Author: Eleanor Roosevelt

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was an American journalist, teacher, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and spent her long career fighting against prejudice and promoting women”s rights.Born into slavery in Holly Springs,  Mississippi, Wells was freed at the end of the Civil War, but at 16, she lost both her parents and her infant brother in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. She and her grandmother labored to support the family and Wells would go on to find work as a teacher and, soon afterwards, became a co-owner and writer for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper.Wells spent much of her career as a reporter writing about the scourge of lynching. She created a widely circulated pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases and became a target for her anti-lynching reporting. Her newspaper office was destroyed by a white mob, but Wells would continue to write, her articles being carried by Black-owned newspapers from coast-to-coast. Wells eventually moved to Chicago and remained an activist, writer, speaker and organizer for women”s and civil rights for the rest of her life.The speech in this volume was delivered by Wells at the National Negro Conference, the forerunner to the NAACP, in New York City on May 31-June 1, 1909.