World's Columbian Exposition

 

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett 

 (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931)

World's Columbian Exposition

In 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago. Together with Frederick Douglass and other black leaders, Wells organized a black boycott of the fair, for its exclusion of African Americans from the exhibits. 

Wells, Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Wells' future husband, Ferdinand L. Barnett, wrote sections of the pamphlet The Reason Why: The Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, which detailed the progress of blacks since their arrival in America and also exposed the basis of Southern lynchings. 

Wells later reported to Albion W. Tourgée that copies of the pamphlet had been distributed to more than 20,000 people at the fair.^[44] That year she started work with The Chicago Conservator, the oldest African-American newspaper in the city.