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    Ida B Wells: the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement

    The pioneering African American reporter counted, investigated and reported lynchings in America as no one had done before‘Lynching is color-line murder’: Ida B Wells-Barnett’s blistering 1909 speech
    by David Smith in Washington Apr 27, 2018 6 minutes
    Portrait of Ida B Wells, 1920. ‘I consider her my spiritual grandmother,’ said journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who covers civil rights. Photograph: Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

    Today, a simple marker on a street corner in Memphis, Tennessee commemorates the People’s Grocery lynching. In 1892 three black men, co-owners of a store giving white businesses a run for their money, were attacked, fought back and were arrested. They never stood trial. A white mob broke into the jail, dragged them away and lynched them.

    The murders were grieved by their friend Ida B Wells, an African American teacher, journalist, civil rights pioneer and suffragist about whom it was once said: “She has plenty of nerve; she is as smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug.”

    Wells was galvanised to count, investigate and report lynchings in America as no one had done before, hurling her 5ft frame into hostile territory with all the fearlessness of a war reporter.

    For a century she has languished as an unsung heroine, overshadowed by more familiar giants of the civil rights movement. In recent years, however, her crusading activism and muckraking techniques, and there are moves to name a street after her in New York and in Chicago.

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