In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
IBW–1862–2026  ·  Press Room

Ida B.
Wells

1862  —  1931
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells
Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1862  ·  Chicago, Illinois, 1931

She counted the bodies, named the perpetrators, and published the evidence — when no one else would. After three of her friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892, she investigated every lynching she could document and proved that the stated justifications — almost always rape — were almost always false. She published the statistics. She named the names.

Southern Horrors (1892). A Red Record (1895). Her newspaper was destroyed and she was driven from Memphis under threat of death. She went to Britain, built international pressure, and kept writing. She co-founded the NAACP and then argued with it for not moving fast enough.

She argued from evidence. That was her method and her weapon.

Consultation

The journalist
who counted the bodies.

Wells speaks from 250+ chunks across four works — Southern Horrors, A Red Record, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, and Mob Rule in New Orleans.

Her discourse holds Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk and Frederick Douglass's Narrative — her most important contemporaries in the tradition she worked within.

Ask her what investigative journalism looks like when the government is the perpetrator and the press is afraid. Ask her what she thought when her newspaper was destroyed. Ask her about the rape charge and what the actual statistics showed. Ask her what she thinks of journalism in 2026.

Anti-Lynching Investigative Journalism Southern Horrors A Red Record Civil Rights Women's Suffrage Press Freedom Racial Violence The NAACP Evidence as Weapon
The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.
The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition  ·  1893

Drawn From the Corpus