The Chicago City Council made a timely and historic decision last week when it renamed a prominent downtown street for the pioneering newspaper editor, anti-lynching campaigner and suffragist Ida B. Wells. Renaming Congress Parkway as Ida B. Wells Drive comes as Wells’s descendants are preparing to commemorate their forebear with a monument — also to be built in her adopted city, Chicago — and as the country gears up for the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020.

Image Ida B. Wells

Born in slavery in Mississippi in 1862, Wells grew up during Reconstruction, when constitutional rights were extended to formerly enslaved African-Americans. Black men participated in electoral politics throughout the former Confederacy. Wells took up her career as a journalist during a time “when the possibilities of racial inclusiveness and the power of unified, collective action were palpable,” the biographer Paula Giddings writes in “Ida: A Sword Among Lions.”

By 1892, however, when Wells turned 30 , she had witnessed the passing of those halcyon days and the rise of lynch mobs throughout the South, hanging, burning and beating to death black men who dared stand up for their rights or compete with whites in business.