“The images and quotations from her bring you right to who she was,” Hunt said to ABC 7 Chicago. 

Commissioned by the Ida B. Wells Commemorative Committee, the sculpture was installed in early June where the Chicago Housing Authority’s Ida B. Wells Housing Project once stood. After several years of fundraising, they reached their goal of the $300,000 needed for the statue. It’s the first artwork in the city that honors a Black woman. 

Wells was an educator, investigative journalist and a civil rights activist who fought against segregation and lynching. She was born into slavery in Mississippi but was later freed due to the Emancipation Proclamation at the time of the Civil War. Wells moved to Chicago where she resided in the Bronzeville neighborhood to do her life’s work. She was outspoken as a Black woman and was active in the women’s suffrage movement. 

“She was not only writing to inform, but to shame,” Nikole Hannah-Jones said in a Chicago Stories special. 

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Her along with W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington and Moorfield Storey founded the National Advancement for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which is a civil rights organization. According to their website, its mission is “to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.” 

She was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for her groundbreaking work in exposing the harm that African Americans were facing due to lynching.