AFRICAN AMERICAN ACTIVISTS Claudette Colvin and Ida B. Wells

Claudette Colvin was an important figure in the civil rights movement. She was born on September 5, 1939. At birth, she was adopted by C. P. Colvin and Mary Anne Colvin, who lived in a poor neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama. This was a time of intense racial divide, and Colvin was a victim of it along with the rest. At the age of four, she was shopping for groceries with her mother, when a group of white children came into the store. They asked Colvin to touch hands with them, in order to compare the colors of their skin. Colvin did so, but received a slap and a severe reprimand from her mother, saying that she was not allowed to touch white people. FOR MORE

Ida Bell Wells wrote for the Chicago newspaper the Daily Inter Ocean. She gained fame for her investigative reporting of lynching in the U.S., demonstrating that in many cases African Americans were being lynched as a means of punishing blacks who “didn’t know their place,” rather than as punishment for a specific crime. And, of course, she pointed out that rarely was any evidence used to justify a lynching even when a crime had been committed. FOR MORE