Well done to everyone who took part in this experiment – there were a lot of intuitive hits among the comments!
The woman in the photo is Ida B Wells, a prominent journalist, newspaper editor and African-American civil rights activist.
Upbringing
Ida B Wells was born in Mississippi in 1862 to slaves, and was the oldest of seven children. Her parents were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation soon after her birth. They both died in a yellow fever epidemic when she was sixteen. She abandoned her education and persuaded a local school to employ her as a teacher so she could support her siblings and keep the family together. At the age of 20 she moved to Memphis with three of her siblings.
Civil Rights Activism
The beginning of her activism and journalism stemmed from an incident which occurred in 1884 while she was travelling on a train. She bought a first class ticket in the ladies car but was asked to move to the smoking car due to the colour of her skin. When she resisted, she was violently dragged from the carriage by the conductor. She bit him and sued the railroad company, but lost the case.
Under the penname “Iola”, she began to write about the discrimination she encountered in the anti-segregationist newspaper Free Speech, of which she later became editor and co-owner.
In 1889, a friend of Wells’ was lynched by a white mob for defending his grocery store against a gang of thugs. Wells spoke out about this incident, and others like it in her journalistic pieces, identifying lynching as a criminal act that was perpetrated against African-Americans who were falsely accused of crimes or in economic competition with white people.
She received death threats for expressing such views publicly and left Memphis for New York. She continued to crusade against lynching in her writings and investigate the true causes for such cases. She also established civil rights organizations and fought for womens’ suffrage. She continued to campaign for African-American and womens’ rights until her death from kidney disease in 1931.
She said that she felt it was “better to die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”
Personal Life
She married the lawyer Ferdinand Barnett in 1898 and had four children. She was unusual for women of the time in that she kept her own surname and endeavoured to balance family life with her activist activities.
In 2006, a musical drama was made about her life and the program summed up her life and legacy in the following words:
“…A woman born in slavery, she would grow to become one of the great pioneer activists of the Civil Rights movement. A precursor of Rosa Parks, she was a suffragist, newspaper editor and publisher, investigative journalist, co-founder of the NAACP, political candidate, mother, wife, and the single most powerful leader in the anti-lynching campaign in America. A dynamic, controversial, temperamental, uncompromising race woman, she broke bread and crossed swords with some of the movers and shakers of her time: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frances Willard, and President McKinley. By any fair assessment, she was a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America.”
How did you do?
Did you learn anything about your intuitive process through this?
Hi, Anna! I love your site but this is the first intuitive experiment I’ve really participated in. What surprised me the most about when I focused in on the photo was the intense pressure on my chest and I felt like someone was choking me (I even started coughing). Do you think that could be from the incident when she was pulled out of the train car? Or possibly another incident in her life? Or something totally unrelated?
Like I said, I’ve never tried one of the intuitive experiments before and I was really surprised by the physical reaction I had when I tuned in. So I guess my main question would be is that normal or do I have some other weird issue? 🙂
When I first seen this picture she looked alot like my mother but meaner. So I assumed by the way she looked like she was a women who commits crime or such. But I asked spirit guide to tell me if she was good women or a bad women and I dreamt that she was a good women who did journaling and was very important! This is my first time joining one of your classes and I can’t wait for the next one. Thanks 🙂
I caught a visual flash of moving images this time! So that’s new for me. In the past with these exercises, I’ve only gotten still images. But with this one I got an image of her literally helping people (strangers to her) over or through something (as in over a gate, through a hedge, etc.). There was a feeling with it, that this was largely judged at the time as being wrong but that for her, it was right and she wasn’t about to not do it. When I first saw her face in the first image, I thought she had been beaten up. Thank you for the exercise!
I was originally unhappy with my attempt ,I felt she was very poor in her early years but for a black lady in the old days that wasn’t much of a difficult guess ,
I felt I didn’t trust her but on reflection being a white male and after the treatment she received maybe I was picking up on the fact she may not trust me,
I thought I’d really missed this one so googled the lady and noticed she attended Fisk university probably in the early 1900’s on viewing images this was the building and grass and park like setting that I perceived as maybe an asylum or hospital and I had her in a white coat like she worked there not like she was admitted , also I feel the old black car was giving me a time indication as it was a old type vintage car with the old spoke wheels etc , I felt dark moods and anger and she admits herself being prone to anger and hostile words a bit quickly , however I did go off track thinking she poisoned or harmed somebody close to her and they may have died although I note someone very close to her was lynched and she apparently witnessed it , I also felt a dark shadow or presence close to her maybe it’s a leftover of this person , so on reflection maybe I picked up more than I originally thought,
thanks anna for the experiment and I eagerly await another chance
I went back to reread my own comment and saw it was all about her fighting spirit, stubbornness, and strong will, and how conflict happens around her. I really didn’t expect to get that right! But I keep getting nice surprises nowadays. Should doubt myself less. This was a fun one!
Hi Emily,
As this woman dedicated much of her life and work to campaigning against lynching, I am wondering if that is the choking connection?
Tomara, JC and Elizabeth – well done!
Brett – actually you can learn something about how your intuition works from getting off track or misinterpreting something you get, so it’s all good!
Hi, I’m new to this site and this is the first experiment that I looked at. I didn’t spend that much time on it, I mostly did it it out of curiosity. While looking at the woman, the word “train” immediately popped into my mind. I got goosebumps when I read that part of her story in this article (since the other factors that I got right could be easily attributed to “lucky/common sense guesses). I also knew that she had 4 children (but for some reason I also thought that something “bad” happened to one of them). I guessed she fought for African-American rights, and that she had been physically abused at some point. I also thought she lived on a farm at some point, but that’s not stated anywhere.
Thank you for this site, and for all your advice and willingness to help others. I am finally starting to trust my intuitions, and feel ready to rediscover the abilities I had as a child. Thank you!
I tried to sum up in one word, and I got the word ‘persuasive’. I must definitely practice more!
I love these experiments. It’s nice to be able to “test” the skills I am developing. I got the following from her picture:
Kind
Angelic heart. Quiet/modest about her good deeds.
American south mid century.
Children. Teacher.
Known for education. Girls primarily.
Death was not untimely or traumatic.
Known for writings more than speaking.
Three boy children of her own. – Wrong about this one. She had 2 boys and 2 girls.
Keep these coming! I need the practice.
I did better than I expected…I immediately got some kind of affiliation with womens voting movements…Tennessee…born late 1800’s-1900’s and later got 1893 (off a few years but in the zone)…Farming, came from a big family…..she was once a slave or maid and later became a wealthy independent..I saw her wearing a button like a women’s right to vote button. So I’d say I got a few good hits! Great : )
She lived her destiny. but just a correction. Ida left Memphis for the windy city – Chicago. She was an important and vital part of Chicago’s history. She did use her husband’s name in the African American community in the early 20th century, Ida B Wells-Barnett. Through her writings she inspired millions of African Americans to emigrate to the urban north and out west in the Great Migration. Her grandchildren lived only a few doors away from us growing up and Ida’s children and grandchildren are still highly respected and admired as leaders in the community.
ps- @Venus. I don’t believe she was ever physically abused -or mentioned it in public although now I’m ready to read her autobiography. I do know that one of the reasons she had to leave Memphis is her work on behalf of African-American women who had been raped by middle-class white Memphis citizens, often the same men behind destroying black businesses. She boldly published their names and names of their businesses or employers in her Memphis newspaper. Her life was constantly threatened with murder. Maybe these were the things you were picking up intuitively.
I wrote down these words as I looked at the photos:
– Aunt Jemima (Wikipedia says this about aunt Jemima: The R. T. Davis Milling Company hired former slave Nancy Green as a spokesperson for the Aunt Jemima pancake mix in 1890)
– Hearty
– Activist
– Caring
– Lots of kids
– Railroad
– Miscarry
– Adopt
– Branded
Some of these match…anyway….interesting
I immediately picked up on determined, defiant, no nonsense & strong willed. I felt she was intelligent but had limited formal education (this could be because she left school early?) & I had a very strong feeling that she was a Civil Rights activist but I thought she was possibly born in late 1800’s when she was born in mid-1800’s. I was also wrong in that I thought she was from Alabama & was a housekeeper. I also was wrong as I thought she had no children but was motherly to others. Need to work on my skills some more!