mob.

The steps I would take to promote the message shared by these two influential women in history are: I would create my own school newspaper campaign and world-wide website to spread the word; equality. These two women fought for equality. They may have had different ways to fight for their rights and others, but they both had the same concept; equality. In my school newspaper I would talk about what both of these two women had seen with their own eyes, living in a state of inequality, racial injustice, discrimination, segregation, etc. To show that it was bad then, innocent African-American children, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, etc. were being hung, shot, stabbed, and even sent to death. To show that it is still happening in the world we live in today, and sharing this message with others in my school newspaper and website, will give people a better understanding of what children who are born into this world are facing. To show what we really need to teach young children and even adults in the world today; equality. Without peace, there is no equality and without no equality, there is no peace. Without peace, there is just going to be a repeat of bad history.