Born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, just a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation and a few years before the end of slavery in her state, Ida B. Wells began writing for Memphis newspapers in her twenties. In 1892, about thirty black men were arrested in the wake of altercations in a mixed-race Memphis neighborhood. Three black businessmen who had been arrested were then dragged from the jail and shot in the street.
This event helped inspire Ida B. Wells to fight against lynching, a campaign which she championed for the rest of her life. It was not a welcome message in Tennessee. Wells received many death threats, and she had to move from Memphis to Chicago in 1893 for her own safety.
The title of this post is the last line of an anti-lynching article, written by Wells in 1900 in Chicago, entitled “Lynch Law in America.”
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