Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells began her anti-lynching campaign the way many of the best reform movements begin: with a personal outrage she refused to swallow quietly. In 1892, three friends and business partners were lynched in Memphis — not for any crime, but because their grocery store competed successfully with a white-owned business nearby. Wells, a newspaper editor, published an investigation. A white mob destroyed her press and threatened her life. She left Memphis and never returned, taking her investigation national and then international, documenting in precise, damning detail the economics and terror of American lynching.

Her pamphlets — Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895) — were the first systematic statistical analyses of lynching in the United States. Wells demolished the standard justification that lynching was a response to sexual assault, showing through meticulous documentation that the majority of lynching victims had been accused of no such thing. Many had simply competed economically with white neighbors, testified in legal proceedings, or simply existed in ways that white communities found intolerable. The work was journalism and scholarship and advocacy simultaneously, and it laid the factual foundation for every subsequent anti-lynching campaign.

Wells was a co-founder of the NAACP in 1909 but grew frustrated with the organization's caution and the way her own contributions were minimized by male colleagues. She ran for the Illinois state legislature in 1930, becoming one of the first Black women to seek elected office in the United States. She died the following year, before her work achieved the national recognition it deserved. In 2020, she was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her investigative journalism — work done nearly 130 years earlier.