Ida B. Wells: Southern Horrors

In March eighteen ninety-two, three of Ida B. Wells's friends were taken from a Memphis jail and lynched. Their names were Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart. They had committed the economic offense of opening a grocery store in a Black neighborhood on the south side of Memphis, competing successfully with a white-owned store nearby. A white mob attacked their store; Moss, McDowell, and Stewart defended themselves and wounded several of the attackers. They were arrested, jailed, and dragged out and killed before any trial could occur.

Wells was twenty-nine years old. She was co-owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech newspaper. She had known Moss since childhood. She responded to the murders by publishing an investigation that became the foundation of the American anti-lynching movement.

What she found, combing through newspaper accounts of lynching cases across the South, overturned the standard justification for racial mob violence. The claim, repeated in Southern newspapers and in congressional testimony, was that lynchings were responses to crimes against white women. Wells demonstrated, case by case, that the stated justification was present in fewer than one-third of the documented incidents. The victims had been killed for economic competition, for voting, for organizing labor, for personal disputes, for the offense of being prosperous while Black.

The Memphis business community responded to her investigation by destroying the offices and printing press of the Memphis Free Speech while Wells was traveling in the North. She received a message warning her that she would be killed if she returned. She never returned to Memphis. She lived in New York and Chicago for the rest of her life.

She published "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" in eighteen ninety-two and "A Red Record" in eighteen ninety-five. "A Red Record" was the first systematic statistical analysis of racial terror in the United States. The method she invented, counting and cross-referencing published accounts, was adopted by the NAACP and remains the template for the Equal Justice Initiative's contemporary lynching documentation.

She is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago, far from the neighborhood where her printing press was destroyed. Memphis placed her on a historical marker. She earned it by never coming back.