Ida B. Wells was a civil rights pioneer who fought for racial justice in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was an investigative journalist, a suffragist, and an anti-lynching activist. Wells was born into slavery in 1862 and became a teacher after the Civil War. She wrote articles about lynching and other forms of racial violence, and she organized boycotts and protests against segregation. Her work helped to lay the foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.