Thousands gathered in Paris, Texas, for the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.

AFTER SLAVERY ENDED IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1865,   Southern states enacted several Jim Crow laws denying equality to African-Americans. White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens. Racist ideology dressed up as "science" depicted blacks as lascivious and inferior. It was in this charged atmosphere that some of the most heinous crimes ever committed in this country were sanctioned by the white community at large, and even by law officials themselves.
Lynching-the kidnapping, torturing and killing of men, women and children by vigilante mobs-became commonplace. Between 1880 and 1930, approximately 3,220 black Americans were reported lynched, along with perhaps 723 whites. The 1880s ushered in a dramatic and prolonged rise in the percentage of African-American victims. These lawless executions, blind to any constitutional guarantee 0f due process, often attracted large crowds. Some spectators brought along children and even picnic baskets, as though the horrific murder of another human being constituted entertainment, or worse, edification. It was the brutal lynching 0f a friend in 1892 that rallied Wells, then 29, to the antilynching cause.
By then, Wells had become a full-time journalist. When a series of articles she had written about her court case against the railroad was picked up by African-American newspapers across the country (and eventually led to a column), Wells knew what she wanted to do with her life. She bought part-ownership in the Free Speech, a black Memphis newspaper, and became its coeditor. "She has plenty of nerve, and is as sharp as a steel trap," said T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, a leading black newspaper.
One of her closest friends was Thomas Moss, who owned a grocery store in Memphis with two other black men. A white businessman, angered by competition from the new store, had pressured town officials to close it down. When a scuffle broke out between black and white youths near the black-owned store, he and other white residents threatened to destroy it. After a group of white men marching toward the store at night were fired upon and at least one was wounded, police rounded up and jailed more than a hundred blacks. But Moss and his two partners were "carried a mile north of the city limits and horribly shot to death," Wells wrote in Free Speech. A local white newspaper reported Moss' last words: "Tell my people to go Westthere is no justice for them here."
The murders devastated Wells, who was godmother to the Mosses' daughter. "The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival," she wrote in an editorial. Echoing Moss' last words, Wells and other black leaders encouraged black Memphians to leave the city, which, she said "will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood."
Thousands of blacks joined the "Exodusters" migrating to Oklahoma and other points west. Wells urged those who remained to boycott streetcars and white businesses. Railway officials, assuming that black passengers were staying away out of a mistaken belief that the electric cars were hazardous, pleaded with Wells to tell her followers the cars were safe. "Keep up the good work," she told her readers.
Driven by anger and grief, Wells plunged into a wide-ranging investigation of lynching in America, documenting the circumstances of more than 700 incidents over the previous decade. She traveled alone across the South to the spots where lynching parties had shot, hanged and burned victims, taking sworn statements from witnesses, scrutinizing records and local newspaper accounts, sometimes hiring private investigators. She studied photographs of mutilated bodies hanging from tree limbs and of lynchers picking over the bones and ashes of burned corpses.
Her findings would astonish many Americans, appall others and outrage white supremacists. She aroused the strongest ire by venturing into the taboo realm of sexuality. The excuse frequently used for the lynching of black men was that they had raped white women. But her research showed that rape had never been alleged in two-thirds of the lynchings, and when it was, the "rape" was often alleged after a secret relationship was discovered or following nothing more than a suggestive look. In one editorial, Wells dared suggest that many of the white women had had consensual sex with the men.
Wells was en route to New York when white newspapers reprinted the editorial. Vandals ransacked the Free Speech offices, and fearing for his life, her coeditor fled the city. Racist whites promised to lynch Wells if she returned. A Memphis paper, the Evening Scimitar, threatened the editorial's author, whom the paper believed to be a man. "Tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake ... brand him on the forehead with a hot iron, and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor's shears." Wells, who had armed herself with a pistol after Moss' lynching, vowed to die fighting. "I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked," she would later write. "If I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit."
T. Thomas Fortune met with Wells during her trip and convinced her to remain in New York City. There she parlayed the subscription list of the now-defunct Free Speech into part-ownership of the New York Age, which published the findings 0f her investigations. She also published a pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynching in All Its Phases, for which renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass, then in his 70s, penned the preface. "Brave Woman!" he wrote, "If American conscience were only half alive ... a scream 0f horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read."

Her crusade gaining momentum, Wells toured Great Britain in 1893 and 1894, speaking in packed churches and lecture halls. The "sweet-faced" orator spoke with "singular refinement, dignity and self-restraint," wrote a London observer. "Nor have I ever met any agitator so cautious and unimpassioned in speech. But by this marvelous self-restraint itself, she moved us all the more profoundly."
She so impressed the Duke of Argyll, Sir John Gorst, that he became the founding president of the London Anti-Lynching Committee, the first of many such chapters in Great Britain and the United States. The London membership included the archbishop of Canterbury, members of Parliament and the editors of England's most prestigious papers. On a dare by Southern papers in the United States and to get at the truth about lynching in America, Sir John and his committee visited the United States in the summer of 1894. The mere presence of the British visitors, who threatened a boycott of U.S. goods, infuriated white Americans. Governor John Altgeld of Illinois said Southerners should retaliate by visiting Ireland "to stop the outrages there."
As it happened, the British delegation was touring the States when a lynching party killed six black men near Memphis. "If Ida B. Wells had desired anything to substantiate the charges against the south," noted an Ohio newspaper, "nothing more serviceable could have come to hand." That incident marked a sort of turning point. Even the Evening Scimitar, which had called for lynching Wells herself two years before, now sounded contrite. "Everyone of us is touched with blood guiltiness in this matter," the paper editorialized.
Historian Philip Dray, author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown, a history of lynching in America, says Wells' work effected a deep change in racial thinking. "In an age when blacks were written about almost exclusively as a problem," he says, "she had established lynching as a practice in which whites were the problem and blacks those in need of compassion and justice."
One tactic that made Wells effective, says historian Paula Giddings, was that she persuaded Northern and foreign investors that lynchings were a form of anarchy, which was poison for economic development. This view threatened investments earmarked for the South. Her calls for boycotts in the South by the black labor force caused states that previously ignored lynchings to rethink their complacency.

Following Wells' campaign, the number of lynchings went down, from a peak of 235 in 1892, to 107 by 1899, and antilynching legislation was enacted in parts of the South. "She was responsible for the first antilynching campaign in the United States," says Giddings. "And she started it almost single-handedly."

WELLS WAS BORN A SLAVE IN HOLLY SPRINGS, MISSISSIPPI, in the midst of the Civil War in July 1862. The child's first three years were punctuated by the sound of gunfire and the frenzy of minor skirmishes, according to Wells biographer Linda McMurry in To Keep the Waters Troubled, published in 1998. The town was captured and recaptured by opposing armies throughout the conflict, changing hands at least 59 times, writes McMurry.

Wells' father, Jim, was the son of an enslaved woman named Peggy and her white owner. More privileged than some slaves, Jim was apprenticed out to learn carpentry.

After the war, he worked as a paid employee for the carpenter who had taught him, but lost his job when he refused to vote for the Democratic ticket of white supremacy. In a display of the grit that he evidently passed on to his daughter, he opened his own business across the street from his former employer. Ida Wells' mother, Elizabeth, was a cook, an "outspoken woman who was constantly whipped and beaten as a slave," says playwright Thompson. The reason she wasn't killed outright, he avers, is that "she was known as the finest cook in the South."

Ida Wells' fearlessness, says Giddings, came in part from her father, a leader of the local black community who attended political meetings in spite of an ever-present threat of terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan. Mississippi's Secretary of State during Reconstruction, James Hill, was a family friend. In due course Holly Springs became home to one of two blacks in the state senate.

Ida's forceful personality emerged at a young age. She was expelled from school after a confrontation with the institution's president. It isn't known what the fight was about, but as McMurry notes, "Ida's fiery temper often got her into trouble." The greatest crisis of her young life occurred when a yellow fever epidemic struck Holly Springs in 1878 and killed both of her parents and her baby brother. Family friends arranged to place her five surviving brothers and sisters in homes around the county, but 16-year-old Ida vetoed the plan. She lengthened her skirts (to look older and got a job as a country schoolteacher, supporting her siblings on a salary of $25 a month.