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.

The bleak years after the Civil War brought continuing oppression to African Americans. During the 1880s and 1890s, more than 100 black citizens were lynched each year. In 1892, Memphis newspaper editor Ida B. Wells-Barnett raised a lone voice of protest and was forced to flee for her life. So began the civil rights pioneer's crusade against lynching.
This compilation features "Southern Horrors, " Wells's first pamphlet on the subject of lynching, as well as its successors, "A Red Record "and" Mob Rule in New Orleans." Substantiated by her meticulous research and documentation, these works remain as important to today's historians as they were to the author's original audience.