Ida B. Wells' Free Speech Editorial After Three Friends Lynched

After her friends Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart are lynched in Memphis on March 9 — killed because their People's Grocery competed with a white-owned store — Wells publishes a blistering editorial in the Memphis Free Speech. She urges Black Memphians to leave the city and calls out the economic motives behind lynching. Her analysis dismantles the rape narrative used to justify mob murder.