Ida B. Wells was just five months old when Confederate forces under Earl Van Dorn raided her home town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, in December 1862, their target the supply depot established there as support for the Union general Ulysses S. Grant's assault on Vicksburg, Tennessee. She was a teenager when, in 1878, a yellow fever epidemic devastated her community, killing both her parents and one of her brothers. And in 1884, at the age of twenty-one, she was forcibly ejected from a ladies’ coach while traveling on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad on the grounds that it was for whites only. In some ways Wells's experiences were all too typical of the dangers and difficulties facing many Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially in the South where “yellow jack” posed a persistent, if not perennial, threat to life. Yellow fever, however, takes little account of race. The same could not be said of the railways in this period. Ida B. Wells was as susceptible as any other American to the threat of viral infection; she was particularly susceptible to the virulence of racial vindictiveness, however, for the simple reason that she was black.