Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells

The NAACP co-founder, civil rights activist, educator, and journalist recounts her public and private life in this classic memoir.

Born to enslaved parents, Ida B. Wells was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She co-founded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement, working alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.

This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells’s private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice. This updated edition includes a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing, new images, and a new afterword by Ida B. Wells’s great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster.

“No student of black history should overlook Crusade for Justice.” —William M. Tuttle, Jr., Journal of American History

© 2020 The University of Chicago Press (Ebook): 9780226691565

Release date

Ebook: 17 April 2020