Read the Horn Book review of CRUSADE FOR JUSTICE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF IDA B. WELLS by Lesa Cline-Ransome

Johnson’s compelling text tells the inspirational true story of a Black suffragist who fought injustice all her life. This biography of Wells begins with her birth in 1862, a year before the Emancipation Proclamation freed her parents. The Fifteenth Amendment nominally enfranchised Black men, but after Ida’s father voted for the first time, his white boss fired him, which led him to open his own business, Wells’s Carpentry.

At sixteen, Ida lost her parents and younger brother to yellow fever, and she began teaching and pursuing an education to support her siblings. Wells refused to accept discriminatory laws or the racist treatment of Black citizens on public transportation and fought against the brutal practice of lynching. The last half of the book focuses on Wells’s suffrage work, including her founding of the Alpha Suffrage Club and her participation in the 1913 march of the National American Woman Suffrage Association—an association that fought exclusively for white women’s suffrage. Wells and other women of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, including Mary Church Terrell, participated to show that they, too, required the vote. 

Jordan’s skillfully crafted oil on cloth illustrations effectively capture the historical era in which Wells lived and the determination she showed regardless of the challenge. The detailed back matter—including an author’s note, a timeline, photographs, and source notes—offers young readers ample resources for learning more about a person and history that all young people should know.