Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born on July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, MS. She was born into slavery during the Civil War, once reconstruction began her parents instilled the importance of education. She enrolled at Rust College but was expelled after a dispute with the university president. Her parents were killed from a yellow fever epidemic and she had to raise her brothers and sisters, becoming a teacher to support them.

Wells-Barnett focused on white-mob violence and used investigative skills to write an exposé, however, that enraged locals and they burned her press forcing her out of Memphis. She moved to Chicago, Illinois, and in 1893 she joined other African American leaders in a boycott of the World's Columbian Exposition. In 1895, she married famed Black lawyer Ferdinand Barnett, having 4 children together. She traveled around the world shedding light on lynching, openly confronting white women in the suffrage movement who ignored lynching and often found herself ostracized by women's suffrage organizations in the United States.

She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women's Club. She attended the Niagara Falls meeting for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and spoke out against the 1908 Springfield Race Riot. She passed away March 25, 1931.