Ida Wells

The Light of Truth

  • The Light of Truth

  • In this collection, Wells's anti-lynching crusade comes alive. Through brilliant social analysis, she exposed lynching as part of a larger framework of subjugation in which white people used violence as a deliberate tactic to combat black economic progress in the southern USA. Wells won international renown for her investigative journalism, leading her on lecture tours around the Northern States and Europe, where she rallied support against lynching.

    Wells established herself as an advocate for social justice and human dignity by combining irrefutable evidence with deeply personal emotional appeal.

    This volume is edited and introduced by Wells biographer Mia Bay.

Born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, Ida B. Wells began a career as a journalist reporting on major social and political issues. After the lynching of a close friend, she devoted the rest of her life to civil rights, becoming a co-founder of the NAACP. Mia Bay is the author of two books on African American history and a biography of Ida B. Wells.

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