On July 1, 1895, Ida B. Wells published A Red Record, the first systematic statistical accounting of lynching in the United States — a document that named names, cited newspapers, and demolished every justification that had been offered for extrajudicial murder.

Wells had been driven out of Memphis three years earlier, after her editorial in the Free Speech observed that the Black men being lynched were often killed not for the crimes alleged but for economic competition with white businesses. A mob destroyed her press. She received death threats. She moved to Chicago and kept writing.

A Red Record documented 241 lynchings in 1892 alone. Wells cross-referenced white Southern newspapers to show that the "rape" narrative deployed to justify the murders was fabricated in the majority of cases — that the men killed had been killed for business disputes, for political activity, for refusing to accept subordination.

She took the evidence to Britain, where her speaking tour generated international pressure. The U.S. Congress refused to pass anti-lynching legislation for another 55 years. A federal law finally passed in 2022.

Wells was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 2020. She had been doing this work since 1884.