This Day in American History

March 9, 1892—Early in the morning, a white mob seized three African-American prisoners from a Memphis jail, took them to a rail yard and shot them, in retaliation for their alleged part in the wounding of three white sheriff’s deputies.

The murdered prisoners, owners of the black-owned People’s Grocery Company, had been friends of a 30-year-old former schoolteacher. But the young woman, Ida B. Wells, was now a journalist, and the death of her friend launched her on a decades-long crusade to document and destroy domestic terrorism against African-Americans in the Jim Crow era of southern segregation.

Lynchings, the particular focus of Wells’ work, were open murders of individuals often suspected of criminal activity, usually carried out spontaneously by mobs, and perpetrated publicly as a warning to others. The origins of the practice have been traced to Ireland and to colonial-era North and South Carolina.

At their worst, lynchings involved not just hangings and shootings, but also burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture.

As heinous as the crimes themselves was their routine nature. Nearly five thousand Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1951, an average of more than one a week, according to the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. (That number included 1,200 whites who were murdered in the South for voting Republican or for being sympathetic to blacks.)

Though whites cited sexual crimes—overwhelmingly trumped-up charges—as justification for twisting the law for their own purposes, the lynching involving the People’s Grocery Company illustrated another motivation: blacks’ assertion of political or socioeconomic rights. The People’s Grocery had dared to compete against a white company that had previously enjoyed a monopoly of blacks’ business in an area on the edge of Memphis then known as “The Curve” (named for the arc made by streetcars).

Daily white-black arguments led to threats against the People’s Grocery. Their plea for police protection was met with a that’s-not-in-our-jurisdiction response (the grocery was right outside city limits) and a suggestion that the owners use guns to protect themselves. The shooting of three whites then resulted. The owners—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—seemed to be safe, at least momentarily, in jail. But when a black contingent guarding them decided after three days that they needed no further protection, the white mob abducted and lynched the black businessmen.

As co-editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech, Wells swung into action. A blistering series of articles chronicled the extent of lynching as local social control (eight lynching cases in the Memphis area in just one month of 1892), contended that a Winchester rifle should have a “place of honor in every black home,” and advised readers of their last resort: “save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Eventually Wells was run out of town over a particularly pointed editorial noted that, contrary to the notion that lynchings were often justified as defenses against the rape of white womanhood, some involved black men who had engaged in consensual sex with white women. But she merely continued her crusade elsewhere.

In Britain, Wells delivered 102 lectures in an attempt to bring international pressure to bear on the United States to enact anti-lynching legislation. In Chicago, she married an attorney who sold her his shares of the Chicago Conservator, enabling her to become full owner of the city’s first African-American newspaper.

As fearless as she was indefatigable, Wells tangled with not only racists but also with other advocates for women’s or civil rights. She upbraided Frances Willard when the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in an attempt to recruit southern women, accepted the rape myth and condoned lynching and the color line. And, in a low point in an otherwise often-brilliant career, W.E.B. DuBois bragged about marginalizing her influence within the NAACP, an organization that she (along with him) was instrumental in establishing.

In a time when reporters have devolved into gotcha pestering of Presidential candidates when they’re not chasing celebrities on their way in or out of rehab, it’s important to recall an era when journalists made a difference in the lives of others.

Shakespeare wrote that some men “are born great, others achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” The daughter of slave parents, Wells assuredly was not born great. It was the unfortunate times in which she lived—a true dark age for African-Americans—that thrust greatness upon her. But she also continually achieved greatness over and over again. Her life and work stand as monuments to what one person can do armed only with facts and courage.