Description
The sword among lions. Ida: A Sword Among Lions is the definitive biography of Ida B. Wells — born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, who became America’s most courageous crusader against lynching and a founder of modern investigative journalism.
Drawing on Wells’s own writings and deep archival research, this National Book Award finalist follows her from schoolteacher to internationally renowned activist: the data-driven reporting that exposed lynching’s lies — she documented that the alleged offenses were usually pretexts for racial terror — the exile from the South after her press was destroyed by a mob, the British lecture tours, and the alliances and clashes with fellow reformers from Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, none of whom matched her fearlessness.
Powerful, meticulous, and long overdue in its recognition, this is essential American history — and an unforgettable portrait of moral courage under fire, written with the scholarly rigor its heroic subject so richly deserves.
A journalist, a suffragist, and one of the bravest voices of her century, Ida B. Wells-Barnett devoted her life to fighting lynching and racial injustice in America. In Ida: A Sword Among Lions, celebrated historian Paula J. Giddings delivers the definitive biography of this extraordinary woman.
Drawing on years of meticulous research, Giddings traces Wells’s journey from her birth in Civil War–era Mississippi to her emergence as a fearless investigative journalist, civil rights leader, and suffragist. Through her anti-lynching campaigns, her pioneering investigative reporting, and her uncompromising moral courage, Wells confronted the violence and hypocrisy of post-Reconstruction America — often at great personal risk.
Winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this magisterial biography restores Ida B. Wells to her rightful place at the centre of American history. Essential reading for anyone who cares about civil rights, journalism, and the power of one determined voice.
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