Inside the graystone in front of you lived one of America's bravest journalists. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, became a fearless investigative reporter who documented the horror of lynching in the South and demanded the nation confront it. Driven out of Memphis under threat of death, she settled in Chicago, where she lived in this graystone on King Drive from 1919 to 1929.
From here she campaigned for anti-lynching laws, helped found the NAACP, fought for women's suffrage, and battled the segregation of Chicago itself. For decades her contributions were overlooked; in 2020 she was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize special citation. The house is a National Historic Landmark.
Stand before its bay windows and remember a woman who, with little more than a pen and unshakable nerve, forced a country to look at what it preferred to ignore.