Wells was born in 1862 in Mississippi. She was sixteen when her parents were killed by a yellow fever epidemic, leaving her and her siblings to fend for themselves. To take care of the brothers he loved he found work as a teacher and then as a journalist. In 1889 he purchased a portion of an African-American newspaper called Free Speech. She was kicked out of Memphis, Tennessee in 1892 after writing an editorial about white men being quick to accuse black men of rape. She moved to Chicago and in 1895 married Frederick Barnett, also a journalist and activist. She was considered a “woman of race”. This means that she was more interested in the improvement of the African American race than in integrating with the whites. Wells was concerned for her people, especially when she saw evidence that many men were being killed for crimes they had not committed. She became very vocal about it and put her life at risk to try to stop them