Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the Civil War, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation. Her parents were enslaved but valued education deeply. After emancipation, her father helped establish Shaw University (now Rust College). When Ida was 16, both her parents and her infant brother died during a yellow fever epidemic. Rather than let her younger siblings be separated and sent to different homes, Ida took charge of the family. She got a job as a teacher to support them, pretending to be 18 to qualify.

In 1884, Wells was forcibly removed from a first-class train car for refusing to move to the 'colored' section. She sued the railroad and initially won, though the decision was later overturned. This experience ignited her passion for justice. She became a journalist and co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech newspaper. When three of her friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892, she launched a fearless investigation into lynching across the South. Her research proved that lynchings were not about justice but about terrorizing Black communities and suppressing economic competition. Her articles and pamphlets, including Southern Horrors and A Red Record, shocked the nation and the world.

Wells took her anti-lynching campaign international, speaking in Britain to build pressure on the United States. She co-founded the NAACP in 1909, organized the Alpha Suffrage Club (one of the first Black women's suffrage organizations), and marched in the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. She was one of the most courageous journalists in American history, risking her life to tell the truth. Wells died on March 25, 1931, in Chicago. In 2020, she was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for her outstanding and courageous reporting on lynching.