Warrior Princess: A People's Biography of Ida B. Wells is the story of a young Black woman who decided to fight and protect Black people her entire life, and did so admirably. Ida B. Wells was a prominent journalist, activist, and suffragist who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was defiant, courageous, and committed to her life's work. For that reason, she endured violent threats from racist white men, and was ostracized by many Black male leaders. She spoke, wrote, and organized. But more importantly, she learned to believe in herself and her mission. As Wells herself wrote: "Let the Afro-American depend on no party, but on himself, for his salvation."

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: A Post-Civil War Life of Hope, Destroyed by Plague; Parents and an Adolescence Stolen........................................... 9 CHAPTER TWO: Miss Ida B. Wells, The Schoolteacher Who Fought on a Train ......... 15 CHAPTER THREE: The Shaping of Black America: Ida B. Wells, the Black Press and Free Speech in Post-reconstruction Memphis ..............23 CHAPTER FOUR: Knotted Rope: Wells' Campaigns Against Lynching....................... 43 CHAPTER FIVE: The 'Princess Of The Press' Becomes a Feted Clubwoman........................ 79 CHAPTER SIX: Ida's Alphabet: NAACP, NACW, NFL, NERL ...................................... 89 CHAPTER SEVEN: Family Time .............. 103 CHAPTER EIGHT: Sexism in the Movement: Wells-Barnett Fights Black Female Invisibilty..................................................... 111 CHAPTER NINE: The Complicated Relationship Between Wells-Barnett and White Feminism........................................... 121 CHAPTER TEN: An Elder in the 20th Century Black Freedom Movement........................... 137 CODA: A Nation of Leading Black Female Voices ........................................................... 147 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................ 181