Historically famous critics

Ida B. Wells

1862-1931 · American · 19th-20th century

American journalist who documented lynching and exposed its use as racial terror

Wells turned investigative journalism into a weapon against lynching, gathering evidence that dismantled the lie that mob murders punished Black crime. Her pamphlets showed lynching was a tool of economic and political terror meant to suppress Black progress, and she pressed her case despite death threats and the destruction of her Memphis newspaper. Her fearless, data-driven reporting set the template for modern human-rights documentation and helped seed the organized civil rights movement.