Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and after being orphaned at 16 became a teacher to support her five younger siblings. She later moved to Memphis, where she became a pioneering data journalist, newspaper co-owner, and civil rights activist. In 1892, after three of her friends were lynched, she urged people to boycott businesses and leave the city, then investigated and documented other lynchings. After a mob destroyed her printing press and threatened her life in response to her outspoken writings, she continued writing and speaking in New York City and then across Great Britain and the United States. In 1895 she moved to Chicago, married attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett, and hyphenated her name to Wells-Barnett. While raising a family of four children, she continued her activism by co-founding the NAACP; founding the Alpha Suffrage Club, an organization of Black women that worked for women's political empowerment; working with Jane Addams to prevent the segregation of public schools; helping establish Chicago's first kindergarten for Black children; and founding the Negro Fellowship League to provide housing and job assistance to Black migrants. Wells-Barnett and her husband are interred together in Chicago's Oak Woods Cemetery, and in 2020 she was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for her outstanding and courageous reporting on violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.
