Paula Jane Giddings (born 1947) is an American writer, historian, and civil rights activist.

[3] As a teen, Giddings personally experienced and witnessed the racism and violence against African Americans that led to and occurred in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement.

According to Giddings, this set the stage for her desire to understand both oppression and resistance to it, a theme that would recur through her own activism and writing.

In 1972, Harris started Howard University Press, and Giddings joined as well, becoming an associate book editor.

Three years later, she felt disillusioned by the falling momentum of the civil rights movement, and wanted to fulfill her dream of living abroad.

[2] She opened the Paris branch of the newspaper, reporting on local issues as well as traveling throughout Africa, interviewing people like Winnie Mandela and President Idi Amin.

Kirkus Reviews described the book as "the first historical study of the relationship, in America, between racism and sexism--broad-ranging, occasionally plodding, generally sound and insightful.

Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching received the 2008 Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians, the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Outstanding Book Award, and was the 2009 Nonfiction winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award.