CHICAGO - A monument to journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells was unveiled June 30 in Chicago.

Officially called The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument, the commemoration created by sculptor Richard Hunt was dedicated in the South Side neighborhood where Ms. Wells lived out her life.

The monument has three bronze columns that support intertwined bronze sheets twisted into coils and spirals. One observer had trouble describing the abstraction at the top of the monu- ment, asking if it was a hat or a crown of thorns. She was more certain about the columns.

“It is interesting,” spectator Roberta Trotter told the Chicago Tribune. ”I just want to know what the artist thinks before I say more. But I do see a strong base. That, I understand — Ida was a strong woman.”

Granddaughter Michelle Duster said traditional busts and statues of Ms. Wells were considered, but she and others pushing for the monument preferred something interpretive, which she said projects Ms. Wells better than the literal.

The monument to Ms. Wells was financed by contributions made during a fundraising campaign over several years led by Ms. Duster. It sits on the site of the Ida B. Wells Homes, a housing project constructed in the 1930s, torn down in 2011 and replaced with market rate and subsidized housing.

“Hopefully it becomes a point of pride to Bronzeville, the kind of thing people want to serve as a backdrop to their lives here,” Ms. Duster said. “That’s what I want — a gathering spot.”

Congress Parkway, a major street in Chicago’s business district, was renamed for Ms. Wells in 2019.

Ms. Wells, who was born enslaved in 1862 in Mississippi, was a 30-year-old newspaper editor in Memphis, Tenn., when she began her campaign against lynching. Ms. Wells’crusade was prompted by the 1892 lynching of a man whose first child was her godchild. She traveled the South over several months interviewing witnesses and reading reports of similar events, which she published in the newspaper she co-owned and edited, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight.

In 2020, Ms. Wells was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the lynching of African-Americans.

Although she was threatened frequently be- cause of her work, she helped to found several civil rights organizations including the NAACP and the National Association of Colored Women.

Ms. Wells died at age 68 of kidney disease on March 25, 1931.