The lynching at The Curve in Memphis near Memphis, Tennessee, was a successful African-American cooperative. The 1892 lynchings of its owners led Wells to begin her investigations of lynching. In 1889, Thomas Henry Moss Sr. (1853–1892), an African American, opened
People's Grocery, which he co-owned. The store was located in a
South Memphis neighborhood nicknamed "The Curve". Wells was close to Moss and his family, having stood as godmother to his first child, Maurine E. Moss (1891–1971). Moss's store did well and competed with a white-owned grocery store across the street, Barrett's Grocery, owned by William Russell Barrett (1854–1920). On March 2, 1892, a young Black male youth named Armour Harris was playing a game of marbles with a young white male youth named Cornelius Hurst in front of the People's Grocery. The two male youths got into an argument during the game, then began to fight. As the Black youth, Harris, seemed to be winning the fight, the father of Cornelius Hurst intervened and began to "thrash" Harris. The People's Grocery employees William Stewart and Calvin R. McDowell (1870–1892) saw the fight and rushed outside to defend the young Harris from the adult Hurst as people in the neighborhood gathered into what quickly became a "racially charged mob". The white grocer Barrett returned the following day, March 3, 1892, to the People's Grocery with a Shelby County Sheriff's Deputy, looking for William Stewart. Calvin McDowell, who greeted Barrett, indicated that Stewart was not present, but Barrett was dissatisfied with the response and was frustrated that the People's Grocery was competing with his store. Angry about the previous day's
mêlée, Barrett responded that "Blacks were thieves" and hit McDowell with a pistol. McDowell wrestled the gun away and fired at Barrett—missing narrowly. McDowell was later arrested but subsequently released. On March 5, 1892, a group of six white men including a sheriff's deputy took
electric streetcars to the People's Grocery. The group of white men were met by a barrage of bullets from the People's Grocery, and Shelby County Sheriff Deputy Charley Cole was wounded, as well as civilian Bob Harold. Hundreds of Whites were deputized almost immediately to put down what was perceived by the local Memphis newspapers
Commercial and
Appeal-Avalanche as an armed rebellion by Black men in Memphis. Thomas Moss, a postman in addition to being the owner of the People's Grocery, was named as a conspirator along with McDowell and Stewart. The three men were arrested and jailed pending trial. Around 2:30 a.m. on the morning of March 9, 1892, 75 men wearing black masks took Moss, McDowell, and Stewart from their jail cells at the Shelby County Jail to a
Chesapeake and Ohio rail yard one mile north of the city and shot them dead. The
Memphis Appeal-Avalanche reports: Just before he was killed, Moss said to the mob: "Tell my people to go west, there is no justice here." After the lynching of her friends, Wells wrote in
Free Speech and Headlight urging Blacks to leave Memphis altogether: The event led Wells to begin investigating lynchings. She began to interview people associated with lynchings, including a lynching in
Tunica, Mississippi, in 1892 where she concluded that the father of a young white woman had implored a lynch mob to kill a Black man with whom his daughter was having a sexual relationship, under a pretense "to save the reputation of his daughter". In a 1909 speech at the National Negro Conference, Wells said:
Free Speech newspaper destroyed by a mob Wells's anti-lynching commentaries in the
Free Speech had been building, particularly with respect to lynchings and imprisonment of Black men suspected of raping White women. A story was published on January 16, 1892, in the
Cleveland Gazette, describing a wrongful conviction for a sexual affair between a married White woman, Julia Underwood (née Julie Caroline Wells), and a single Black man, William Offet (1854–1914) of
Elyria, Ohio. Offet was convicted of rape and served four years of a 15-year sentence, despite his sworn denial of rape. Underwood's husband, Rev. Isaac T. Underwood – after she confessed to him that she had lied two years later – diligently worked to get Offet out of the penitentiary. After hiring an influential Pittsburgh attorney, Thomas Harlan Baird Patterson (1844–1907), Rev. Underwood prevailed, Offet was released and subsequently pardoned by the Ohio Governor. On May 21, 1892, Wells published an editorial in the
Free Speech refuting what she called "that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women." Four days later, on May 25,
The Daily Commercial wrote: "The fact that a Black scoundrel [Ida B. Wells] is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern Whites. But we've had enough of it."
The Evening Scimitar (
Memphis) copied the story that same day, and added: "Patience under such circumstances is not a virtue. If the Negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor's shears." A White mob ransacked the
Free Speech office, destroying the building and its contents. James L. Fleming, co-owner with Wells and business manager, was forced to flee Memphis; and, reportedly, the trains were being watched for Wells's return. Creditors took possession of the office and sold the assets of the
Free Speech. Wells had been out of town, vacationing in
Manhattan; she never returned to Memphis. A "committee" of White businessmen, reportedly from the
Cotton Exchange, located Rev. Nightingale and, although he had sold his interest to Wells and Fleming in 1891, assaulted him and forced him at gunpoint to sign a letter retracting the May 21 editorial. Wells subsequently accepted a job with
The New York Age and continued her anti-lynching campaign from New York. For the next three years, she resided in
Harlem, initially as a guest at the home of
Timothy Thomas Fortune (1856–1928) and wife, Carrie Fortune (née Caroline Charlotte Smiley; 1860–1940). According to Kenneth W. Goings, no copy of the
Memphis Free Speech survives. The only knowledge of the newspaper ever existing comes from reprinted articles in other archived newspapers.
Southern Horrors (1892) On October 26, 1892, Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Having examined many accounts of lynchings due to the alleged "rape of white women", she concluded that Southerners accused Black men of rape to hide their real reasons for lynchings: Black economic progress, which white Southerners saw as a threat to their own economic progress, and white ideas of enforcing Black second-class status in the society. Black economic progress was a contemporary issue in the South, and in many states whites worked to suppress Black progress. In this period at the turn of the century, Southern states, starting with Mississippi in 1890, passed laws and/or new constitutions to
disenfranchise most Black people and many poor white people through use of
poll taxes, literacy tests and other devices. Wells, in
Southern Horrors, adopted the phrase "poor, blind Afro-American Sampsons" to denote Black men as victims of "white
Delilahs". The Biblical "
Samson", in the vernacular of the day, came from
Longfellow's 1865 poem, "
The Warning", containing the line: "There is a poor, blind Samson in the land" To explain the metaphor "Sampson",
John Elliott Cairnes, an Irish
political economist, in his 1865 article about
Black suffrage, wrote that Longfellow was prophesizing;
to wit: in "the long-impending struggle for Americans following the Civil War, [he, Longfellow] could see in the Negro only an instrument of vengeance, and a cause of ruin".
A Red Record (1895) After conducting further research, Wells published
A Red Record, in 1895. This 100-page pamphlet was a sociological investigation of lynching in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It also covered Black people's struggles in the South since the Civil War.
A Red Record explored the alarmingly high rates of lynching in the United States (which was at a peak from 1880 to 1930). Wells said that during Reconstruction, most Americans outside the South did not realize the growing rate of violence against Black people in the South. She believed that during slavery, white people had not committed as many attacks because of the economic labor value of slaves. Wells commented that "ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution" since 1865, the final year of the civil war.
Frederick Douglass had written an article noting three eras of "Southern barbarism" and the excuses that whites claimed in each period. Wells explored these in her
A Red Record: • During the time of enslavement, she observed that whites worked to "repress and stamp out alleged 'race riots or suspected rebellions by the abducted, usually killing Black people in far higher proportions than any white casualties. Once the Civil War ended, white people feared Black people, who were in the majority in many areas. White people acted to control them and suppress them by violence. • During the
Reconstruction Era white people murdered Black people as part of mob efforts to suppress Black political activity and re-establish
white supremacy after the war. They feared so-called "Negro Domination" through voting and taking office. Wells urged Black people in high-risk areas to move away to protect their families. • She observed that whites frequently claimed that Black men had "to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women". She said that white people falsely assumed that any relationship between a white woman and a Black man was a result of rape. But, given power dynamics, it was much more common for white men to take sexual advantage of poor Black women. She stated: "Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Black men rape white women." Wells connected lynching to sexual violence, showing how the myth of the Black man's lust for white women led to the murder of African-American men. Wells collected 14 pages of statistics related to lynching cases committed from 1892 to 1895; she also included pages of graphic accounts detailing specific lynchings. She wrote that her data was taken from articles by white correspondents, white press bureaus, and white newspapers. Her delivery of these statistics did not simply reduce the murders to numbers, Wells strategically paired the data with descriptive accounts in a way that helped her audience conceptualize the scale of the injustice. This powerful quantification captivated Black and White audiences about the horrors of lynching, through both her circulated works and public oration.
Southern Horrors and
A Red Records documentation of lynchings captured the attention of Northerners who knew little about these mob murders or accepted the common explanation that Black men deserved this fate. According to the
Equal Justice Initiative, 4,084 African Americans were murdered in the
South, alone, between 1877 and 1950, of which, 25 percent were accused of sexual assault and nearly 30 percent, murder. Generally southern states and white juries refused to indict any perpetrators for lynching, although they were frequently known and sometimes shown in the photographs being made more frequently of such events. Despite Wells's attempt to gain support among white Americans against mob murders, she believed that her campaign could not overturn the economic interests whites had in using lynching as an instrument to maintain Southern order and discourage Black economic ventures. Ultimately, Wells concluded that appealing to reason and compassion would not succeed in gaining criminalization of lynching by Southern whites. In response to the extreme violence perpetrated upon Black Americans, Wells concluded that armed resistance was a reasonable and effective means to defend against lynching. She said, a "
Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home."
Speaking tours in Britain Wells travelled twice to
Britain in her campaign against lynching, the first time in 1893 and the second in 1894 in effort to gain the support of a powerful white nation such as Britain to shame and sanction the racist practices of the United States. She and her supporters in America saw these tours as an opportunity for her to reach larger, white audiences with her anti-lynching campaign, something she had been unable to accomplish in America. In these travels, Wells notes that her own transatlantic voyages in themselves held a powerful cultural context given the histories of the
Middle Passage, and black female identity within the dynamics of segregation. She found sympathetic audiences in Britain, already shocked by reports of lynching in America. Wells had been invited for her first British speaking tour by
Catherine Impey and
Isabella Fyvie Mayo. Impey, a
Quaker abolitionist who published the journal
Anti-Caste, had attended several of Wells's lectures while traveling in America. Mayo was a writer and poet who wrote under the name of Edward Garrett. Both women had read of the particularly gruesome mob murder of
Henry Smith in Texas and wanted to organize a speaking tour to call attention to American lynchings. Impey and Mayo asked Frederick Douglass to make the trip, but he declined, citing his age and health. He then suggested Wells, who enthusiastically accepted the invitation. In 1894, before leaving the US for her second visit to Great Britain, Wells called on
William Penn Nixon, the editor of the
Daily Inter-Ocean, a Republican newspaper in Chicago. It was the only major white paper that persistently denounced lynching. After she told Nixon about her planned tour, he asked her to write for the newspaper while in England. She was the first African-American woman to be a paid correspondent for a mainstream white newspaper. Wells toured
England,
Scotland, with
Eliza Wigham in attendance and
Wales for two months, addressing audiences of thousands, and rallying a moral crusade among the British. She relied heavily on her pamphlet
Southern Horrors in her first tour, and showed shocking photographs of lynchings in America. On May 17, 1894, she spoke in
Birmingham,
West Midlands, at the Young Men's Christian Assembly and at
Central Hall, staying in
Edgbaston at 66 Gough Road. On June 25, 1894, at
Bradford she gave a "sensational address, though in a quiet and restrained manner".
British Anti-Lynching Committee On the last night of her second tour, the British Anti-Lynching Committee was established – reportedly the first anti-lynching organization in the world. Its members included prominent public figures such as the
Rt. Hon. John Campbell, 9th Duke of Argyll (
K.G.,
K.T.),
Rt. Hon. Sir
John Eldon Gorst (M.P. for
Cambridge), the
Archbishop of Canterbury,
Edward White Benson. In addition to Gorst, approximately twenty more
Members of Parliament from across the United Kingdom and Ireland joined the committee, including
Dadabhai Naoroji (
Finsbury Central),
Charles Diamond (
Manchester North),
Thomas Burt (
Morpeth),
Joseph Pease (
South Durham),
John Wilson (
Glasgow Govan), and
Alfred Webb (
West Waterford). The committee also included influential clergy, including Rev.
John Clifford,
D.D., Rev.
Christopher Newman Hall,
D.D., Rev.
Robert Forman Horton,
D.D., Rev.
Philip Henry Wicksteed (and his wife, Mrs. Wicksteed;
née Emily Solly), Rev.
Joseph Estlin Carpenter, Rev.
William Fiddian Moulton,
D.D., and
Moncure Daniel Conway (American abolitionist minister and radical writer). Journalist on the Committee included Sir
Edward Russell (editor of the
Liverpool Daily Post),
Percy William Bunting (editor of
The Contemporary Review),
Peter William Clayden (1827–1902) (night editor of the
Daily News),
Alfred Ewen Fletcher (editor of the
Daily Chronicle),
Charles Prestwich Scott (editor of the
Manchester Guardian), and
William Pollard Byles (
M.P. for
Shipley and editor of the
Bradford Observer; and his wife, Mrs. Byles,
née Sarah Anne Unwin). Suffragists and social reformers on the Committee included Mrs.
Harriot Stanton-Blatch (
aka Harriot Eaton Blatch or Harriot Stanton Blatch;
née Stanton), Miss
Isabella Ormston Ford (1855–1924) (
Leeds), Mrs.
Spence Watson (
née Elizabeth Richardson),
Mrs. Jacob Bright (
aka Ursula Bright,
née Ursula Mellor), Miss
Eliza Wigham (
Edinburgh), and
Lady Henry Somerset. Scholars included Professor
James Stuart (
M.P. for
Sunderland; and his wife, Mrs. Stuart;
née Laura Elizabeth Colman, daughter of
Jeremiah James Colman). Physicians included
Oguntola Odunbaku Sapara,
M.D. Miss
Florence Balgarnie served as the committee's honorary secretary and
John Passmore Edwards, a journalist (part owner of the
Weekly Times of London and
The Echo; and former Member of Parliament for
Salisbury, served as Treasurer. As a result of her two lecture tours in Britain, Wells received significant coverage in the British and American press. Many of the articles published by the latter at the time of her return to the United States were hostile personal critiques, rather than reports of her anti-lynching positions and beliefs.
The New York Times, for example, called her "a slanderous and nasty-minded
Mulatress". Despite these attacks from the American press, Wells had nevertheless gained extensive recognition and credibility, and an international audience of supporters for her cause. Wells's tours in Britain even influenced public opinion to the extent that British textile manufacturers fought back with economic strategies, imposing a temporary
boycott on
Southern cotton that pressured southern businessmen to condemn the practice of lynching publicly. == Marriage and family ==