Ida B. Wells Born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida B. Wells rose to become a teacher, writer, editor, and civil rights activist. As an investigative journalist—muckrakers, as they were known at the time—she wrote about and campaigned against lynching. This photograph from 1910 shows Wells around the age of forty-eight. That same year she joined in the founding of the NAACP.

Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library