The People's Grocery lynchings

The People's Grocery stood at an intersection south-east of Memphis known as the Curve, and it took business from William Barrett's white-owned store across the way. After weeks of escalating threats, armed men entered the Black-owned store at night; its defenders fired, wounding three. More than thirty Black men were arrested, among them the owners Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart.

On 9 March 1892 a mob took the three men from the jail and shot them in a rail yard north of the city. Moss, a postman and a respected man in Black Memphis, was reported to have said before he died: "Tell my people to go West, there is no justice for them here." Thousands of Black Memphians did exactly that, leaving for Oklahoma in the months afterwards.

Ida B. Wells was Moss's friend and godmother to his daughter. She had believed, as she later wrote, that lynching was a response to crime; the killing of three men whose only offence was commercial success convinced her otherwise. She wrote it in the Free Speech, urged the exodus, and began the investigative work that produced Southern Horrors. A mob destroyed her press and she was warned not to return to Memphis. She continued from Chicago for the rest of her life.