Activist and journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. She insisted, “I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking back what I have said.” Library of Congress LC-USZ62-107756

ssay written by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “United States Atrocities: Lynch Law.” New York Public Library 1229161

African-American activists also continued the fight for equality in the decades following the Civil War. Ida B. Wells-Barnett is rightfully the most famous: she owned the Memphis Free Speech, in which she led the campaign against lynching. When racists destroyed her newspaper office in 1892, Wells moved north and wrote for several papers, including Chicago 's Conservator and the New York Age . Settling in Chicago , she founded several clubs for African-American women and went to the White House to lobby for a federal anti-lynching law. Her editorials, speeches, and books about the ties between race and sex made her the most radical black woman of her time.

1893 print of Mary E. Britton from Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities. New York Public Library 1221541

Mary E. Britton also used the print media in the battle for racial equality. Born in the decade before the Civil War, Britton worked to desegregate Kentucky railroads, campaigned for gender equality, and joined in the efforts of the suffragist movement. Britton served as the editor of the Lexington Herald “ women's column” while contributing to multiple newspapers throughout the country.

Mary Church Terrell was active in feminist and civil rights causes for almost a century, from her youth in the 1880s to her death in 1954. The founding president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, Terrell also served on the Washington, DC school board from 1895-1911. Her autobiography is A Colored Woman in a White World (1940). Library of Congress LC-USZ62-54720

Mary Church Terrell was the first black woman in the world to hold a master's degree. Born in 1863 to an elite black family in Memphis , she earned her degree at Ohio 's Oberlin College in 1888. Although mostly known for her work as a civil rights activist in Washington , D.C. , Terrell also wrote for periodicals. Her most famous piece may be “What it Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” published by The Independent , a widely read magazine aimed at whites, in 1906. She is especially famed for a speech at an International Suffrage Alliance meeting in Berlin – which she delivered in English, French, and German.