Ida B. Wells-Barnett got a new plaza for her 164th birthday — one designed to make her impossible to overlook.
At the eastern end of Beale Street, city leaders cut the ribbon on a redesigned Ida B. Wells Plaza, where the investigative journalist and anti-lynching crusader’s bronze statue now stands higher and more visible, surrounded by new paving, landscaping, lighting and displays that help tell her story.
The ceremony was held July 16, the date Wells-Barnett was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862.
“This is an important public space in our city, and public spaces tell the story of the city,” Memphis Mayor Paul Young said. “The names that we choose, the places we preserve, the people we honor — those things reflect our values and shape how future generations of Memphians understand our great city.”
The bronze statue was initially installed at Beale and Fourth streets in 2021. Fourth Street has since been renamed Ida B. Wells-Barnett Street. But Young acknowledged that the original placement did not fully capture the dignity or importance of the woman it honored. “When we erected the statue, there were some issues with the location and how it was placed,” Young said.
The statue has been elevated so it can be seen from farther away. Other improvements include specialty lighting, new landscaping and irrigation, redesigned planters, seating, exhibit foundations and signs explaining Wells-Barnett’s life and work. City capital records list $450,895 in appropriations for the renovation.
The plaza also serves as a new entrance to Church Park, near FedExForum and historic First Baptist Church-Beale, a location tied closely to Wells-Barnett’s work as a journalist.
“Now what we have today is a project where we have a plaza that actually reflects the beauty and the dignity that Ida B. Wells deserves,” Young said.
Taking a stand for history
Young said the project dates to his years as director of the city’s Division of Housing and Community Development, when Rev. Dr. L. LaSimba M. Gray Jr. approached him about creating a public memorial to Wells-Barnett.
Gray, who helped organize the Ida B. Wells Memphis Memorial Committee, said the effort grew from his realization that Wells-Barnett’s contributions were in danger of being forgotten.
“When I learned that there was a systematic effort to erase her contribution, then I doubled down, making sure that it didn’t happen,” Gray said.
He sought the support of the late scholar and civil rights activist Miriam DeCosta-Willis, editor of “The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells.”
“She said, ‘Let’s do it, LaSimba,’” Gray recalled. “She said, ‘But LaSimba, I’m up in age and sick.’ I said, ‘You wouldn’t do a thing. Just give your endorsement.’”
With that endorsement, Gray said, he went to work raising money, building public support and recruiting designers to shape the plaza. The statue itself was created by Andrea and Larry Lugar of Lugar Bronze Foundry.
Young credited Nixon General Contractors, landscape architecture firm JPA Inc. and Lugar Bronze Foundry with helping complete the redesigned space.
“History should be very visible,” Young said. “It shouldn’t just exist in books and museums, but in the everyday places where people gather, where they walk and where they learn.”
From Holly Springs to history
Wells-Barnett moved to Memphis after losing her parents and a younger brother during the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. She worked as a teacher before emerging as a journalist, newspaper editor and outspoken critic of racial segregation.
Her reporting took on new urgency after the 1892 lynching of her friend Thomas Moss and his business associates, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart. The three men were connected to People’s Grocery, a Black-owned store whose success threatened a nearby white-owned business.
After the men were arrested following an armed confrontation, a white mob removed them from jail and lynched them. Wells-Barnett investigated their deaths and challenged the claims routinely used to justify lynching, arguing that racial violence was often used to suppress Black economic and political progress.
A white mob later destroyed her newspaper office and threatened her life while she was away from Memphis. She never returned to live in the city, but continued her anti-lynching campaign through writing, public lectures and international speaking tours.
Historic topics on display
Those painful chapters are reflected in the plaza’s artwork, including an installation titled “The Tree of Strange Fruit” that invokes lynching, as well as another that recalls the printing press Wells-Barnett used to spread information.
Memphis Parks Director Justice Bolden said the installations are meant to force visitors to confront the past while also looking toward a better future.
“We can’t forget about the past,” Bolden said. “Any time you install monuments or signage, it’s a reminder to educate those about what has happened in our past, but it’s also an opportunity to look over and see a statue and landscaping and beautiful paver brick that reminds you of what our future looks like.”
Bolden said he hopes young people who visit the plaza leave with “a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, a sense that ‘I matter.’”
Young said the plaza can also function as a gathering place for families, parade participants and visitors finishing a walk along Beale Street.
For Gray, however, its location carries a deeper significance. Wells-Barnett worked near the church and operated a printing office along Beale, placing her at the center of Black Memphis’ political, business and cultural life.
“I think the blues always have been an expression of pain, but this is the crucible,” Gray said. “Beale Street meets history and culture in a real meaningful way that cannot be ignored.
“If anything was going to happen in Memphis in that time or in that era, it started on Beale Street — and Ida B. Wells was in the mix.”
