This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
At the age of 27, when Ida B. Wells first began editing and writing for the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, she encountered a preacher whose rhetoric was less than pious. Wells detailed in her posthumous autobiography Crusade for Justice that the unnamed reverend had decided that “morally there were no virtuous southern girls.” He had specifically pointed to how Wells had recently been fired from her schoolteacher position. But this termination was not motivated by Wells’s inability to educate her students; rather it was the result of an editorial she had published detailing the dreadful conditions for Black children in the Memphis public school system.
When a family friend told Wells about the preacher’s comments, she immediately requested an audience. Wells traveled to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and confronted the reverend face-to-face. “He acknowledged that he had made the derogatory remarks, but added that he had only told it to my close friends. He realized his error and he begged pardon and stood ready to make amends,” Wells noted in Crusade for Justice. At Wells’s request, he apologized for his attempt to defame her from his pulpit the following Sunday, reading a statement that Wells herself penned.
“I could have denounced him in my paper and made him even more unpopular than he was. I could have sued him in the courts; but feeling that he had been taught his lesson, I let the matter drop,” Wells wrote. “I felt that I had vindicated the honor of the many southern girls who had been traduced by lying tongues.” Her decision to hold the preacher accountable for his sexist, defamatory remarks was reflective of her approach to life: One must act to defeat perceived injustice, no matter how difficult.
Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in July of 1862, three years before the end of the Civil War. Her mother was a skilled cook and her father was a respected carpenter; both involved themselves in Reconstruction politics after they were emancipated. They managed to ensure education for themselves and their children, encouraging Wells to read, write, and attend school. Tragically, both parents died in 1878 from yellow fever, leaving Wells orphaned and a guardian of her siblings at the age of 16.
Over the next few years, Wells cared for her siblings while focusing on professional and academic interests. She took on teaching work near her hometown and later moved her family to Memphis to pursue a similar position. There, she became one of the first to legally challenge Jim Crow laws, which had begun cropping up in the South during Reconstruction.
At the age of 21, Wells purchased a first-class ticket on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwest Railroad from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, and sat down in the respective ladies’ car. Instead of checking her ticket and moving on, the conductor ordered her to move to the second-class smoking car, which was mostly occupied by Black people. But Wells refused, and two additional railroad employees helped the conductor drag her into the smoking car, ripping her dress in the process. Instead of giving in, Wells opted to disembark, still holding on to her ticket. This was more than 70 years before Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.
When Wells returned to Memphis, she retained a lawyer and sued the railroad. The court awarded her $500 in damages, and the verdict ensured that all railroads would have to offer first-class accommodations to Black passengers. The railroad appealed, and the Tennessee Supreme Court struck down the ruling, demonstrating that true racial equality in the post-Reconstruction period would be difficult to produce.
After this incident, Wells began writing for the Black-owned local publication The Living Way under the pseudonym “Iola,” mostly focusing on issues facing Black Americans. Her stories quickly gained attention in the U.S. and internationally, leading her to be referred to as the “Princess of the Press.” Soon after, in 1889, Wells became co-owner and editor of the Free Speech and Headlight. It was there that she first became involved in investigative reporting and pushback against it, especially as she turned her attention to covering lynching.
AS BLACK AMERICANS BEGAN to build economic and social mobility in the South after emancipation, white supremacists countered with racist violence. Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 5,000 lynchings occurred in the U.S., likely an undercount since these murders were not formally tracked or documented. Wells understood that terrorizing Black people was integral to the cultural fabric of the U.S., particularly in the South. Her commitment to reporting on the phenomenon was spurred on by the lynching of one of her close friends, Thomas Moss, in 1892.
A popular man in the local Black community, Moss, along with his partners Calvin McDowell and William “Henry” Stewart, owned a shop named People’s Grocery Company in the Curve, a neighborhood outside of Memphis. It was located in the same neighborhood as a white-owned grocery store, and was challenging its competitor’s long-standing monopoly in the local economy. What started as an immature fight between Black and white children in the area escalated into accusations that the People’s Grocery was a planning center for Black attacks against white residents.
After a shoot-out between Black men guarding the People’s Grocery from a white mob and a county sheriff backed by five deputized citizens, over a hundred Black people in the area were jailed, including Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. Not long after, they were dragged from their cells, brought to a railroad yard, and shot in cold blood. Local newspapers framed the lynchings as the natural result of Black people attempting to target white people. But Wells saw that portrayal as a farce, and set out to prove it.
So began her commitment to investigative reporting, and her status as one of the United States’ most important muckrakers. Armed with a pistol, Wells traveled the country, visiting sites of racialized violence and interviewing Black community members. Lynching, Wells concluded, was a systemic method of oppressing Black Americans in a post-slavery world. And false criminal accusations served to distract people from the deeper issues at hand.
“She understood that lynching was more than the product of racial hatred,” says Paula Giddings, professor emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College. “It was a means to publicly dishonor Blacks and thus exclude them from spheres of social, political, and especially economic influence.”
Indeed, Wells’s investigations highlighted a pattern in which lynchings helped to ensure that Black Americans would remain economically subordinate to white people. It was a bloody pattern that occurred again in 1898, this time in the thriving, majority-Black city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where most shops and restaurants were Black-owned. White supremacists noted this prosperity, and began a smear campaign to force Republicans out of positions of political power.
After a white suffragist named Rebecca Latimer Felton claimed in a speech that Black male rapists were a major threat to white women’s safety, Alexander Manly, editor and owner of the Black-owned Wilmington Daily Record, published a rebuttal. A massive white mob, already emboldened by a monthslong local white supremacist campaign, stormed Wilmington, destroying the Daily Record’s offices and then murdering dozens of innocent Black people.
Hundreds of other Black residents were cast out of their homes, and local elected leaders were forced to resign. After the massacre, white people filled the jobs that Black people had once had. It was a devastating blow to a community that was building economic mobility, sparked by a local journalist’s questioning of a racist