by Mia Bay
In the face of such press, all eyes turned to the jail where Moss, McDowell, Stewart, and other black men were being held without bail. The white mob that descended on the city jail three days after the shoot-out was hardly unanticipated. Armed, and in many cases inebriated, white men had been patrolling the streets around the jail since the arrests, threatening to “lynch the niggers.”5 Indeed, during the two nights immediately after the shoot-out, the Tennessee Rifles had gathered to guard the jail. Lynchings often began with a raid on the jailhouse, so this black militia group was anxious to protect the men inside the prison, whose numbers included at least one militia member—McDowell. But on the third day of their watch, the militia guard was forced to disperse after the sheriff seized their arms. While Memphis whites remained free to bear arms, the city procured a court order to disarm not only the Tennessee Rifles but also all the city’s black citizens—who were also prohibited from buying guns. In the end, no one but the white jailer met the white mob that descended on the prison on March 9, 1892, at three o’clock in the morning. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart were dragged from their cells and marched to a desolate field just north of the city limits. There they were lined up for execution at gunpoint and asked if they had any last words before they died.
Thomas Moss reportedly pleaded for his life, begging to be spared for the sake of “his wife and child and his unborn baby.” Once he realized that his pleas were futile, he told his killers to “tell my people to go West—there is no justice for them here.”6 The others recorded no last words. Calvin McDowell evidently perished in a pitched battle with one of the lynchers, whose gun he grasped and held on to until a bullet shattered his closed fist. Another shot killed him, and at some point the mob gouged out his eyes, before leaving all three men stretched out on the ground, partially covered with some brush.
Sketches of Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and the murder scene appeared in The Memphis Commercial the day after McDowell, Moss, and William Stewart were killed.
When the trouble began Wells was in Natchez, Mississippi, selling subscriptions to Free Speech, and she did not get home until after her friend Tommie Moss had been laid to rest. Before news of the lynchings in Memphis reached her she was on top of the world. Now thirty years old, Ida was doing the work she loved. At long last she felt confident that she could make her living with a newspaper and would never again need to “tie…[herself] down to school teaching.”7 On this point she would prove right, her schoolteaching days were over. But the murders of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart would change her life, propelling her on an antilynching campaign that would cost her her newspaper, threaten her life, and sever her ties to Memphis forever. In time, it would also make her the most famous black woman in America.
Tell My People to Go West:
Wells’s Last Days in Memphis
Few of these momentous changes were foreseeable by Wells when she arrived back in Memphis a week or so after the lynchings. But she did return to a Memphis utterly transformed. In deep mourning over the deaths of the popular owners of the People’s Grocery, the city’s once confident black community was shocked “beyond description.” Moreover, blacks in Memphis were still at the mercy of mob rule, and lived in fear of their lives. Anticipating black retaliation, the city had secured a court order authorizing the sheriff to “shoot down on sight any Negro who appears to be making trouble.” And with this license, whites had flooded the Curve. “They obeyed the judge’s orders literally,” Wells recalled in her autobiography, “and shot into any group of Negroes they saw with as little compunction as if they had been on a hunting trip.” Barred from buying guns, blacks could not even defend themselves; colored men had no choice other than to submit to “outrages and insults for the sake of those depending upon them.”8
Determined to “sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked,” Wells “bought a pistol the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched” and rarely traveled unarmed afterward.9 But even as she began carrying a pistol in her purse, she realized that the situation in Memphis completely defied self-defense as a remedy. The men who worked in the People’s Grocery had tried to defend themselves, and they had ended up not only dead but publicly defamed in scores of white newspapers. Hardworking and responsible young black men, they had lived by all the rules that African Americans were supposed to obey in order to advance themselves and their race. Their deaths revealed the futility of the ambitions long held by Memphis’s striving black elite—indeed, it called into question the ideology of racial uplift that had so long fueled Ida’s hopes for black progress in the South.
“A favorite with everybody,” her friend Thomas Moss was a particularly poignant case in point. Employed full time as a letter carrier—the Free Speech office was on his route—he had worked nights in the black business that he cofounded and co-owned. An eminently respectable man who taught Sunday school, he had died with religious literature from his last class still in his pocket. In short, Thomas Moss was the embodiment of the hard work, self-discipline, and clean living that Southern whites insisted African Americans lacked. Ambitious and enterprising, he had demonstrated the industry and initiative that many black leaders advocated as a form of racial uplift that would earn the race the rights and respect accorded to white people. Yet “he was murdered with no more consideration than if he had been a dog” for the crime of defending his property.10
The Memphis Commercial also featured grisly drawings of the dead men.
Her worldview utterly transformed by the lynchings, Ida advocated immediate emigration from Memphis. Echoing the dying words of her friend, in her first editorial after his death she told Memphis blacks, “There is…only one thing left we can do: save money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives or our property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts.” Her advice did not go unheeded. With other black leaders also advocating migration, African Americans left Memphis in droves, clearing out so rapidly that they caused a crisis in the city’s economy. With so many blacks either gone or economizing in preparation for departure, business slowed to a “standstill.”11 Throughout the city, vendors found themselves oversupplied with all sorts of goods and waiting in vain for black customers. Indeed, six weeks after the lynching, the African American withdrawal from the city’s economy was so noticeable that both the superintendent and treasurer of the City Railway Company, which ran the Memphis streetcar system, visited Free Speech to investigate the precipitate drop in their black patronage. They also hoped that the paper would use its influence to get blacks to once again ride the streetcars.
Wells was at work in the Free Speech office on Beale Street when the two men arrived. First taken aback by their visit and then confused by their appeal for help, she asked them “what they thought was the cause” of their sudden lack of black passengers. Their reply was disingenuous at best: “They had heard that Negroes were afraid of electricity,” they told her, alluding to the fact that Memphis had recently converted from horse-drawn streetcars to cable cars powered by electricity. They wished “to assure our people that there was no danger” and added that Ida should tell her readers “that any discourtesy toward them would be punished severely.” Confounded, Wells pressed the men to deal with the real issue keeping Memphis blacks off the streetcars. “Electricity has been the motive power here for over six months,” she noted. “How long since you have observed the change?…‘About six weeks’…Why, it was just six weeks ago that the lynching took place.” But the two men refused to acknowledge the connection. “The streetcar company had nothing to do with the lynchings,” one of them protested. “It is owned by Northern capitalists.”12
As far as Wells was concerned, however, City Railway’s white Memphis representatives and employees were all implicated in the lynchings. “Every white man of any standing in this town knew of the plan and consented to the lynching of our boys,” she told her visitors. Her argument was largely lost on the railroad’s representatives, who urged “the colored people to find t
he guilty ones”—and to return to the streetcars even before that. But their visit did tell Wells that her Free Speech editorials were having a powerful effect. One had instructed the African Americans in Memphis “to save their nickels and dimes” so they could leave the city as soon as possible. Wells herself had been walking to save carfare, but she was unaware that many others were doing so as well prior to the City Railway men’s appearance in her office. As soon as the two men left her office, she wrote up her exchange with them, encouraging Memphis blacks “to keep up the good work.” Likewise, even before the next edition of her paper appeared, she spread the word of a streetcar boycott at the city’s two largest churches that Sunday, urging congregants to “keep on staying off the cars.”13 The boycott, however, did not replace migration as the central goal of the Memphis blacks. Anxious to scout out new homes for both herself and others, Ida was among those who hit the road in the months following the deaths of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. She spent three weeks in Oklahoma that spring, posting several favorable reports of conditions there in Free Speech, and also made plans to act on T. Thomas Fortune’s suggestion that she “give the East Coast a look-over” before deciding where to resettle.14
The migration that took shape in Memphis in 1892 was only one of several such black migration movements that followed the death of Reconstruction. Most notable was the Kansas Exodus of 1879, which saw twenty thousand African Americans from Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Tennessee abruptly leave for Kansas. Largely inspired by black fears for their future in the newly “redeemed” Democratic South, these cotton belt migrants were known as “Exodusters” because they likened the South to biblical ancient Egypt—an opinion Wells would begin to share in 1892. Scourged by the economic exploitation, political oppression, and widespread racial violence that had accompanied the Democrats’ restoration in the region, many migrants feared that the Democrats would reinstitute slavery, or at least establish something very much like it. Their flight was urgent, one said, because it would soon be impossible for blacks to leave the South. “The Democrats, as the Slave owners of the South, will fix it,” one Exoduster leader noted, “so that…not any colored man will be able to Leave the South without a Pass.”15
The migration had “pull” as well as “push” factors. In particular, the migrants were attracted to Kansas by the promise of cheap land under the 1862 Homestead Act, which had been widely promoted across the South by land developers, and also touted by black leader Benjamin “Pap” Singleton of Tennessee, a proponent of black westward migration. But the defeat of Reconstruction in 1877 was clearly the immediate concern behind the 1879 migration, which saw black migrants fleeing to freedom in Kansas in numbers so large that the movement collapsed at least in part as a result of its own success. Sparsely populated and difficult to farm, the windswept prairie state could not absorb or support the mass migration of impoverished Southern blacks. Not particularly welcome there, many soon found it difficult to secure land or jobs. But while black Southerners lost interest in Kansas, many continued to be interested in leaving the South. Back-to-Africa movements flourished at the turn of the century, which saw a variety of black Southerners earnestly considering resettling in Liberia—although few were able to raise the funds needed to do so.
Like Kansas, Liberia appealed to black Southerners above all as an alternative to where they were. Founded in 1816 by a white organization known as the American Colonization Society (ACS) as a place to resettle American blacks, Liberia had long elicited mixed feelings among black Americans. Few could support the society’s desire to return all American blacks to Africa, and prior to 1865 the ACS’s ostensibly antislavery goals were called into question by its commitment to beginning this reverse diaspora by returning free blacks to Africa. Moreover, Liberia, although touted by the ACS as a place in which African Americans could flourish in their native habitat, had high mortality rates. Soon notorious as a place where disease and food shortages brought an early end to many who emigrated there, Liberia retained an appeal in the late nineteenth century that spoke to the still more terrifying dangers that blacks faced in the United States. Among those interested in emigrating to Liberia, for example, was a group of blacks from Pastoria, Arkansas, clearly confident that they would be better off almost anywhere else. Titled “A Coloured Application to Git out of Egypt,” their 1891 petition to the ACS noted that the only land available to blacks in their community was “6 feet by 4 wide 4 ft. Deep[,] an[d] that not untel…dead.”16
Unlike this Arkansas delegation, however, Wells had not seriously considered migration as a practical or political necessity prior to 1892. Prone to characterizing herself as a Southern girl, Wells had been happy enough to return to Memphis at the end of her 1887 California trip. Willing to brave the shifting political winds of post-Reconstruction Tennessee, she had bought her share in Free Speech after conservative Democrats rose to power in Memphis in 1888, ousting the biracial Republican coalition that had long held power there. That year also saw a Democrat take the Tennessee governor’s race for the first time since the Civil War. Certainly, the resurgence of Southern Democrats committed to installing a “white man’s government” across the South must have troubled Wells long before 1892. Indeed, this unpromising new political climate framed Wells’s defeat in her railroad suits, as well as her dismissal from her teaching post by Memphis’s lily-white board of education.
Still, until the Memphis lynchings, Wells had advocated meeting white violence with resistance rather than flight. Her Free Speech editorials expressed frustration with Republican politics, black leaders, and white racism but did not abandon Southern race relations as irredeemable. Convinced that many of the Reconstruction-era Republicans who still held power and controlled federal offices were more committed to patronage than preserving black civil rights, she had called for new party leadership to “save the country.” “Give the young Republicans a chance and relegate some of these chronic office holders to the rear,” she had urged party loyalists.17 Moreover, Ida did not then rule out the possibility of new political coalitions. At a time when the Democrats were increasingly billing themselves as the party of white supremacy and the Republicans had largely abandoned any commitment to racial justice in favor of an alliance with big business, Ida was politically independent. Along with T. Thomas Fortune and other black political mavericks, she called for blacks to rally around specific candidates and issues rather than let party loyalties dictate their votes. The Republicans had always been the lesser of two evils where black voters were concerned. But in the hope that independent voting could gain African Americans greater influence with both parties, Wells and other African American independents insisted that the party did not deserve to take African American votes for granted.
Retrospectively, Wells’s hopes for a resurgence of black political power in the South seem quixotic, as we now know that the steady erosion of black voting rights in the late nineteenth-century South would ultimately shut most black Southerners out of politics. Moreover, by the nineteenth century’s last decade, it was increasingly clear that the Republican Party was largely content to let the black vote disappear. The 1890 Lodge bill, a measure authorizing the use of federal power to monitor voter registration and elections in the South, was defeated when its Republican supporters abandoned it as part of a deal to pass a higher tariff. Even before the bill died in the Senate in 1891, Ida was worried. “If the Republican party lets this opportunity go by, without doing something in the interest of honest elections,” she wrote when the bill was still under consideration, “it deserves to be defeated for years to come.”18
Still, in the end, it was racial violence rather than the rapid erosion of black political power in the South that drove Wells and other black political exiles out of the region during the 1880s and 1890s. By the early twentieth century, the disenfranchisement strategies pursued by Southern Democrats would triumph, resulting in a wholesale exclusion of blacks from Southern politics that lasted until the passage of the Voti
ng Rights Act of 1965. But as late as the spring of 1892, even to a critical observer such as Wells, black disenfranchisement was not yet a fait accompli.
The Republican Party controlled the Senate until November 1892—when Democrats regained power in the Senate for the first time since the Civil War. Moreover, prior to their repeal in 1894, the Reconstruction era’s federal election laws protecting African American voters remained in place. Although never very effective, these laws gave the federal government the authority to supervise state elections, offering at least statutory support for the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against denying any citizen the right to vote on “account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Neither the Fifteenth Amendment nor the federal election laws offered any protection to the many black Southerners whose voting rights were already giving way to forms of disenfranchisement such as high poll taxes and other racially indirect measures designed to discourage blacks from voting. But the impact of such measures was not always immediately obvious. In Wells’s home state, for example, the racially discriminatory impact of the poll taxes and new voting qualifications that Tennessee introduced in 1890 was partially obscured by the fact that the new measures initially decreased both black and white voters.19 Moreover, while similar measures were in the works across the South, the legal disenfranchisement of the majority of the region’s black voters would not be fully accomplished until 1908, with the conclusion of successful disenfranchisement campaigns in Texas and Georgia. In short, the elimination of black voting rights in the South was under way in 1892 but far from complete.
