they had collaborated closely on several projects. She was better known than W.E.B. DuBois and more ideologically compatible with Douglass than Booker T. Washington"--but it was considered too belittling to black "manhood" to have a woman leading African American politics. Wells first rose to prominence when she wrote about her lawsuit against a railroad company that had kicked her out of a first-class seat. Throughout the 1890s, she crusaded vigorously against the rise of lynching as a tactic used by whites to intimidate the newly freed black populace. She also worked closely with the suffragist movement, but broke with white feminists who preferred to downplay or ignore ethnic dimensions to social justice. The woman who emerges from McMurry's intricately detailed biography, drawn extensively from Wells's own writings, is a fierce social advocate who easily serves as a role model for modern activists. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly North Carolina State University history professor McMurry manages to make the attractive and dynamic figure of Ida B. Wells sound dull. Born in Mississippi at the height of the Civil War, Wells attained a level of success remarkable for black women of her time. When her parents died during a yellow fever epidemic in 1878, the 16-year-old Wells took over the rearing of her six younger siblings, supporting them by teaching elementary school. She attended Rust College, where her father, politically active during Reconstruction, had been a member of the board,