Ida B. Wells was on a swing through Mississippi during the spring of 1892, seeking subscriptions for the Free Speech, Memphis’ only black newspaper. On March 10th, she was in Natchez when the bad news caught up with her. Back home in Memphis, Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart had just been lynched.
Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were business partners; they owned a majority interest in Peoples’ Grocery, one of the city’s few black-owned businesses, which had only recently set up shop near the corner of Walker and Mississippi. Ida knew them well: She was the godmother to Tom and Betty Moss’ daughter.
Now her three friends were dead. They had been spirited from the Shelby County Jail, the sketchy reports indicated, loaded on a switch engine on the rail line that ran behind that building, carried a mile north of the city limits, and shot.
Boarding the train for her return trip to Memphis, the 30-year-old civil rights leader was deeply hurt. But she wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t the first time that black Americans had suffered at the hands of white mobs. Nor was it the first time that Judge Charles Lynch’s rough form of frontier justice had been applied to totally inappropriate situations. Nor would it be the last. But Wells was determined that somehow, someway, the madness would cease.
For 20 years after the bloody 1866 race riots that marked the ending of the Civil War in Memphis, the city had enjoyed an uneasy racial peace. But by the late 1880s, the balance was beginning to tilt back in the direction of white supremacy. “The young men of today say, ‘We are going to work this out,’” Memphis’ Weekly Avalanche editorialized in 1889, “‘and the North can do all the howling it wants.’” Caged for two decades, Jim Crow was ready once again to test his wings.
Slowly but surely, the white establishment reasserted its authority. Assisted by the federal government’s attitude of benign neglect on racial matters, white Memphis took complete control over black. In 1887 the last three black representatives in the state legislature — all from Shelby County — were replaced by whites. Nearly a century would pass before blacks were once again active participants in state and local politics.
There were voices of protest, however, the most strident emanating from offices in the basement of Beale Street Baptist Church, whose minister, the Rev. Taylor Nightingale, was also the publisher of the Free Speech. In that newspaper, an editorialist known to readers as “Iola” took direct aim at Mr. Crow. “The dailies of our city say that the whites must rule this country,” she wrote in 1889. “But that is an expression without a thought … for the Negro of today is not the same as Negroes were thirty years ago, and it can’t be expected that the Negro of today will take what was forced upon him thirty years ago.”
“Iola” was in fact Ida Wells, who by 1890 had become the most eloquent spokesperson for civil rights in Memphis. In her columns, she attacked blacks who had betrayed “the cause” as vehemently as she condemned white supremacists. And her reputation was spreading beyond Memphis and the Mid-South. Her articles were carried by black newspapers outside the South, papers like The New York Age, the Detroit Plaindealer, and the Indianapolis World. And the image she was projecting of a city torn by racism — where lynchings remained the white community’s answer to the problem of “Negro crime” — was hardly one of which any chamber of commerce would approve.
Born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida Wells was the oldest of eight children born to Jim and Elizabeth Wells; her father, a slave, was in fact the illegitimate son of his owner. The year Ida turned 16, the yellow fever epidemic swept down from Memphis through Holly Springs, claiming both her parents as victims, and leaving her to assume sole responsibility for rearing the five siblings who survived.
Wells was luckier than most of her peers, however; she had attended Rust Institute and found work as a schoolteacher, first in a rural school some six miles from Holly Springs, then, around 1882, in a school in rural Shelby County. She moved to Memphis for the latter job, and it was a job-related incident that led to her first display of civil rights militancy.
Each day Wells rode the Chesapeake & Ohio line from her home in the city to the school where she taught in Woodstock. On May 4, 1884, she boarded the train and made her way to the ladies’ coach. The conductor, prompted by recent nullification of civil rights laws in Tennessee, asked her to move to the smoking car. Angered by his orders, she refused. When he tried to force her to move, she bit his hand and attached herself all the more firmly to her seat.
Physical force prevailed that day; the conductor, with the aid of the baggage-man, removed her from the car. But her defeat was only temporary. She filed suit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. She won her case (and a $500 award in damages) but the decision was later reversed in Tennessee’s Supreme Court, on the grounds that her intention had been to cause trouble for the railroad, rather than to claim a comfortable seat for herself.
Wells felt the reversal keenly. As she later wrote, she had “firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice.” After the court’s reversal, she was, she wrote, “shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged.”
But discouragement did not lead to apathy. Spurred by a need to tell the story of her experiences with the railroad, she began writing articles for the Free Speech, Rev. Nightingale’s newspaper.
As Wells’ writing drew more and more attention, she accepted an invitation to go into partnership with Rev. Nightingale and J.L. Fleming, an Arkansas journalist, though for several years she had to maintain her teaching position to support herself. But in 1891, one of her more strident editorials (on the inequalities of the city’s segregated school system) cost her that job, so she was forced to rely upon the Free Speech as her sole source of income.
That loss was the Free Speech’s gain. Wells turned to neighboring cities and states, soliciting subscriptions and advertisements, and the paper prospered. She was named the most prominent correspondent for the American black press at a national convention, and the Free Speech became a respected voice within the local black community.
By 1890 Ida B. Wells had become the most eloquent spokesperson for civil rights in Memphis.
It was as a leader of the community that Ida Wells returned home to Memphis in March of 1892, too late to attend one of the largest funeral processions the city had ever witnessed. She hurried to the Moss residence, to console his widow and piece together the events that led to the lynching of Moss and his colleagues.
The violence had its roots in tension between the black owners of Peoples’ Grocery and W.H. Barrett, proprietor of a white-owned grocery that stood across the street. The area around Walker and Mississippi was nearly all black; many locals had begun shopping at People’s, and there were often angry words between Barrett and the proprietors of Peoples’ and even physical confrontations.
After several skirmishes, the white grocer persuaded the Shelby County Grand Jury to indict the owners of Peoples’ Grocery for maintaining a public nuisance and shut down their store. Furious, neighborhood blacks held a meeting at which one speaker suggested it was time to dynamite the “damned white trash.” News of that threat gave Barrett the grounds he needed to secure warrants for the arrest of the speakers, on charges of conspiring against whites.
Barrett spread rumors that a group of whites was planning retaliation against Peoples’ Grocery. Armed against the promised attack, Tom Moss, his partners, and several neighbors waited in the darkened store. Long after closing and with no word of identification, nine men in civilian clothes, later identified as sheriff’s deputies dispatched to serve the warrants, stormed the back door. The blacks opened fire. Three of the lawmen were wounded. Most of the black defenders fled, but Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were arrested and imprisoned. It was late Saturday, March 5, 1892.
By Sunday morning, tension was running high throughout the city, and armed whites roamed the streets. Not since 1866 had the city’s racial climate turned quite so sour.
On Tuesday night, a group of men, later identified as designated deputies, entered the jail and took Moss, McDowell, and Stewart from their cells. At 3 a.m. on March 9, 1892, on a vacant lot beside the Chesapeake & Ohio tracks outside of town, they shot the three men to death and mutilated McDowell’s body. An eyewitness filed a report with one Memphis paper that held up its Wednesday morning press run to give its readers the details of the event.
The black community spoke of revenge, but even the most militant knew that reprisals were useless — white Memphis held the power and the guns. “Tell my people to go West — there’s no justice for them here.” Those, reportedly, were Tom Moss’ last words.
A black mass meeting near Walker and Mississippi, echoing the lynched man’s sentiments, overwhelmingly approved a resolution urging westward emigration. In the columns of the Free Speech, Wells threw her support behind the scheme. “The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. … There is therefore only one thing left we can do: save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property nor give us a fair trial in the courts.”
“On to Oklahoma” became a rallying cry; over the next month some 2,000 blacks fled across the Mississippi, seeking freedom from fear and hoping that an abandoned city would regret the loss of their dollars. Among those who went west was Wells, who wanted to see firsthand if people would find conditions of life improved there. From Oklahoma she wrote to the Free Speech weekly, telling her readers of the opportunities she saw there.
The World War I era found Wells actively involved in the suffragette campaign. In 1913 she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, dedicated to winning the right to vote for black women. She and her colleagues marched side by side in Chicago with white suffragettes.
Wells next turned her fact-finding fervor in another direction: She began to gather all the evidence she could on lynchings. Her work went beyond the writing of letters and the searching of legal records. As soon as Wells received word of a lynching, she made a personal visit to the site, asking both blacks and whites to tell all they knew about the tragedy and the reasons behind it. In town after town across the South, she searched out the truth.
Lynchings had long been condoned by whites as fit punishment for a black who ravished a white woman. The editor of Memphis’ Appeal-Avalanche had written in 1891 that though lynching might be in violation of the written law, “there is a higher law which provides that the rapist must pay the penalty with his life.” But Wells suggested that in recorded cases of lynching — and the number since the Civil War approached 10,000 — less than one-third of the victims had been accused of assaulting white women.
And what of those so charged? Why were their crimes punished by a lynching mob when the assault of black women by white men had never drawn such punishment? A crime deserving capital punishment when committed by black men drew no public outcry when visited upon black women by white men.
This flagrant double-standard was the subject of many Wells editorials. Then, in May of 1892, she went still further, intimating that some of the “rapes” may have been voluntary liaisons between black men and white women, observing that “nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will have a very damaging effect on the moral reputation of their women.”
Wells had gone too far this time. The white press was outraged. “There are some things the Southern white man will not tolerate,” the Commercial responded, “and the obscene intimations of the foregoing have brought the writer to the outermost limit of public patience.”
Public patience with Ida Wells — white public patience, that is — had indeed evaporated. Her statements fanned another mob into action, and on May 27th the offices of the Free Speech were burned out. Wells was in New York City that night; J.L. Fleming, the paper’s editor, had been forewarned and was also out of town, but the white mob that gathered outside the vandalized offices promised to lynch both journalists should they ever again appear in Memphis.
Wells became a virtual exile. She stayed in the North; for some months she wrote for The New York Age. Then, in early 1893, she accepted an offer to tour the British Isles. It was an important turning point in her career. In Europe she became an international celebrity. She found audiences who listened, spellbound, to her accounts of lynch-mob brutality, newspapers that made those accounts available to the masses, and churches that agreed to censure their American counterparts that remained silent in the face of such injustice.
The Manchester Guardian was impressed. “Her quiet, refined manner, her intelligence and earnestness, her avoidance of all oratorical tricks, and her dependence upon the simple eloquence of facts makes her a powerful and convincing advocate,” that paper noted in 1893. In London, after speaking before members of Parliament, Wells was assured that the weight of British public opinion endorsed the right of a fair trial for every Southern black. She was instrumental in the formation of the London Anti-Lynching Committee, which held a treasury of 5,000 pounds for the purpose of investigating and publicizing the persecution of Southern blacks.
On her tours of the British Isles in 1893 and 1894, Wells made special mention of Memphis. She had an account to settle with the white communtiy here, and the city, unmoved by her rhetoric, continued to provide graphic, brutal illustrations for her speeches. On July 22, 1893, for example, several thousand watched as a Saturday night crowd broke into the Shelby County Jail and seized Lee Walker, an accused rapist. His throat was cut, he was hanged, and his body was set ablaze. Ten hours before this outrage, the Chicago Inter-Ocean had received a telegram advising them that a black man was to be burned and inviting them to “send Miss Ida Wells to write it up.”
The black activist, of course, was an ocean away. But her efforts in Europe were beginning to reap dividends. The British textile industry, after all, was a major customer of Memphis’ cotton merchants, and the international attention which Wells focused upon the city’s foul racial climate was not helping the local economy. While some continued to support lynchings, others were beginning to question the practice, on pragmatic if not humanitarian grounds. “Already the press and pulpit of Britain are thundering against us,” the Commercial noted after the Walker lynching, “and Memphis has been held up to them as an illustration of barbarism and savagery.”
In September 1894, shortly after Wells had returned from her second British tour, six black men accused of arson were lynched by another white Memphis mob. This time white political and business leaders raised their voices in outrage. At a public meeting in the Merchant’s Exchange, resolutions condemned lynching unequivocally and called for the apprehension and punishment of the murderers of the six. The recently consolidated Commercial Appeal lent its support: “If this crime goes unpunished, every friend of Memphis must be dumb before the accusations of its enemies.”
Thirteen white men were, in fact, brought to trial for this particular crime. And although no convictions were obtained, there was evidence at least of a change of mood and mentality in the Bluff City. Twenty-three years would pass before another lynching took place in Shelby County, and that sad event proved to be the last of its kind. Memphis was still decades away from real racial equality, but at least the terror of lynch law had finally ended.
Much of the credit must be given to Ida Wells. Ironically, she never returned to Memphis. After her tours of Great Britain, she settled in Chicago and in 1895 married Ferdinand L. Barnett, publisher of the Chicago Conservator. Over the next decade, they had four children, two sons and two daughters.
Despite her family responsibilities, Ida Wells Barnett remained active in black politics. She was one of the founders of the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the first female financial secretary for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1909 she attended the founding conference for the NAACP in New York, where she delivered a detailed report on lynching. As founder and chairperson of the Anti-Lynching League, she traveled about the country, visiting scenes of lynchings, gathering data, and consoling the families of victims.
The World War I era found her actively involved in the suffragette campaign; in 1913 she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, dedicated to winning the right to vote for black women. She and her colleagues marched side by side in Chicago with white suffragettes.
Memphis’ loss proved to be America’s gain, as Wells remained politically active in civil rights up until her death, at the age of 69, in 1931. Little wonder that her obituary echoed the sentiments of those who worked beside her in the NAACP and the Alpha Suffrage Club; to them she was and would remain “the black queen of our race.”
