| The daughter of slaves, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, born this day in 1862, was a journalist who led an antilynching crusade in the United States. Beginning in the late 1880s and using the pen name Iola, Wells wrote articles for black-owned newspapers on such issues as the education of black children. In 1892 she was a part-owner of the Memphis Free Speech. Later that same year, however, after she denounced in her editorials the lynching of three of her friends, the newspaper's office was mobbed and destroyed by local whites. Undaunted, Wells began a crusade to investigate the lynching of blacks in the American South. |