Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is a journalist and author who was the first weekly African-American columnist for The Los Angeles Times, from 2006 to 2007. Before that, she was a staff writer for LA Weekly and New Times Los Angeles. Ms. Kaplan is the author of two books, “Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches From a Black Journalista” and “I Heart Obama.” Her essays and reporting have appeared in many anthologies, including “Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood,” which won an American Book Award in 2004. She has taught creative nonfiction in the M.F.A. writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.

Ida B. Wells was an African American journalist, abolitionist and feminist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s. She went on to found and become integral in groups striving for African American justice.