14 AMERICAN BLUES THEATER Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931), more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was an African- American investigative journalist, educator, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She arguably became the most famous black woman in America, during a life that was centered on combating prejudice and violence. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Freed by the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil War, she lost both her parents and a sibling in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, when she was 16 years old. She went to work and kept the rest of the family intact with the help of her grandmother. She moved with some of her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee, where she found better pay as a teacher. Soon she co- owned a newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In 1889 Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells, opened the People’s Grocery in the "Curve", a black neighborhood just outside the Memphis city limits. Moss' store did well and competed with a white-owned grocery store across the street. In 1892, while Wells was out of town, a white mob invaded her friend’s store. During the altercation, three white men were shot and injured. Moss and two other black men, named McDowell and Stewart, were arrested and jailed pending trial. A large white lynch mob stormed the jail and killed the three men. After the lynching of her friends, Wells wrote in Free Speech and Headlight, urging blacks to leave Memphis altogether: “There is, therefore, only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” Wells emphasized the public spectacle of the lynching. More than 6,000 black people did leave Memphis; others organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. After being threatened with violence, Wells bought a pistol. She later wrote, "They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth." The murder of her friends drove Wells to research and document lynchings and their causes. She began investigative journalism by looking at the charges given for the murders, which officially started her anti- lynching campaign. She spoke on the issue at various black women's clubs and raised more than $500 to investigate lynchings and publish her results. Wells found that black people were lynched for such social control reasons as failing to pay debts, not appearing to give way to whites, competing with whites economically, and being drunk in public. She found little basis for the frequent claim that black men were lynched because they had sexually abused or attacked white women. This alibi seemed to have partly accounted for white America's collective silence on lynching, as well as its acceptance by many in the educated African-American community. She published her findings in a pamphlet entitled "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases." She followed this with an editorial that suggested that, unlike the myth that white women were sexually at risk of attacks by black men, most liaisons between black men and white women were consensual. ABOUT IDA B. WELLS The women of Flyin’ West moved to Nicodemus, Kansas from Memphis, Tennessee in the late 1800s, around the same time that Civil Rights pioneer Ida B. Wells was encouraging African-Americans to leave Memphis following the lynching of three black men. Ida B. Wells in 1893