Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a co-founder of the NAACP, an anti-lynch crusader and a most courageous Black woman journalist. She was born of slave parents in Holly Springs, Mississippi in1862. At age fourteen, she was orphaned by a yellow fever epidemic. Despite this adversity, she managed to attend Rust College and Fisk University.

From 1884 to 1891, Ida B. Wells taught segregated public school in Memphis, Tennessee and began writing articles for the Free Speech, a Black newspaper. In 1891, the Memphis Board of Education fired her because her articles were too fiery and controversial. Later, she acquired a partnership in the Free Speech, became its editor and traveled throughout the southern states.

Ida B. Wells was strong-willed and spirited. Once when asked to leave the "white section" of a train, she flatly refused and had to be forcibly removed by three conductors. She sued and won $500 in damages, but the decision was later reversed. She became an outspoken antagonist against the senseless murders (i.e., lynchings) of Black businessmen who were lynched for defending their property and she wrote an editorial identifying the murderers and demanded that they be brought to justice.

Later, writing under a pen name "Iola," she published a shocking, detailed expose’ on the activities of the lynch mobs. The same night the expose’ appeared in the Free Speech, her printing office was vandalized and all the equipment and copies of the Free Speech were destroyed.

In 1895, she married Ferdinard Barnett, an attorney and a Chicago newspaper owner and later bore four children. Together they used their newspaper to expose injustice perpetrated against Blacks. Mrs. Barnett became frustrated that violence against Blacks was growing and that nothing was being done. Once, when investigating a lynching in Cairo, Illinois, she found the Black townspeople too afraid to protest. Alone, she went to the State House in Springfield to argue against the reinstatement of the sheriff who had permitted the murder. For more than a day, she pleaded her case against the best lawyers in southern Illinois and won. That was the last of lynching in the state of Illinois.

Ida B. Wells Barnett was perhaps the most famous Black female journalist of her time. She was a correspondent for the Memphis Watchman, Detroit Plain Dealer, Indianapolis World and the Little Rock Sun, to name a few. Mr. T. Thomas Fortune, a noted Black editor of the time said "She has become famous as one of the few of our women who handled a goose quill, with diamond point, as easily as any man in the newspaper work." Mrs. Barnett was cited as one of the 25 outstanding women in Chicago’s history and one of its housing projects bears her name. She died in 1931.