Chapter One "And forever free" Jim and Lizzie Wells had no idea what kind of world their firstborn child would grow up in. Would it be one with a master, Holly Springs architect Spires Boling, who held Jim and Lizzie and their children in bondage and made decisions governing every minute of every day of their lives? Or would it be one in which she could live in freedom with only God as her master? Like everyone else in the country in 1862, they would have to wait and see if the country would remain divided in two--one part favoring slave states, one part favoring free states--as the Civil War raged on and Southern Confederate "Rebels" battled Northern Union "Yankee" soldiers. In Holly Springs, Mississippi, the young Wells couple, newly married, had to stay quiet, keeping their hopes to themselves as all around them white townsfolk cheered loudly at the news of every battle the Confederate soldiers won. But by July 16, 1862, when their first child, Ida Bell Wells, was born, Union soldiers had begun making progress, and their dream of freedom for their daughter inched closer. Months later, on January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln''s Emancipation Proclamation declared that "all persons held as slaves" in Confederate states "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Their Ida was six months old and would never know the life of enslavement that her parents had lived.For Jim, a carpenter and master mason, and Lizzie, a cook, both well known for their talents, freedom for their growing family still meant hard work and long hours. Jim and Lizzie had married in enslavement and did it once more in freedom.

They wanted a marriage that was legal in the eyes of the law, not just a union blessed by their former master. Eugenia was born only two years after Ida; then came Alfred, George, Anna, Lily, Stanley, and Eddie, who died at birth. Within a few years, Jim opened his own carpentry shop in a town where few Blacks were business owners. With his own hands he built a small, neat three-room home for his family close to Chulahoma Street and the center of town. But freedom wasn''t free, as the Wells family would soon find out. Ida was just five years old when her father left the house and made his way to the ballot box to cast his first vote as a freedman in the November 1867 election. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 made voting available for all formerly enslaved men, three years before the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which incorporated it into the Constitution and specifically granted Black men the right to vote. Throughout the South, whites who''d fought to ensure the rights of slave owners weren''t pleased at the thought of the Black men they''d once enslaved now having their say in deciding elections.

A rise in threats, assaults, and riots broke out, as new racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, which formed nearly as soon as slavery ended, began terrorizing Negro residents to prevent them from exercising their newfound freedoms, like owning land and businesses and, of course, voting. With his first vote cast, Jim returned to his shop to find it bolted shut by his landlord, angry that his Black tenant had exercised his civic duty. But Jim Wells, son of a white plantation owner, who had watched the mistreatment of his enslaved mother at the hands of his father''s white wife, and who had waited far too long for his own freedom, looked at his locked shop, made his way into town, bought more tools, and rented a new space to house his carpentry shop. Jim and Lizzie had lived in two worlds--slavery and freedom. And now they wanted to make sure their children knew that freedom meant they had a right to a life where they could stand up, speak out, and fight back in ways they never could before their emancipation. Jim joined the local Union League, a group committed to securing the vote for all Negro men. And in addition to continuing to vote in local elections, he made it his business to volunteer, join the Masonic lodge, and serve on the school board. Lizzie knew her husband''s work was important, but it didn''t ease her worrying over his safety.

Alone with the children at night, she paced the floor, waiting for him to arrive safely home from political meetings with other colored men in town. The Wells family were members of the Ashbury Methodist Episcopal Church, cofounded by Moses Adams, a formerly enslaved man, and a white Yankee minister named Albert McDonald. The two were equally committed to good work and the Good Book. Lizzie too was steadfast in her faith. She was dedicated to seeing her fresh-scrubbed, well-dressed children off to Sunday school and church service each and every week, and she was honored with the award for best attendance. When Reverend McDonald asked for a volunteer to record notes from their church meeting and not one in the congregation raised their hand, he made a surprising discovery. None of them, he realized, were able to read or write. Classes in the pews of the church began immediately, with Reverend McDonald as their teacher.

Later he purchased additional land and built a school, Shaw University, the first colored school in Holly Springs. Named for its benefactor Reverend S. O. Shaw, whose contribution of $10,000 helped to build the school, Shaw was a university in name only; the Freedmen''s Aid Society, a group founded by the American Missionary Association during the Civil War, provided Northern teachers for the elementary-level classes. Shaw University was one of over five hundred schools and colleges it founded for newly freed enslaved people. "Our job was to go to school and learn all we could," Ida remembered. And Lizzie and Jim made sure that not just their children, but also Shaw University, thrived, by helping to raise money for new supplies and buildings. Despite his limited education, Jim was appointed to serve on Shaw University''s board of education.

Students young and old walked for miles to attend, including Lizzie, who learned her letters alongside Ida and her other children so that she could finally read her Bible. But Lizzie had another equally pressing need for literacy. Since slavery had ended, she had hoped to reunite with family that had been sold off by their master. Learning to read and write would allow her to send letters back to Virginia and inquire about long-lost relatives, torn from her by slavery. "The colored people take a lively interest in the institution," an 1868 Freedmen''s Aid Society report on Shaw University noted. Ida was one of 40 girls in a class of 124 students at Shaw, and she was certainly one of the best students, spending much of her time in the school library. Every one of her teachers would agree that unlike her female classmates, Ida preferred reading Dickens, Alcott, and Shakespeare to the sewing, washing, and ironing classes required for girls. At home she proudly read aloud the local newspapers to her father and his friends.

Class sizes continued to increase as former slaves took on extra work to pay the fees to educate their children. As the classes grew, the school grew with them. Monies from a Reconstruction-era fund allowed Shaw University, which later became Rust College, to add buildings, baseball fields, and croquet lawns. But all around, the Wells family and many other Negro families like them could feel the anger growing as well, among their white neighbors. Colored people, barely out of slavery''s grasp, being educated at schools with facilities sometimes better than their own was more than some white residents could stomach. The lives of Freedmen''s Aid Society teachers and the school''s founders were threatened; angry mobs marched in the streets, openly taunting their Negro neighbors. And yet President Rutherford B. Hayes, in an attempt to resolve the results of a contested presidential election with the Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden and appeal to Southern Democrats who opposed his election, agreed to what became known as the Compromise of 1877.

The Compromise was actually a concession in which Hayes agreed to withdraw all federal troops from Southern states. Soldiers had been providing much-needed voting and legal protections to Negro residents immediately following the Civil War. The federal troop withdrawal marked the end of the Reconstruction era, a time of reform and growth during which the formerly enslaved could gain a foothold in building lives for themselves by attending schools, working for themselves, and seeking political office. It was also the beginning of the Jim Crow era and the start of voter restrictions, increased racial segregation, and a period of increased racialized threats for Negro citizens. Ida could see how the tension between whites and colored only grew as she began to hear the initials KKK whispered more frequently. She didn''t exactly know what those letters meant, but she knew they represented hate, and she knew they spelled out fear.