Ida B. Wells Publishes 'Southern Horrors,' Documenting Lynching as Racial Terror

After three of her friends — Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart — were lynched in Memphis in March 1892 for operating a successful grocery store that competed with a white-owned store, journalist Ida B. Wells launched a systematic investigation of lynching. Her pamphlet 'Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases' (1892) documented that the rape charge typically used to justify lynching was a pretext, that many victims were prosperous Black businesspeople or political figures, and that economic competition and racial intimidation rather than rape drove most lynchings. White mobs destroyed her newspaper office in response. Wells was forced to relocate to New York and continued her anti-lynching crusade from there.