On September 14, 1892, Ida B. Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a 23-page pamphlet compiling documented cases of lynching across the American South. She had been driven out of Memphis six months earlier, after her newspaper office was destroyed by a mob following her editorials investigating the lynching of three Black businessmen — friends of hers — by a white mob resentful of their successful grocery store.

Wells was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to enslaved parents who were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation when she was six months old. Both parents died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1878, leaving her as the eldest of six surviving children at sixteen. She forged records to appear older, passed a teaching examination, and supported her siblings for a decade.

She began writing for Black newspapers in Memphis in the late 1880s under the pen name "Iola." In 1884 she sued the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad after being forcibly removed from a first-class car by the conductor; she won in circuit court and lost on appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court. She continued writing about racial violence with a rigor that treated lynching as what it was — a terror campaign to suppress Black economic and political power — rather than the "justice" narratives white newspapers produced.

The evidence she compiled between 1892 and 1900, including A Red Record (1895), constitutes the most thorough documentation of American lynching produced in the nineteenth century. She presented it to Congress. Nothing happened.

She helped found the NAACP in 1909. She was not invited to sign the founding document.