Pulitzer Prize Board
citation to Ida B. Wells, as an early pioneer of investigative
journalism and civil rights icon
From
a thinker who Maya Angelou has praised for shining “a brilliant
light on the lives of women left in the shadow of history,” comes
the definitive biography of Ida B. Wells—crusading journalist and
pioneer in the fight for women’s suffrage and against segregation
and lynchings
Ida
B. Wells was born into slavery and raised in the Victorian age yet
emerged—through her fierce political battles and progressive
thinking—as the first “modern” black women in the nation’s
history.
Wells
began her activist career when she tried to segregate a first-class
railway car in Memphis. After being thrown bodily off the car, she
wrote about the incident for black Baptist newspapers, thus beginning
her career as a journalist. But her most abiding fight would be the
one against lynching, a crime in which she saw all the themes she
held most dear coalesce: sexuality, race, and the law.
