The Fight She Started Isn't Finished

Ida B. Wells spent her life proving a single, stubborn idea: that the truth, documented and refused to be buried, is stronger than the power arranged against it.

Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, she became one of the most consequential Americans of her century, and was then very nearly erased from the story of it. She was a journalist who investigated lynching when doing so could cost her life. She was an organizer who helped found the NAACP and built women's clubs when the existing ones shut her out. She was a suffragist who refused to march at the back. She did not wait for permission, and she did not wait for safety. She got the facts, and she put them where they could not be denied.

A century later, the causes she named are contested all over again. A free press is thinning out, newsroom by newsroom. The rights she organized for are argued over from the ballot box to equal protection under the law. And for most of that century, her own name was left out of the textbooks it belonged in.

Not a monument, a movement

The temptation now is to make Ida B. Wells safe. To cast her in bronze, name a school, and consider the debt paid. She would have refused that, too. She measured people not by their admiration but by their action, by what they built and whom they stood beside.

So Rise With Wells is not a memorial. It is a working movement, organized around the three fronts of her fight:

A Free Press Under Fire puts her methods, verify, document, publish, into the hands of a new generation through Bylines for Justice. Civil Rights on the Line builds the coalition of chapters, campuses, and congregations that carries her causes forward, city by city. And A New Generation Meets Ida helps students in HBCUs and classrooms not just discover her, but apprentice to her craft.

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. Ida B. Wells

The film, and the fight it funds

At the center is WELLS, a film in the making that brings her fearless life to the screen. But a film is a beginning, not an ending. Rise With Wells exists so that the story does not stop at the credits, so that the dollars, the bylines, and the record all keep moving after the lights come up.

The fight she started isn't finished. It was never going to be finished by one woman, in one lifetime, with one press. She knew that. She left the work, and the method, to whoever would take it up. That is the invitation, and it is open.