Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (1862 – 1931) was an African American investigative journalist, educator, and an early leader in the civil rights movement. Born into slavery during the Civil War, she was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and raised her younger siblings after her parents died of yellow fever.

As editor of the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, Wells conducted fearless investigative journalism into white mob violence. Through meticulous forensic documentation in pamphlets such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), she exposed lynching as an economic and terroristic weapon used to suppress Black prosperity. Exiled from the South after mob threats destroyed her press, she carried her campaign to Britain and helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.