Ida B. Wells

Born to slave parents in Holly Springs on July 16, 1862, Wells' life epitomized the freedom struggle for African Americans following the Civil War. When her parents and an infant brother died in the Yellow Fever outbreak of 1878, Wells raised her five remaining siblings. Despite these early hardships, she became a journalist and entrepreneur, serving as co-owner of the Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper Free Speech. Her investigative style of journalism publicized the often unreported accounts of mob lynching in the South. Her books Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Red Record exposed the subterfuges southerners employed for this type of murder of Black men. "Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women." Wells once wrote. She died

March 25, 1931, in Chicago, Illinois.