Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) was an American journalist and campaigner against lynching. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, orphaned at sixteen, she taught school and in the 1880s became part-owner of the Memphis Free Speech. When a mob destroyed its office in 1892 after her editorial on lynching, she carried the campaign to New York, Chicago and Britain, publishing Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), which used the white press's own figures to expose the pretexts for mob murder. She married the Chicago lawyer Ferdinand Barnett in 1895, helped found the NAACP, and worked for women's suffrage and civic reform in Chicago until her death.