Knowra Ida B. Wells Ida B. Wells Ida B. Wells was an American journalist and activist who exposed lynching through investigative reporting and campaigned for civil rights and women’s suffrage.
A Red Record : Ida B. Wells’s 1895 pamphlet documenting lynching in the United States and challenging claims used to justify it. This landmark compilation made her evidence-based indictment of lynching widely available.
Investigative journalism : Journalism that uncovers facts about wrongdoing through sustained research, records, interviews, and verification. Wells gathered evidence and tested claims about lynching rather than repeating mob narratives.
Frederick Douglass : An American abolitionist, writer, and orator who escaped slavery and became a leading advocate for Black freedom. Douglass publicly endorsed Wells’s anti-lynching pamphlet and supported her campaign.
Alpha Suffrage Club : A Black women’s suffrage organization founded in Chicago in 1913 by Ida B. Wells and Belle Squire. Wells organized the club to advance Black women’s political participation.
Miscegenation : A historically racialized term for sexual relations or marriage between people classified as belonging to different races. Wells showed that alleged interracial sexual relations often served as pretexts for lynching.
Anti-lynching movement : A campaign to end lynching through investigation, public advocacy, legislation, and organized protest. Wells became one of its most influential investigators and advocates.
Southern Horrors : Ida B. Wells’s 1892 pamphlet exposing lynching and disputing the claim that it was chiefly a response to assaults on white women. Its argument shows how she used documented cases to dismantle a prevailing defense of lynching.
Mary Church Terrell : An American educator and civil rights activist who helped found the National Association of Colored Women. Terrell worked alongside Wells in Black women’s organizing and suffrage activism.
Woman’s Era Club : A Black women’s organization founded in Boston in 1892 that promoted reform and mutual support. Wells joined this national network of Black women activists and reformers.
Convict leasing : A system in which governments leased incarcerated people to private employers, often under brutal conditions. Like lynching, it enforced racial domination, but through state-backed forced labor rather than mob murder.
Show all 25