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Ida was born as a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862 . Ida was the oldest of eight children , Her mother was very religious and her father was involved in local politics. His parents died of yellow fever in 1878.

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Ida attended Shaw University for many years, but never graduated. She was a school teacher before becoming a journalist. Ida loved the theater and was constantly trying to improve herself.

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Ida was involved in a boycott of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, in retaliation for the black community being excluded from the event.

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Ida married Ferdinand Barnett in 1895. They had four children together — Charles, Herman, Ida, and Alfreda.
Ferdinand was also a journalist and founded a black newspaper in Chicago called the Conservator.

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Ida was participated in founding the National Association for Colored Women in 1896.  After the World’s Fair ended, her civil rights work continued in Chicago through a the Ida Wells Club. The Club established the first black kindergarten in Chicago.

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Ida B. Wells Used Investigative Journalism to Uncover the Truth About Lynching
Through writing, as she put pen to paper, her words became an important tool to analyze, debate, and persuade readers on the issues of the day, particularly when it came to race and gender.

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In 1884, Wells-Barnett filed a lawsuit against a train car company in Memphis for unfair treatment. She had been thrown off a first-class train, despite having a ticket. Although she won the case on the local level, the ruling was eventually overturned in federal court. After the lynching of one of her friends, Wells-Barnett turned her attention to white mob violence. She became skeptical about the reasons black men were lynched and set out to investigate several cases. She published her findings in a pamphlet and wrote several columns in local newspapers. Her expose about an 1892 lynching enraged locals, who burned her press and drove her from Memphis. After a few months, the threats became so bad she was forced to move to Chicago, Illinois.

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Ida was also a staunch supporter of women securing the right to vote. She co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1912, which became the largest Black women’s suffrage organization in Illinois. In addition to supporting women’s efforts to obtain the vote, the Alpha Suffrage Club taught women how to be politically active and promoted Black candidates for office.

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She continued her work for decades, traveling abroad to decry lynching and raise money and working with women’s clubs to encourage political participation, even running for state office herself. In 1922, she supported an antilynching bill then before Congress. Because of Democratic opposition, the bill failed, as did all federal efforts to end lynching, white supremacy’s weapon of terror.

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She died in Chicago, Illinois, on March 25, 1931. On May 4, 2020, Ida B. Wells was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize "for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."

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Dan Duster (a great-grandson of Ida B. Wells) accepts the Special Citation from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger on behalf of his family.