The Great Chicago Fire
1871
1871 · about 300 dead, a third of the city destroyed
Site of the O'Leary barn, DeKoven Street, Chicago, Illinois
In memory of
Ida B. Wells
Journalist who documented lynching
- Born
- Died
- Lived
- 68 years
- Resting place
- Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Born into slavery months before emancipation and orphaned at sixteen, Wells kept her younger siblings together by teaching. In 1892 three friends of hers who ran a grocery were lynched in Memphis for competing with a white shop. She began to investigate.
Her pamphlets showed, case by case, that lynching was not punishment for crime but a way of keeping Black people down. A mob destroyed her newspaper office and she wrote on from Chicago and from Britain. She was given a Pulitzer special citation in 2020, eighty-nine years after her death.
This page was written by the site, from public historical records.
Nearby and related
Haymarket Affair, Chicago, 1886
1886
A bomb, a trial without evidence, and the reason the world marks 1 May
Haymarket Martyrs' Monument, Forest Home Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois