Featured specimens
Three pieces from the archive, pulled to the front.
Ida B. Wells
Born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, Ida B. Wells lost both parents and a baby brother to yellow fever at sixteen and raised her five surviving siblings while teaching school. After a friend was lynched in Memphis in 1892, she turned to the investigative journalism most of the South wanted buried, using white newspapers' own numbers against them in Southern Horrors and A Red Record to prove lynching was never about protecting anyone. She helped found the NAACP in 1909 and then watched her name get quietly minimized in its own history anyway. This shirt puts it back where it belongs.
Granville Woods
Granville Woods patented the induction telegraph in 1887, letting moving trains communicate with stations and each other for the first time and preventing collisions on lines that had none. A company tied to Thomas Edison challenged his claim to the invention in court. Woods proved he'd built it first and won — twice. Edison then offered him a partnership instead of a lawsuit. Woods turned it down and kept inventing on his own.
Wilma Rudolph
Wilma Rudolph had polio as a child, wore a leg brace until she was nine, and was told by doctors she'd never walk normally. By twenty, she was the fastest woman in the world, winning three gold medals at the 1960 Rome Games. The brace came off years before the record did.