When Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)1 sat down at her long dining room table in 1928, three years before her death, to begin writing her autobiography, her place in history was hardly assured. In addition to leading the nation's first anti-lynching campaign, Wells-Barnett co-founded the National Association for the Advancement ofColored People (naacp) and organized a black settlement house in Chicago, the Negro Fellowship League. She established the only black women's suffrage club extant in Illinois when women became partially enfranchised there in 1913, and subsequently ran for a senate seat in the state. Wells-Barnett was also the instrumental force behind the first national blackwomen's movement in the United States. Although in recentyears there has been growing attention paid to her achievements, Wells-Barnett has yet to be fully acknowledged in the canonical literature. Racism and/or sexism, in part, explain this oversight, as does thefactthatscholars haveonlyrecentlyrecognized theways in which difference, and the intersections ofrace, class, and gender informed Wells-Barnett's analysis ofracial violence. Wells-Barnett was the firstactivistto linklynchingto cultural attitudesaboutwomen—black and white—and to sexuality. There remains however another unstudied factorthat has affected Wells-Barnett's place in history: she was marginalized bythe civil rights establishment—includingthosewhothoughther too militant and yet incorporated her insights into their own strategies without crediting her. In January of 1930, when Wells-Barnett and her oldest daughter, Ida B. Jr., attended a Negro History Week meeting in Chicago, her worst suspicions were confirmed. The group discussed a book by Carter G. Woodson—who had inaugurated Negro History Week and