May 1892

After the lynching of her friend Thomas Moss in Memphis, journalist Ida B. Wells began a systematic investigation into lynching across the South, publishing 'Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.' Her meticulous documentation demolished the myth that lynching was punishment for crime, exposing it as a tool of racial terror. Wells's campaign made her the foremost anti-lynching activist of the era and laid the groundwork for decades of civil rights advocacy.

After her newspaper offices are destroyed and she receives death threats, Ida B. Wells relocates to New York and launches a systematic anti-lynching campaign, speaking across the Northeast and in England and Scotland. Her two British tours in 1893 and 1894 generate international pressure on the U.S. government and spark the founding of anti-lynching societies on both continents.