Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an African-American educator, investigative reporter and one of the earliest leaders of the civil rights movement.
During the decade of the 1890's, when recording for the Memphis Free Speech and , a journal she co-owned, Ida Bell documented lynching as a method to regulate and exercise control over the Black community. Her work publishers were slain by a white mob after the printing, and following continuous warnings, she was compelled to leave the South and migrate to Chicago.