Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi, shortly before emancipation.

Both of her parents and an infant brother died in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, and at sixteen she began teaching to support her siblings.

After being forcibly removed from a first-class ladies' car, Wells sued the railroad and initially won in the local circuit court before the verdict was reversed on appeal.

Wells bought a share of the Memphis newspaper Free Speech and Headlight and used it to expose racial injustice in the South.

The lynching of her friend Thomas Moss and two other Black grocers in Memphis prompted Wells to begin her investigative campaign against lynching; a mob later destroyed her newspaper's offices.

Wells published her pamphlet Southern Horrors, a documented exposé of lynching in the American South.

Wells published A Red Record, a statistical study of lynchings in the United States, building on her speaking tours of Great Britain that brought international attention to the cause.

Wells married Chicago attorney and editor Ferdinand L. Barnett, thereafter often using the name Wells-Barnett, and made Chicago her home base.

Wells was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, though she later distanced herself from the organization's leadership.

Wells died of kidney disease in Chicago at the age of 68, leaving an unfinished autobiography, Crusade for Justice.