Most people recognize Ida B. Wells for her singularly consequential anti-lynching crusade.

Wells also was a pivotal figure in virtually every other reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She challenged racially segregated schools and trains, lobbied for women's suffrage, established a settlement house for Black men, cofounded both the National Association of Colored Women (1896) and the NAACP (1910), and edited the Chicago Defender, one of the country's most influential Black newspapers. 

In addition, it was Wells's Alpha Suffrage Club that orchestrated the election of Chicago's first Black alderman, Oscar DePriest, in 1914. 

Learn more about Ida B. Wells.