The lynchings of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart
By 1892, Ida B Wells’ Memphis paper was thriving. She traveled the Mississippi Delta selling subscriptions, tripling circulation. <em>Free Speech</em> was editorially fearless: Ida sharply called out any accommodation of white supremacy, even by Black community leaders she knew. Thread. <br /><br />Thomas Moss & his wife Betty were Ida B Wells’ best friends. They ran the co-op People’s Grocery in the Curve, a Black section of Memphis. W.H.Barrett, the white owner of a nearby grocery that had once had a neighborhood monopoly, took every opportunity to harass his competition. <br /><br />@<a href="https://twitter.com/lynchingsites" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">lynchingsites</a> WH Barrett spread rumors of a race riot - a setup that ended with plainclothes Memphis police being shot by People’s Grocery guards. Memphis whites looted the store, Black people in the Curve were arrested at random, and Tom Moss and other black men were jailed without bail. <br /><br />A Black militia group, the Tennessee Rifles, knew lynching was likely, so patrolled the jail - but after 3 days the sheriff seized their guns & those of all Black citizens of Memphis. On March 9, 1892, at 3 a.m., a white mob dragged out Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, Wm. Stewart. <br /><br />McDowell fought hard, grabbing a lyncher’s gun and not letting go until shot through his hand. Tom Moss begged on behalf of himself, his child & his pregnant wife. Instead of mercy, he was asked for his last words. “Tell my people to go West - there is no justice for them here."
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24/11/2020
Ida B. Wells, Owner & Editor
Ida B Wells didn’t love being a teacher, but as she built an adult life in Memphis, she began working as a reporter. Realizing that owning & editing her own paper was the only way to make a living as a journalist, Wells invested in The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Thread. <br /><br />Her new career ended her old one: after protesting in print the “few and utterly inadequate buildings” for Black students in Memphis schools, as well as corruption on the school board, Wells' teaching contract was not renewed. She had found her calling. <br /><br />9Ida B Wells' paper Free Speech was in demand in rural towns, where often 1 person would read it aloud in public. When the owners learned that vendors were cheating illiterate buyers by selling them the wrong paper, they started printing Free Speech on distinctive pink paper. <br /><br />What made Ida B Wells so fearless? Mia Bay’s biography, "To Tell the Truth Freely," argues that growing up at the peak of Reconstruction, with politically active parents, gave Ida a precious taste of a world in which Black people had power.<br /><br />Hear Bay & @<a href="https://twitter.com/nhannahjones" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">nhannahjones</a> on @<a href="https://twitter.com/LewisPants" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LewisPants</a> podcast about Ida B Wells' legacy of activist journalism.<iframe width="100%" height="482" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>No image today. As @<a href="https://twitter.com/TennHistory" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TennHistory</a> explains: “No copy of the Free Speech survives. As with the other 25 black-owned newspapers of the era, no library or archive has preserved copies." All we have are partial reprints in other papers.
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22/11/2019
There's a lot of stuff on the world wide web
Way down the rabbit hole tonight. Memphis cartes de visites circa 1880s, many from a Gebhardt Studios on Beale Street that had both black & white patrons. A whole cache on Flickr, lovingly annotated circa 2015 by someone I can't identify in real life. <br /><br /><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/51992558@N00/albums/72157638797992446" title="old Memphis cartes de visite, cabinet cards, and other old image types"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/2868/11437684054_d7d86c6b78_z.jpg" width="640" height="480" alt="old Memphis cartes de visite, cabinet cards, and other old image types" /></a><br /><br /><br />Rev. Benjamin Imes, Ida B Wells's minister: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/51992558@N00/16703997882/in/album-72157638797992446/" title="1880s photo of Rev. Benjamin A. Imes, Memphis, Tennessee"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/8663/16703997882_5f1c87230e_z.jpg" width="640" height="480" alt="1880s photo of Rev. Benjamin A. Imes, Memphis, Tennessee" /></a>
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22/11/2019
Ida fights segregation on the railroad
Memphis was rebuilding when Ida B. Wells arrived in the 1880s. After the yellow fever epidemic, the city levied a tax to build drainage systems & fight mosquitoes. The city fathers were white, but a growing Black population garnered some power: school board seats, police hires. <br /><br />Accomplished Black women in town were resisting segregation. Jane Brown sued and won after a Memphis railroad made her change cars. Julia Hooks refused to move from her seat in a downtown theatre: she was thrown out, jailed, and fined. (Image of RR car interior c. 1880.) <br /><br />@<a href="https://twitter.com/ExploreWellcome" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ExploreWellcome</a> Ida surely knew about these heroic women when she refused to give up the first class “ladies car” seat she had bought on a Memphis-bound train in 1883. When the conductor grabbed her to haul her off the train, she bit his hand. <br /><br />Whites stood on their seats to watch, and applauded when she was taken off the train. #IdaBWells sued for violation of the Tennessee “separate but equal” railway policy, as there was no Black 1st class ladies car. She won. She was 21 years old.
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19/11/2019
Introducing Ida B. Wells
Soon after the US Centennial, teenage Ida B. Wells’ family was decimated by a yellow fever epidemic. Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne virus, fatal 10-15% of the time. Her father James and her mother Lizzie, who had survived slavery, died along with three of their children. <br /><br />To keep her surviving siblings together, Ida “let down her skirts, put up her hair, and inflated her age to 18” to get a job teaching school. Six years later she moved the family 50 miles from small-town Mississippi to Memphis, where her career as a journalist and leader began. <br /><br />Ida B. Wells is not just a towering figure in American history, she’s a link between the 1st gen of women’s suffrage & the next. Her activism began before the rip in the white women’s movement had mended. Her influence was felt through the ratification of the 19th A. and beyond. <br /><br />I am grateful to @<a href="https://twitter.com/MichelleDuster" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">MichelleDuster</a> for permission to use her great-grandmother’s image as an avatar of this project, and excited to dig in to more of #IdaBWells story in the days ahead. #Suffrage100 #BlackSuffragists
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18/11/2019
Black Memphis, white Memphis
Julia Hooks bought a ticket at a downtown Memphis theater. It was 1881 and "Hermann the Magician" was a hit. She was making her way to her seat when two policemen grabbed her. They ripped her dress in the struggle, arresting her as she cried: “Let go of me, I am a schoolteacher!”
Hooks filed a complaint against the officers, but they weren’t punished.
Instead, Julia Hooks was fined $5 for disorderly conduct - particularly ironic, because she was about the least disorderly person in Memphis.
A gifted pianist, Julia’s concerts were the center of Black Memphis social life in the 1880s; Ida B Wells met Mary Church Terrell at one of them.
Julia and her sister Mary were the first Black women to graduate from Berea College in Kentucky, which was integrated until 1904.
I’ll return to Mary Britton, who became a well-known journalist in Louisville and then the first Black woman doctor in KY.
Another sister, Hattie, killed herself after being slut-shamed by Ida B Wells - also a story for another day.
Where was I? Julia. She was eventually known as the Angel of Beale Street for her good works. She started a classical music society, then an integrated music school whose pupils included WC Handy(!), and later an Orphans & Old Folks Home that she funded with her concert earnings.
But when the police were dragging her out of the theater because management had suddenly designated the section for whites only, she called out “I’m a schoolteacher” to demonstrate her respectability in a way that white people might understand.
Paula Giddings explains why teaching was an esteemed profession for women: “In Memphis, a certified teacher not only had to pass a written exam, she also had to demonstrate ‘good moral character’ and ‘the purest and truest of natures’ to the satisfaction of a biracial board.”
During Reconstruction, when Black men voted and held state & local office, Memphis reformers lobbied hard for Black schools & Black teachers. There was only one high school, but it was a good one.
And incredibly, men and women, blacks and whites, were paid equally to teach.
Pay equity in schools owed in part to Memphis’ leading white suffragist, Elizabeth Avery Meriwether. Throughout the 1870s she lobbied tirelessly for equal pay for male and female teachers.
When 3 teachers were fired for “holding too many of Mrs. Meriwether’s views” - the actual reason the superintendent gave for their dismissal! - she led a 7-month fight that ended with them reinstated and a new superintendent installed.
Essentially a lone voice, she demanded the all-male school board be replaced by a gender-balanced group. Equal pay legislation she helped pass was undermined in a closed-door session, but her lobbying had impact.
After teacher salaries were slashed in 1878 due to budget cuts, men and women were paid the same in both the Black and white school systems.
One result was that white men left teaching entirely. Another was that Black women had access to a career.
Meriwether was Memphis’ most visible advocate for women’s equality through the 1870s & 80s.
She demanded fair divorce laws, equal pay, and votes for white women.
In 1876 she rented out a local theater to give her own lecture on women’s rights under the law.
The same year she lobbied the national Democratic convention - remember, they were the party of Southern white conservatism - to include women’s suffrage in their platform.
Meriwether was an active member of the National Woman Suffrage Assoc, even joining Susan B Anthony on a speaking tour.
In 1880 she submitted 2 petitions to the NWSA national convention, one signed by 130 white women and the other by 110 black women, courtesy of her servant.
She sent both petitions with a note describing how the servant, whom she doesn’t name, heard her describing suffrage to guests and after dinner offered to collect signatures from black women. “She took the paper and procured these 110 signatures against the strong opposition...
"...of black men who in some cases threatened to whip their wives if they signed. At length the opposition was so great my servant had not courage to face it. She feared bodily harm...by the black men.”
Meriwether doesn’t explain why the white women gathered barely more names.
One more thing about Elizabeth Meriwether:
In 1867 she and her husband Minor hosted a gathering in their home, which they had reestablished after spending the war in exile. Elizabeth followed Minor, a Confederate officer. Their 3rd son (Lee, of course) was born on the road.
Minor survived the war, as did fellow Memphis Confederates Matt Galloway and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Reunited in the Meriwethers' living room, they founded the local chapter of the KKK.
Elizabeth’s contribution was to suggest that their platform include votes for white women. /
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01/08/2020