The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument is a bronze and marble public sculpture by artist Richard Hunt. Located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, the sculpture takes its name from a quote by civil rights activist and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931): “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them“. It was unveiled in 2021.
The abstract art sculpture is 35 feet high and features two etched images of Wells-Barnett as well as some of her famous quotes. One inscription reads: “What is or should be a woman? … A strong bright presence, thoroughly imbued with a sense of her mission on earth and a desire to fill it.”
The plaque says:
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
July 16, 1862 – march 25, 1031Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Orphaned at 16, she became a teacher to support her five younger siblings. She later moved to Memphis where she became a pioneering data journalist, newspaper co-owner, and civil rights activist. In 1892 after three of her friends were lynched, she urged people to boycott businesses and leave the city. She investigated and documented other lynchings. In response to her outspoken writings, a mob destroyed her printing press and threatened her life. She continued writing and speaking in New York City, then across Gret Britain and the United States. In 1895 she moved to Chicago, married attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett, and hyphenated her names to Wells-Barnett. She continued her activism while raising a family of four children. She co-founded the NAACP and founded he Alpha Suffrage Club — an organization of Black women that worked for women’s political empowerment. She worked with Jane Addams to prevent the segregation of public schools, helped establish Chicago’s first kindergarten for Black children, and founded the Negro Fellowship League to provide housing and job assistance to black migrants. wells-Barnett and her husband are interred together in Chicago’s Oak Wood Cemetery. In 2020 Ida B. Wells was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize citation “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrendous and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”
From 1919 to 1929, the couple lived at 3624 S. Martin Luther King Drive, Chicago. The Ida B. Wells-Barnett Houe is a National Historic Landmark.
At the dedication, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said:
We are about to unveil a monument to a black woman who actually did believe in the ideas of this country. We create monuments because we want monuments to tell us publicly how we see ourselves as a nation. So, the fact that across this country we don’t have monuments to the enslaved, but we have monuments to those that enslaved them. Monuments to enslavers, bigots and colonizers are coming down all across the country. We have to not leave an empty space there. We have fill in those spaces with the spaces of the true Americans who actually fought for the ideas of liberty and freedom, and that’s what we are doing today with the Ida B. Wells monument.
