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A Determined
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How Ida b. Wells battled Jim Crow in Memphis. by linda peavey and ursula smith
a v ersion of this story origina lly a ppe a red in the june 1983 issue of
MEMPHIS
maga zine.
IDA B. WELLS PHOTOGRAPH IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES
I
da 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.
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