“The most courageous woman most of us never heard of.”
– The New York Post

By Paula J. Giddings, excerpted from Ms. Magazine, May 11, 2020

For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.

“Having destroyed my paper, had a price put on my life, and been made an exile from my home for telling the truth, I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely.”

These were the words of Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), one of the nation’s earliest investigative journalists who launched the nation’s first anti-lynching campaign in 1892. Despite her role in exposing “the truth about lynching”—that claimed some 5,000 victims between 1882 and 1927—Wells was, in recent years, characterized by the New York Post as the “most courageous woman most of us never heard of.”

The Special Citation of the Pulitzer Prize Committee is bound to go a long way in redressing her undeserved anonymity. See the rest of this Ms. Magazine article here.