Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells, born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1862, was a journalist and civil rights activist. Wells was a journalist and civil rights activist during the late 1800s, when blacks could still remember being slaves. Wells was known for being outspoken and unafraid to challenge whites, an attitude that could have easily gotten her lynched.
	Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, her parents were able to support Ida and her six siblings because her mother was a “famous” cook and her father was a skilled carpenter. When Ida was only 14 years old, The Yellow Fever swept through Holly Springs and killed her parents and her youngest sibling. The Emblematic of the righteousness, responsibility, and fortitude that characterized her life, she kept the family together by securing a job teaching. She managed to attend a near-by Rust College. She eventually moved to Memphis to live with her aunt and help raise her youngest sisters.
	It was in Memphis where Ida B. Wells first began to fight for racial and gender justice. During an 1884 train ride, Wells was asked to give up her seat to a white passenger and refused, which occurred more than 70 years before Rosa Parks. She was thrown off the bus after rejecting to get out of her seat, and the whites applauded. After the conductors dragged her out of the train car, she sued the train company and won! Though the ruling was overturned, Wells proved that she could unabashedly stare racism right in the eyes.
	Wells was born just before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued after the Union victory at Antietam, and it had both moral and strategic implication for the ongoing Civil War by declaring all slaves in rebelling territories free. The Emancipation Proclamation is also credited for documenting lynching in the South and researching how white segregationists used violent methods to keep African Americans “in their place.”
	To put it lightly, Ida B. Wells helped shape the world and helped stopped racism and sexism in her own way through journalism and documentation.