Bio: (1862–1931) American journalist and sociologist. Ida B. Wells was educated at Shaw University and built a career as a teacher, journalist, and civil rights advocate. In 1889, she became co-owner of the Memphis newspaper Free Speech and Headlight. Later, in 1910, after moving to Chicago, she founded the Negro Fellowship League, which served as a center for missionary and social work within the Black community.

Wells is best known for her investigative journalism exposing and condemning the lynching of African Americans in the United States. She argued that lynching was not primarily a response to criminal acts, as was commonly claimed, but a tool of racial control used to punish Black individuals who challenged the racial hierarchy. Drawing on carefully gathered statistics, she showed that fewer than one-third of lynching victims had even been accused of rape. In her view, the defense of white womanhood was largely a pretext; lynching functioned as a means of terror, aimed particularly at African Americans who were gaining economic independence and property. Her further assertion—that sexual exploitation of Black women by white men posed the real threat to the myth of racial purity—provoked even greater public controversy.

Main works

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892);

The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893);

A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894. (1895);

Lynch Law in Georgia. (1899);

Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (1900);

The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (1917);

The Arkansas Race Riot (1922);

Selected works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1991).