This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
At the age of 27, when Ida B. Wells first began editing and writing for the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, she encountered a preacher whose rhetoric was less than pious. Wells detailed in her posthumous autobiography Crusade for Justice that the unnamed reverend had decided that “morally there were no virtuous southern girls.” He had specifically pointed to how Wells had recently been fired from her schoolteacher position. But this termination was not motivated by Wells’s inability to educate her students; rather it was the result of an editorial she had published detailing the dreadful conditions for Black children in the Memphis public school system.
When a family friend told Wells about the preacher’s comments, she immediately requested an audience. Wells traveled to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and confronted the reverend face-to-face. “He acknowledged that he had made the derogatory remarks, but added that he had only told it to my close friends. He realized his error and he begged pardon and stood ready to make amends,” Wells noted in Crusade for Justice. At Wells’s request, he apologized for his attempt to defame her from his pulpit the following Sunday, reading a statement that Wells herself penned.
“I could have denounced him in my paper and made him even more unpopular than he was. I could have sued him in the courts; but feeling that he had been taught his lesson, I let the matter drop,” Wells wrote. “I felt that I had vindicated the honor of the many southern girls who had been traduced by lying tongues.” Her decision to hold the preacher accountable for his sexist, defamatory remarks was reflective of her approach to life: One must act to defeat perceived injustice, no matter how difficult.
Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in July of 1862, three years before the end of the Civil War. Her mother was a skilled cook and her father was a respected carpenter; both involved themselves in Reconstruction politics after they were emancipated. They managed to ensure education for themselves and their children, encouraging Wells to read, write, and attend school. Tragically, both parents died in 1878 from yellow fever, leaving Wells orphaned and a guardian of her siblings at the age of 16.
Over the next few years, Wells cared for her siblings while focusing on professional and academic interests. She took on teaching work near her hometown and later moved her family to Memphis to pursue a similar position. There, she became one of the first to legally challenge Jim Crow laws, which had begun cropping up in the South during Reconstruction.
At the age of 21, Wells purchased a first-class ticket on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwest Railroad from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, and sat down in the respective ladies’ car. Instead of checking her ticket and moving on, the conductor ordered her to move to the second-class smoking car, which was mostly occupied by Black people. But Wells refused, and two additional railroad employees helped the conductor drag her into the smoking car, ripping her dress in the process. Instead of giving in, Wells opted to disembark, still holding on to her ticket. This was more than 70 years before Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.
When Wells returned to Memphis, she retained a lawyer and sued the railroad. The court awarded her $500 in damages, and the verdict ensured that all railroads would have to offer first-class accommodations to Black passengers. The railroad appealed, and the Tennessee Supreme Court struck down the ruling, demonstrating that true racial equality in the post-Reconstruction period would be difficult to produce.
After this incident, Wells began writing for the Black-owned local publication The Living Way under the pseudonym “Iola,” mostly focusing on issues facing Black Americans. Her stories quickly gained attention in the U.S. and internationally, leading her to be referred to as the “Princess of the Press.” Soon after, in 1889, Wells became co-owner and editor of the Free Speech and Headlight. It was there that she first became involved in investigative reporting and pushback against it, especially as she turned her attention to covering lynching.
AS BLACK AMERICANS BEGAN to build economic and social mobility in the South after emancipation, white supremacists countered with racist violence. Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 5,000 lynchings occurred in the U.S., likely an undercount since these murders were not formally tracked or documented. Wells understood that terrorizing Black people was integral to the cultural fabric of the U.S., particularly in the South. Her commitment to reporting on the phenomenon was spurred on by the lynching of one of her close friends, Thomas Moss, in 1892.
A popular man in the local Black community, Moss, along with his partners Calvin McDowell and William “Henry” Stewart, owned a shop named People’s Grocery Company in the Curve, a neighborhood outside of Memphis. It was located in the same neighborhood as a white-owned grocery store, and was challenging its competitor’s long-standing monopoly in the local economy. What started as an immature fight between Black and white children in the area escalated into accusations that the People’s Grocery was a planning center for Black attacks against white residents.
After a shoot-out between Black men guarding the People’s Grocery from a white mob and a county sheriff backed by five deputized citizens, over a hundred Black people in the area were jailed, including Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. Not long after, they were dragged from their cells, brought to a railroad yard, and shot in cold blood. Local newspapers framed the lynchings as the natural result of Black people attempting to target white people. But Wells saw that portrayal as a farce, and set out to prove it.
So began her commitment to investigative reporting, and her status as one of the United States’ most important muckrakers. Armed with a pistol, Wells traveled the country, visiting sites of racialized violence and interviewing Black community members. Lynching, Wells concluded, was a systemic method of oppressing Black Americans in a post-slavery world. And false criminal accusations served to distract people from the deeper issues at hand.
“She understood that lynching was more than the product of racial hatred,” says Paula Giddings, professor emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College. “It was a means to publicly dishonor Blacks and thus exclude them from spheres of social, political, and especially economic influence.”
Indeed, Wells’s investigations highlighted a pattern in which lynchings helped to ensure that Black Americans would remain economically subordinate to white people. It was a bloody pattern that occurred again in 1898, this time in the thriving, majority-Black city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where most shops and restaurants were Black-owned. White supremacists noted this prosperity, and began a smear campaign to force Republicans out of positions of political power.
After a white suffragist named Rebecca Latimer Felton claimed in a speech that Black male rapists were a major threat to white women’s safety, Alexander Manly, editor and owner of the Black-owned Wilmington Daily Record, published a rebuttal. A massive white mob, already emboldened by a monthslong local white supremacist campaign, stormed Wilmington, destroying the Daily Record’s offices and then murdering dozens of innocent Black people.
Hundreds of other Black residents were cast out of their homes, and local elected leaders were forced to resign. After the massacre, white people filled the jobs that Black people had once had. It was a devastating blow to a community that was building economic mobility, sparked by a local journalist’s questioning of a racist conspiracy theory.
At every turn, Wells faced serious danger, particularly in her home base of Memphis. Months after publishing her report on Moss’s lynching in the Free Speech, in which she quoted his final words (“Tell my people to go west, there is no justice here”) and encouraged an economic boycott of white businesses, an angry white mob destroyed the publication’s offices. Wells had just released an article that disputed the common claim that Black men raped white women as a rationale for lynchings, saying it was a “threadbare lie.” Instead, she pointed to consensual relationships between white women and Black men as often being the true story. Fortunately, Wells was out of town at the time.
Wells’s life was threatened, and a price was put on her head. It would be 30 years before she could return to the South. Instead, Wells continued to travel, writing and speaking in both the U.S. and Europe about the unchecked horrors of lynching. She published two books, Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), which employed statistics, interviews, and narratives as documentary evidence. Included in Southern Horrors is a letter sent to Wells by Frederick Douglass, whom she was close to, in which he called her a “brave woman” for her coverage of lynching.
“Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison,” Douglass wrote. “You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves … you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.”
IN 1893, WELLS SETTLED in Chicago. Soon after arriving, she met and married Ferdinand L. Barnett, an attorney and publisher of The Conservator, Chicago’s first Black newspaper. Their wedding was front-page news, as both Wells and Barnett were liked and respected figures in the civil rights community. They went on to have four children, but unlike other women of her age, Wells did not opt to become a homemaker; she continued her anti-lynching crusade and became more involved in the era’s Progressive movements.
Wells’s background in reporting racist violence and advocating for the empowerment of Black Americans motivated her interest in civil rights organizing. In 1898, she was elected secretary and national organizer of the National Afro-American Council, a precursor to the NAACP.
1908 saw the deadly Springfield, Illinois, race riot, in which thousands of white people attacked the city’s Black community, triggered by a false rape accusation of a Black man. At least nine, but likely dozens more, Black people were killed, and thousands were forced out of their homes. It was the catalyst for the formation the next year of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Wells worked tirelessly to draw up plans for the NAACP’s success. But compared to many of her peers, she was quite radical, which caused friction with people like Booker T. Washington, who advocated for racial accommodation rather than directly fighting against oppression. Despite W.E.B. Du Bois taking a more proactive approach to protesting injustice, Wells took issue with his belief that elite Black Americans should advance the race as a whole.
“Her belief in both the worthiness and political potential of the Black working class differed from many of her peers in the NAACP—who believed in leadership by the ‘talented tenth’—as well as the compliant conservatives led by Washington,” says Giddings. Wells also wanted anti-lynching to be a key area of focus for the new organization, but faced some skepticism from her peers.
When it came time for the “Founding Forty” NAACP members to be called at a 1909 conference, Wells’s name was not on the list. While a commotion broke out, with the NAACP’s more radical faction protesting the news, Wells left the building. From then onward, her relationship to the NAACP remained fraught. “I cannot resist the conclusion that, had I not been so hurt over the treatment I had received at the hands of the men of my own race … the NAACP would now be a live, active force in the lives of our people all over this country,” she detailed in Crusade for Justice. For most of her life, Wells would often experience marginalization at the hands of her male contemporaries, due to her identity as a Black woman and her willingness to transgress gender roles.
Despite this, Wells continued to forge her own path as an anti-racist feminist. As the suffragette movement took off in the early 1900s, she advocated for the rights of Black women. But this often put her at odds with white women in the movement, many of whom refused to take an intersectional approach to feminist organizing. Focusing on racial discrimination and recognizing Black women as integral to the struggle for suffrage was unpopular. This led Wells to call out her peers for their racism, and attempt to organize in ways that prioritized Black women’s interests.
In 1913, Wells and two of her white colleagues in the movement formed the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. It aimed to inform working-class Black women of their civic duties and highlight paths toward electing Black candidates to political office. That March, the Club attended a national suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., at which they faced racial discrimination and were forced to march behind the white women. But Wells slipped out from the back and joined her white colleagues in leading the Illinois contingent, shocking onlookers.
BEYOND HER ACTIVISM, Wells was a probation officer, founded Chicago’s first Black kindergarten, and ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois state Senate as an independent candidate in 1930. By the late 1910s, the relatively new federal agency which would later be known as the FBI had opened up a file on Wells, labeling her as “one of the most dangerous negro agitators.”
Wells’s approach to bettering the world around her was multifaceted, organizing both locally and nationally, constantly pursuing avenues for change. But she was much more than the sum of her accomplishments: She was a mother, a devout Christian, and a person who lived through serious trauma. After decades of work, she died in 1931 at the age of 68.
Wells’s philosophy of action is vitally important to recognizing how we can combat oppression today. She exposed how lynchings and other acts of racialized violence often masked corruption. Today, the Trump administration has continued to cite undocumented immigrants as the biggest danger to the U.S., while siphoning off government funds to line the pockets of the president and his allies. Just as lynchings were often used as a cover-up of attempts to destroy Black economic and social mobility, attacking immigrants and other marginalized groups has pulled focus from the Trump administration’s own shady dealings.
As the nation recognizes its 250th anniversary, Wells should be seen as more than just a trailblazing figure, but also someone whom Americans can be inspired by. “She represents the promise of the country,” says Giddings. “As a Black woman who fought to make this country face the truth about itself and its citizens, she represents the real promise of America’s declaration 250 years hence.”
This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
