Born to slave parents in Holly Springs on July 16, 1862, Ida B. Wells came to embody the struggle for freedom among African Americans after the Civil War. After her parents and an infant brother died in the yellow fever outbreak of 1878, she raised her five remaining siblings. Despite these hardships, she became a journalist and entrepreneur and co-owned the Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper Free Speech. Her investigative journalism brought public attention to often unreported mob lynchings in the South, and her books Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Red Record exposed the deceptions southerners used to justify the murder of Black men. She wrote, "Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women," and she died in Chicago, Illinois, on March 25, 1931.