Ida B. WellsBarnett

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, born a slave several months before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, became one of the leading African American reformers and civil rights activists during the Reconstruction era. After the Civil War, she attended Fisk University, where she learned the skills of journalism. She became a nationally known newspaper editor and columnist, and she used her position and reputation to advocate for civil rights for black Americans. Much of her civil rights activity focused on lynching, which had become widespread in the South after the Civil War. In this excerpt from her autobiography, which was published after her death in 1931, Wells-Barnett reveals some of the tensions present in the struggle for civil rights at the turn of the twentieth century. She describes the conflict between Booker T. Washington and W.E...