Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells was an American investigative journalist and newspaper editor whose reporting in the 1890s and afterward documented and campaigned against lynching in the American South, at a time when such violence against Black Americans was widely underreported or misrepresented in the mainstream press. Wells co-owned and wrote for the Memphis newspaper Free Speech and Headlight before threats to her life forced her to relocate, and she continued investigative and advocacy journalism from Chicago for decades afterward. She was also a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and is widely regarded as a pioneering figure in American investigative and advocacy journalism, particularly among Black American journalists.