During her early twenties in Memphis, Tennessee, Ida B. Wells emerged as "the brilliant Iola," a pen name she often used as a journalist, whose forthright style and incisive political critique gained the attention and respect of a broad readership in what was then an almost exclusively male circle of black press professionals. Wells was to mature into a forceful journalist and editor, one who made her living by writing. She also emerged as a major, though always controversial, figure among those who crafted the African American political agenda for the twentieth century.

Throughout her public career, Ida B. Wells-Barnett consistently broke new political and professional ground. One of but a few black women in journalism, Wells became editor of her local black weekly, the Memphis Free Speech, in 1889. When that paper was destroyed in the aftermath of a lynching and her own life was threatened, Wells became...