Ida B. Wells

Co-founder of the NAACP and one of the United States’ foremost civil rights activists on behalf of women and African-Americans, Ida B. Wells was born 1862 as a slave in Holly Spring, Miss. Wells supported herself and her orphaned siblings as a teacher, then moved to Memphis to work as a journalist. After the lynching of a friend in in 1892, she launched an anti-lynching campaign that would last her lifetime, and force her into exile in the North. She died 1931 in Chicago.

Posts by Ida B. Wells

The Requirements of Southern Journalism

”If it could be established, a fearlessly edited press is one of the crying necessities of the hour. Such a journal, edited in the midst of such conditions as exist in the South, can better give the facts, than out of it, or than the press dispatches will do. True, such a one might have to be on the hop, skip and jump but the seed planted even though the sower might not tarry to watch its growth, can never die. At present only one side of the atrocities against a defenceless people is given, and with all the smoothing over is a bad enough showing.”