Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells, born Ida Bell Wells and later known as Wells-Barnett, who lived from 16 July 1862 to 25 March 1931, was an American investigative journalist, sociologist, educator and early leader of the civil rights movement who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, she was freed as an infant when Union troops captured the town, and after losing both parents and an infant brother to the 1878 yellow fever epidemic at age sixteen she took a teaching job to hold her remaining siblings together before moving with some of them to Memphis, Tennessee. Through the 1890s she documented the lynching of African Americans in pamphlets such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and The Red Record, debunking the widespread white claim that lynching victims were guilty of crimes and arguing instead that lynching was used to terrorize African Americans who represented economic and political competition to whites. She co-owned and wrote for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, covering racial segregation and inequality until a white mob destroyed her newspaper office, after which she left for Chicago, married Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895, and continued organizing for civil rights and women's suffrage for the rest of her life despite facing disapproval even from within those movements. She died in Chicago in 1931 and was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 2020 for her courageous reporting on lynching violence against African Americans.