Pulitzer Prize Board citation to Ida B. Wells, as an early pioneer of investigative journalism and civil rights icon
From a thinker who Maya Angelou has praised for shining "a brilliant light on the lives of women left in the shadow of history," comes the definitive biography of Ida B. Wells—an essential work of African American history about the crusading journalist and pioneer in the fight for women's suffrage and against segregation and lynchings.
Born into slavery in the tumultuous Post-Reconstruction era and raised in the Victorian age, Ida B. Wells emerged—through her fierce political battles and progressive thinking—as the first "modern" black woman in the nation's history.
Wells began her activist career when she tried to desegregate a first-class railway car in Memphis. After being thrown bodily off the car, she wrote about the incident for black Baptist newspapers, thus beginning her career as a journalist. But her most abiding fight would be her groundbreaking anti-lynching campaign, a crime in which she saw all the themes she held most dear coalesce: sexuality, race, and the law.
This definitive biography of a foundational African American leader reveals: