On May 21, 1892, Black journalist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) published an anti-lynching editorial in her Tennessee newspaper The Memphis Free Speech.
In it, she wrote “Nobody in this section of the country believes the 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 of 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.”
Two days after those notices appeared, on May 27, 1892, while Wells was visiting Manhattan, a white mob attacked and destroyed her newspaper’s office in Memphis and threatened to kill her if she returned to the city. They posted watches on arriving trains on the lookout for Wells, who was just 29.
Just months before, in March, three Black men, friends of Ida B. Wells, had been lynched in Memphis. The lynchings of her friends inspired her to examine the frequency of racial terror lynching and the false charges often used to justify it. She used her newspaper to share that information.
“Wells found that most Black lynching victims were actually killed for minor offenses or non-criminal transgressions such as failing to pay debts, public drunkenness, engaging in consensual interracial romance, or — as in the case of her friends — challenging white economic dominance,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative’s History of Racial Injustice.
Ida B. Wells in New York
After the destruction of her newspaper she accepted a job with The New York Age (1887-1960) and continued her anti-lynching campaign from New York City. For the next three years, she lived 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).
On October 26, 1892, Wells detailed her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases which noted the white revolt against economic progress was a leading cause of lynchings. It was published by The New York Age.
While still in New York, Wells began work on The Red Record, published in Chicago in 1895. The 100-page pamphlet provided more details about the issue describing 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. The 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 in places like New York 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 noted that, since the time of slavery “ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution.”
Wells also addressed New York temperance advocate and suffragist Frances Willard (1839-1898) in a chapter entitled “Miss Willard’s Attitude.”
Willard delivered “a studied, unjust and wholly unwarranted attack upon our work” at her Annual Address to the Women’s Christian temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) Convention in Cleveland, November 5, 1894, Wells said, quoting her at length saying:
“It is my firm belief that in the statements made by Miss Wells concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless acts between the races she has put an imputation upon half the white race in this country that is unjust, and, save in the rarest exceptional instances, wholly without foundation. This is the unanimous opinion of the most disinterested and observant leaders of opinion whom I have consulted on the subject, and I do not fear to say that the laudable efforts she is making are greatly handicapped by statements of this kind, nor to urge her as a friend and well-wisher to banish from her vocabulary all such allusions as a source of weakness to the cause she has at heart.”
Wells railed against Willard’s racism in Red Record, quoting Willard:
“I pity the southerners, and I believe the great mass of them are as conscientious and kindly intentioned toward the colored man as an equal number of white church-members of the North. Would-be demagogues lead the colored people to destruction. Half-drunken white roughs murder them at the polls, or intimidate them so that they do not vote. But the better class of people must not be blamed for this, and a more thoroughly American population than the Christian people of the South does not exist. They have the traditions, the kindness, the probity, the courage of our forefathers.
“The problem on their hands is immeasurable. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop is its center of power. ‘The safety of woman, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that the men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.”
“Here we have Miss Willard’s words in full,” Wells responded, “condoning fraud, violence, murder, at the ballot box; rapine, shooting, hanging and burning; for all these things are done and being done now by the Southern white people. She does not stop there, but goes a step further to aid them in blackening the good name of an entire race, as shown by the sentences quoted in the paragraph above. These utterances, for which the colored people have never forgiven Miss Willard, and which Frederick Douglass has denounced as false, are to be found in full in the Voice of October 23,1890, a temperance organ published at New York City.”
In 1895 Ida B. Wells settled in Chicago, where she married, raised a family, and remained a racial justice activist and vocal opponent of lynching until her death in 1931.
No copy of the Memphis Free Speech survives. We only know of the paper from reprinted articles in other archived newspapers.
Her investigations, speeches, and written publications however, challenged racial terror during her lifetime and ensured that history would not be lost to future generations.
Her work is a major foundation for the Equal Justice Initiative’s report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, as well as the contents of the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where a grove is named in her honor.
Illustrations, from above: Ida B. Wells, in a photograph by Mary Garrity from ca. 1893; the cover of Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells (New York, 1892); and Ida Wells’ campaign card used during her unsuccessful run for an Illinois State Senate seat in 1928 (University of Chicago Photograph Archive).