Excerpt: “Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, suffragist, and civil rights activist. She will be honored on the first American Women Quarters™ Program coin of 2025. … While still in her twenties, Wells became part-owner of the newspaper Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and became a prolific writer. In May 1892, in response to Wells’s article about lynching, a mob destroyed her printing press and drove her from the city. After a few months, she relocated to Chicago. Ida B. Wells married lawyer Ferdinand Barnett in 1895, and the couple would go on to have four children. Despite the challenges of raising young children, though, Wells did not leave her work behind and continued to report on Southern lynchings. While investigating, she occasionally went to the site of a killing, despite extreme danger. In 1895, she published the groundbreaking A Red Record, the first documented statistical report on lynching.”
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