A pioneering journalist, driven civil rights activist, and dedicated educator, Ida B. Wells spent her lifetime tirelessly speaking out against the intersectional prejudices that afflicted her and Black people and women across the United States.
Now, nearly a century after her death in 1931, she is the 16th woman recognized on the quarter through the US Mint’s American Women’s Quarter Program, a four-year initiative in partnership with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum to honor the achievements and contributions of women in the US.
Wells’s likeness will be featured on the reverse side of the coin, opposite George Washington’s profile, but she is not the only individual recognized by the program in its final year. The US Mint is also commemorating the legacies of Girls Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low, astronomer Dr. Vera Rubin, disability justice activist and author Stacey Park Milbern, and tennis champion Althea Gibson.
Born into slavery in 1862 during the Civil War, Wells never stopped working to make the world around her a more just place. She sued a railroad company for racial discrimination; investigated lynchings and racial terrorism that was threatening Black communities in the South; co-founded the the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and ran for the Illinois state senate.
“I grew up hearing stories about my great-grandmother, and I always felt proud of how she fought for justice. She believed that everyone should have the same rights and chance to go to school, live in safe places, own businesses and property, and to vote — no matter what they looked like,” wrote Michelle Duster, Wells’s great-granddaughter, in Smithsonian Magazine.
“The quarter with her image will remind all about how far we have come as a country and how important it is to speak up and do whatever is possible for everyone to have equal rights and opportunities,” Duster continued.
