Anti-Lynching Activist and Journalist, Ida B. Wells, Receives Posthumous Pulitzer Citation

One of the nation’s most well-known investigative reporters survived a yellow fever outbreak in 1878 that killed her parents and a sibling and forced her to become head of the household and the caretaker of the surviving brothers and sisters. Ida B. Wells was 16 years-old and already showing the steely determination she would later display as a journalist who wrote about lynchings in the South, an accomplishment that recently earned her a 2020 Special Citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board 89 years after her death.

“Ironically, the very first time the Prizes were presented was June 1917 – less than a year before the 1918 outbreak of the Spanish Flu pandemic,” remarked Pulitzer Prize Administrator Dana Canedy during last week’s presentations. “During this season of unprecedented uncertainty, one thing we know for sure is that journalism never stops. And much like our courageous first responders and front-line healthcare workers, journalists are running toward the fire.”

Investigating America’s Lynchings

Ida B. Wells, who was born six months before the President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, eventually lost her job as an educator in Memphis where she and her siblings moved to live with an aunt. She had been vocal in her criticism of the conditions of the Blacks-only schools. No longer a teacher, Wells focused more on her anti-lynching writings after a friend and his business partners were lynched by a white mob incensed that two white men aligned with a grocery store owner who envied  the black men’s successfully competing enterprise were killed during a shootout at the store.

As she traveled throughout the South investigating lynchings, Wells became a target. Her newspaper office was destroyed while she was away in New York City. Wells decided to stay in the North after being told she would be killed if she returned to Memphis. In 1893 she published A Red Record, a personal look at the stain of lynchings on American history.

Two years later, Wells married Ferdinand Barnett and the couple had four children. Wells remained an impactful voice for Blacks and women. She protested in Washington, D.C., and pressed then-President William McKinley for reforms. She formed the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and is considered a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Ida B. Wells died in Chicago at age 68 from kidney disease.