Reading about Ida B. Wells is like reading a biography of activism itself, of a whole flock of lives lived. Born into enslavement in Mississippi in 1862, Wells died in 1931, a year after running for the Illinois State Senate. In between, she became, at sixteen, the primary caregiver to five younger siblings after her parents died in the Yellow Fever epidemic; a teacher; a litigant fighting Jim Crow railroad laws; a journalist and owner of a newspaper; a fired teacher for reporting on disparities between white and Black schools; a journalist whose press was destroyed after she reported on lynching; a citizen who met directly with William McKinley about lynching legislation and Woodrow Wilson about segregation; founder of the Negro Fellowship League neighborhood center, the rent for which she paid from her job as Chicago’s first female probation officer; a mother of four; a founder of and activist within multiple organizations for gender equality and racial justice, including the Alpha Suffrage Club and the NAACP; the integrator of the 1913 Washington, D.C., suffrage parade; the subject of an FBI investigation; and, always, a writer shining light on the facts.
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