Ida B. Wells, the oldest issue of James and Elizabeth Wells, the subject of this sketch, was born at the beautiful town of Holly Springs, Miss., in the midst of a fateful epoch. Great moral questions were uppermost in the public mind and discussion. In the forum of public prints, in the homes of the slave-holding oligarchy, in the cabins of the haunted and oppressed slave, the one question uppermost in the minds of all was that of abolition of slavery. The immortal Lincoln had issued the most momentous proclamation ever promulgated by the chief executive of a great nation. The alarums of internecine strife were dying away in subdued echoes, in which the sorrows of a great people were commingled with abounding joys. It was a period in which it was well to be born, if a man is a product in the development of his character of contemporaneous as well as prenatal influences.
The subject of this sketch was precocious in the acquisition of useful knowledge. When the Freedmen's School was established at Holly Springs she attended it until the building of what was then known as Shaw, but was subsequently Rust University. In consequence of the death of both parents of yellow fever, within a day of each other, in 1878, she was under the necessity of leaving school for the purpose of undertaking the support and education of the five children, younger than herself, who had been so suddenly committed to her care. A greater responsibility could not have fallen upon shoulders so young and upon one less experienced as a bread-winner, for she had had indulgent parents, whose chief delight was to give their children all the
