Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, who hailed from Holly Springs, Mississippi, was a journalist, sociologist, and suffragist who was an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1890's, she engaged in advocacy and held fundraisers to raise awareness and document the atrocious paradigm of lynching in America. She found that lynchings occurred for reasons as petty as Black people not moving out of the way when white people were walking in public or because they were economically competitive with white people in their region.
