Ida B Wells

African-American journalist and activist who pioneered anti-lynching campaigns and civil rights advocacy

Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) was a groundbreaking investigative journalist and co-founder of the NAACP. Born into slavery, she exposed the horrors of lynching in the South through her newspaper Free Speech, risking her life to challenge racial violence.

Weeks after her friend Thomas Moss was lynched in 1892, Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, debunking the myth that lynchings were responses to crime. Her data-driven approach revealed that most victims were targeted for economic competition or interracial relationships.

A suffragist, she refused to march at the back of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade. Her relentless activism laid groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement, yet her contributions were often overshadowed until recent decades. In 2020, Wells posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for her courageous reporting.