The Light of Truth Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader

The broadest and most comprehensive collection of writings available by an early civil and women’s rights pioneer

Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks’s courageous act of resistance, police dragged a young black journalist named Ida B. Wells off a train for refusing to give up her seat. The experience shaped Wells’s career, and—when hate crimes touched her life personally—she mounted what was to become her life’s work: an anti-lynching crusade that captured international attention.

This volume covers the entire scope of Wells’s remarkable career, collecting her early writings, articles exposing the horrors of lynching, essays from her travels abroad, and her later journalism. The Light of Truth is both an invaluable resource for study and a testament to Wells’ long career as a civil rights activist.

Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She grew up to be a journalist who fought to expose the injustice of lynching through her writing, lecturing, and political activism.

Mia Bay is Professor of History at Rutgers University and Director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. She lives in New York City.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.