Person · 1862–1931
Ida B. Wells
Journalist, suffragist, and the driving force of the anti-lynching movement, who documented racial-terror violence with rigorous data.
The founder of the [[anti-lynching]] movement.
Born enslaved in Mississippi months before emancipation, Ida B. Wells became a teacher, then a fearless investigative journalist. After three friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892, she turned her pen on lynching itself — investigating cases, debunking the lies used to justify them, and publishing Southern Horrors and The Red Record.
Driven out of the South under threat of death, she carried her campaign north and abroad, helped found the NAACP, and fought for both Black civil rights and women's suffrage. Her insistence on documented facts set the template for modern human-rights reporting.
On the timeline
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Videos·1
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations — the links rarely drawn together.
- documented by (incoming)·ThreadGreed — The Root
Ida B. Wells showed that lynching often targeted Black economic success — proof that racial terror served greed.
- documented by·EventThe Wilmington coup of 1898
Wells and other Black journalists exposed the racial-terror violence of the era to the nation and the world.
- builds on (incoming)·PersonBryan Stevenson
EJI's lynching memorial completes the documentation Wells began in the 1890s.
- builds on (incoming)·PersonNikole Hannah-Jones
The 1619 Project extends Wells's use of journalism as a weapon for truth and justice.