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 âa brilliant light on the lives of women left in the shadow of history,â comes the definitive biography of Ida B. Wellsâcrusading journalist and pioneer in the fight for womenâs suffrage and against segregation and lynchings Ida B. Wells was born into slavery and raised in the Victorian age yet emergedâthrough her fierce political battles and progressive thinkingâas the first âmodernâ black women in the nationâs 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.
