Donations pour in for Ida B. Wells monument in Chicago, but $180K still needed
Abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett spent more than half of her life in Chicago. But though she was one of the most prominent black leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries, there’s no monument to her anywhere in the city. Wells’s great-granddaughter and a dedicated group of community members have been trying to change that since 2011, and a new fund-raising push launched on Twitter this week has infused their quest with new urgency.
On Monday, educator and organizer Mariame Kaba announced that she wanted to raise $10,000 for the monument to Wells by May 10, promising to contribute $1,000 of her own on top of that. Kaba rallied people to donate whatever they could to the monument fund with the #IdaPledge hashtag. Since the fund collects money through PayPal, it’s impossible to follow donations in real time. Kaba asked those that contributed to contact her and the promised to tweet a weekly update on progress toward her $10,000 goal.