Hey everybody I hope you heard the big news. This year's Pulitzer Prizes have been announced and one of my personal journalism heroes has won. Ida B Wells. It took more than a century, but Ida's work on lynching has been officially recognized

as some of history's most consequential journalism.

We made an episode about Ida Wells in a previous season of this podcast, so I figured this is a good moment to share that with you again.

Because I suspect that Ida is still one of those iconic historical figures that people know by name, but not necessarily

understand her real contribution to history.

Which is a shame because Ida's work and her ideas are just so so relevant right now.

I'm Kywright and this is the United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and

its grip on our future. You are you. I'm Paula Giddings, writer, biographer of Ida B Wells.

I spoke with Paula back in 2018. of Ida B. Wells.

I spoke with Paula back in 2018 during the midterm elections.

Her spectacular biography of Ida Wells is the definitive source, and it's as much a coming of age story as anything else.

As I looked at her diary, she has fragments of a diary that are available.

You begin to see what's really inside of her.

She wants to transform a society that isn't treating her very well actually.

And she wants to transform herself. What's very interesting comes out in the diary is that she has a lot of anger

and she knows it will destroy her if she can't get a hold of it. So she works very

hard to transform that anger into something positive.

And this kind of urgent activism that she has, I think, comes as the result of that.

Ida Wells was born enslaved but grew up free during the Reconstruction era.

In those decades following the Civil War, when the United States rewrote its constitution

to create a truly interracial democracy and for a time those were more than

words on a page I had a came of age in a place where that promise that ideal of everybody getting a fair shot at making a life for themselves,

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