You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

She was one of those persons, wrote the novelist Thornton Wilder of a character in his historical

novel who have allowed their lives to be nored away because they have

fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of

civilization. Judge with me whether our great life this week is one of those good souls.

Here's something she wrote.

The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving

this and at the same time aroused the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice

for every citizen and punishment by law for the lawless,

I shall feel I have done my race a service.

Hands up, if you can attribute that quote to its rightful author. She is Ida B Wells, a black American journalist

and campaigner for the rights of Afro-Americans who risked her own safety to speak out

against the practice of lynching.

...