Ida B. Wells, Voice of Truth: Educator, Feminist, and Anti-Lynching Civil Rights Leader, written by Michelle Duster, illustrated by Laura Freeman, and published by Godwin Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company

Ida B. Wells, Voice of Truth, written by Michelle Duster, illustrated by Laura Freeman, demonstrates Wells’s fight for justice over nearly 50 years. Seventy years before Rosa Parks’s famous bus boycott, Wells refused to move from a train’s “ladies’ car” to their “colored car,” which doubled as the smoking car. As a teacher, Wells lost her job for having the heart to write her frustrations about separate and unequal school systems in her co-owned publication Memphis Free Speech. After losing three of her friends to lynching, Wells wrote the truth about those lynchings, knowing that “her friends were only guilty of being economic rivals to a white-owned business.” After marriage, Wells-Barnett was involved in the suffrage movement, started the first kindergarten for Black children in Chicago, and helped recently-migrated Black men find work. Wells’s legacy lives on today as we still learn that “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

Author: Michelle Duster
Illustrator: Laura Freeman
Award: 2023 Honor Book for Younger Children