This Day in Black History

You may have seen one of the many linked stories today on social media noting that the first Memorial Day remembrance was organized by formerly enslaved people in 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, a fact that was conveniently lost to history, or suppressed.

Another bit of black history that is not widely known (at least by white Americans) from this date is that Ida B. Wells was driven from her home town of Memphis by white mobs, who had already killed three of her friends and destroyed her newspaper office.

Quoting the website for Ava DuVernay's film Thirteen, the friends, Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart

were arrested for defending themselves against an attack on Moss' store [in March of 1892]. Moss was a highly respected figure in the black community, a postman as well as the owner of a grocery store. A white competitor, enraged that Moss had drawn away his black customers, hired some off-duty deputy sheriffs to destroy the store. Moss and his friends, not knowing the men were deputies, resisted. A gun battle broke out and several deputies were wounded. Moss, his two friends, and one hundred other black supporters were arrested.

Several nights later, masked vigilantes dragged Moss and his two friends from their cells, took them to a deserted railroad yard, and shot them to death. Enraged by their deaths, Wells lashed out at the refusal of Memphis police to arrest the well-known killers. She encouraged blacks to protest with boycotts of white-owned stores and public transportation.

This led Wells to look into lynchings, which until then she had thought happened only for heinous crimes. She found that rape was often claimed when relationships had been consensual. Wells wrote an editorial in her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, on May 25 that read,

"Nobody in this section of the community believes 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." The suggestion that white women would willingly have sexual relations with black men enraged white Memphis.

Wells was on her way to New York City when the reaction came:

Many white citizens of Memphis did not appreciate the implication that some of their women might prefer the company of black men, and the editor of the [white] newspaper declared that the "black wretch who had written that foul lie should be tied to a stake at the corner of Main and Madison Streets, a pair of tailor's shears used on him, and he should then be burned at the stake." (source)

A white mob attacked the Free Speech office on today's date, May 27, 1892, burning it and destroying the presses.

Wells never returned to Memphis, taking up residence in Chicago instead, where she will finally be remembered with a monument one of these days.
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A past post that discusses some of her time in Chicago.


Wells (by then Wells-Barnett) with her four children in 1909. Photo from the Wikimedia Commons.