Ida B. Wells Awarded Pulitzer Prize

Our namesake has received much recognition in the 89 years since her death, and this is such a well-deserved one – to underscore a fact!

Ida B. Wells once said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Indeed, it was the hallmark of her 40-year career as an investigative exposing the horrors of the lynching era, and on Monday, she was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for her work.

Wells was among this year’s recipients in fifteen Journalism and seven Book, Drama and Music categories. The awards announcement is normally held at Columbia University, but because of the current shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s announcement was made online.

Wells was recognized “For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching,” according to the Pulitzer website. The citation comes with a bequest by the Pulitzer Prize board of at least $50,000 in support of her mission, and recipients will be announced at a later date.

Born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, Wells became a crusading writer and publisher who through her newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, crusaded against lynching and for civil rights in the deep South after the Civil War. She investigated the regularly used narrative of Black men raping White women that often preceded lynchings, and discovered that it was false, realizing that it was nothing more than a means for Whites to terrorize and oppress Black Americans. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare old lie that Negro men rape white women,” Wells wrote.

She was forced to flee Memphis after her newspaper offices were plundered and her presses destroyed, but she continued her work in Chicago, IL where she became even more active in the fight for civil rights, making her mark in history as one of the founders of the NAACP, as well as in efforts in the suffrage movement and anti-segregation advocacy.

Since her death in 1931, she has been recognized not just as an crusader for civil rights, but also a major influence in investigative journalism, “As a journalist, I’m grateful that in investigating lynchings of black men, Ida B. Wells pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism.” New York Times Caitlin Dickerson said. Dickerson wrote her obituary for the newspaper’s “Overlooked” series of obituaries — people, many of who of color, whose deaths were not reported at the time.

The recognition of Ida B. Wells is seen with the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which was established in 2016, and is “a news trade organization dedicated to increasing and retaining reporters and editors of color in the field of investigative reporting.” It was founded by journalists Ron Nixon, Topher Sanders and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Hannah-Jones also was named a Pulitzer winner for her essay for the 1619 Project, which recognizes enslaved Black people serving as the foundation of America.

The Kansas City-based Ida B. Wells Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality of which One People’s Project is a coalition member, is named for Wells, as is the One People’s Project newssite Idavox.