Ida B. Wells was one of the strongest voices for Black freedom during the Jim Crow Era. An outstanding journalist, she campaigned against lynching alongside Frederick Douglass and she charted a course for independent African American journalism in support of civil rights activism. Today she was honored with a special posthumous citation by the Pulitzer Prize committee. Of course, this should have happened 103 years ago.
The Pulitzer Committee said the citation was given “For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”
According to the New York Times:
The journalist Ida B. Wells was awarded a posthumous special citation. Ms. Wells made it her life’s work to write about the racist violence in the South and to destroy the stereotype that was used as an excuse to lynch black men: That they were rapists. Ms. Wells was 30 when she set out on a reporting mission to document and investigate lynchings. By talking to eye witnesses in dozens of lynching cases, she discovered that in most lynchings, rape was not an accusation. She owned and edited a newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech, and was called “The Princess of the Press” by her peers.
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