Ida B. Wells and the Long Crusade to Outlaw Lynching | Retro Report

Born into slavery, Ida B. Wells later became an educator, an investigative journalist and an early civil rights activist, shedding light on the plight of Black Americans across the South. After the brutal deaths of three friends who were victims of lynching, Wells began chronicling mob violence, publishing her findings in newspaper articles and pamphlets.

Her investigations identified dozens of arbitrary reasons given to explain lynchings. “She found, time and time again, that people who were lynched were innocent people who were either pushing the boundaries of what the social structure was at that time or they were a convenient scapegoat for some crime somebody else committed,” Michelle Duster, Wells’s great-granddaughter, told Retro Report.

Wells organized the first campaign to make lynching a federal crime, but that effort did not bear fruit until the passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022.

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