ABSTRACT
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a teacher-turned-journalist who was the co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech, launched the anti-lynching movement in 1892 after a mob murdered three Memphis storeowners, one of whom was a close friend. She urged African Americans to fight back, with guns if necessary but mainly through economic pressure. Spurred by her scathing editorials, thousands migrated to Oklahoma while those who stayed boycotted the newly opened streetcar line. Wells-Barnett began investigating other lynchings, and she soon discovered that few lynch victims were even accused of rape and that behind many rape charges lay interracial affairs. When she published an editorial arguing, “nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” 1 a white mob destroyed her press and warned Wells-Barnett, who was in New York at the time, not to return to Memphis at the cost of her life.
