Ida B. Wells Launches Anti-Lynching Crusade After Memphis Murders

After three of her friends — Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart — were lynched in Memphis in March 1892, Ida B. Wells published a searing editorial in the Memphis Free Speech. The white community burned her press and threatened her life. From exile in New York, she published 'Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,' pioneering the use of statistics to expose lynching as racial terrorism.