Ida B. Wells, renowned journalist and activist, would be celebrating her 163rd birthday today, July 16th. Wells is known for her work as an investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement, and was one of the founders of the NAACP.

Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, into slavery during the Civil War. In 1878, Wells’s parents and one of her brothers died of yellow fever, leaving the surviving Wells children as orphans. At 16, Wells took on the responsibility of becoming the new head of her family, taking a job as a schoolteacher to support them.

After being forcibly removed from a first-class train car in 1884 for being Black, Wells began writing about issues of race and politics in the South, publishing under the pen name “Iola.” She later became the owner of two newspapers: the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, and the Free Speech.

“The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press,” said Wells. Throughout the 1890s, Wells documented the lynching of African Americans in articles and pamphlets such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and The Red Record, which debunked the false justifications frequently offered by whites at the time.

Wells spent the last half of her life in Chicago, Illinois, where she remained a respected journalist and activist. She was involved with clubs and organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women and the NAACP, and started the all-Black Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913. In 2020, she was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize special citation for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.