IDA WELLS

She was born a slave in 1862, then orphaned by the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. But somehow Ida Wells managed to get an education and become a teacher. Then, in 1884, she was forcibly removed from the first-class ladies coach on a railroad, and she filed suit against the railroad as a result (to put this in some context, this was three-quarters of a century before Rosa Parks was arrested for doing something similar in Montgomery, Alabama.)

Ida Wells won her case in Memphis Circuit Court, then lost it before the Tennessee Supreme Court (click here to read a first-person account of her experiences). But in the process she launched a career in journalism, becoming a Memphis correspondent for African-American newspapers in Northern cities.

Then, in 1892, three black grocers were lynched in Memphis in one of the ugliest acts of mob violence in American history. Ida Wells’ stories about the event made her a hero in the African American community but angered white people in Memphis, and she moved away from the South at that time. Now a resident of New York, she launched an anti-lynching crusade. Never one to hesitate to speak her mind, she criticized some black leaders of that era, most notably Booker T. Washington, because she believed that integration, not accommodation, was the right way. Later she co-founded the National Association of Colored Women and worked with Jane Addams to lobby against segregated public schools in Chicago.