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___It was a day like any other for Ida B. Wells as she sat in the Lady's Coach on the way to her teaching job in Woodstock, Tennessee, ten miles north of Memphis, where she currently lived. It was May 4, 1884, and Ida was contenting herself with a book when the train conductor suddenly approached her and demanded that she give up her seat. She was to head over to the "Colored" section of the train, he said. Wells scoffed at this--knowing that that car was also the smokers' car, a place she assuredly did not want to be, and not fit for a lady, besides. Ida simply refused to comply, a haunting mirror action of what a future civil rights leader, Rosa Parks, would do in the same predicament on a bus decades later. Like Parks, Ida believed in her right to sit where she pleased, and she rejected the bigoted Jim Crow Law that had been issued in Tennessee after the Civil War, establishing segregation between blacks and whites on public transportations like trains. ThingThe conductor resorted to force, attempting to yank Ida from her seat, but she responded, true to her fiery spirit, by sinking her teeth into his hand. To her horror and disgust, Ida saw that a jeering crowd of white women had formed, goading the conductor on. He did not back down, instead procuring another man to help. Together, they succeeded in dragging Ida from her seat. Infuriated and mortified, Ida chose to get off the train rather than walk back, defeated, to the colored car. ThingIda decided to fight back by filing a lawsuit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. She hired a black lawyer to represent her. This was a costly mistake, however, and she soon discovered that he had been intimidated and "bought off by the road", as she wrote in her autobiography. She took a chance with another lawyer, a white man named James M. Greer. He did an astounding job and later that year, just before the Christmas of 1884, the local courts judged in Ida's favor. The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche newspaper reported the decision in an article with the headline, "A DARK DAMSEL OBTAINS A VERDICT FOR DAMAGES AGAINST THE CHESAPEAKE & OHIO RAILROAD--VERDICT FOR $500." When the railroad appealed later on and the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision in 1877 (she was ordered to pay the railroad a fine of $200), Ida was crushed. She recorded in her diary: ThingI felt so disappointed, because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now if it were possible would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them. ThingIda hardened herself after this experience. A fire had been kindled inside her, a burning desire to oppose what she recognized as wrong. She armed herself with her speech and her pen, and embraced this calling for justice that she would heed for the rest of her life.
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