Ida B. Wells

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.