Bettina Aptheker on Ida B. Wells

“Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, two women who helped shape the main contours of the civil-rights movement in the United States in the twentieth century.”

“The crucial event in the career of Ida Wells was the lynching of three Black men in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 9, 1892. Although she knew all the victims, one of them, Thomas Moss, was a particularly close friend. A series of racist provocations by white Memphis businessmen, who were trying to force the Black proprietors of a local grocery store out of business, finally culminated in the triple slayings. At the time of the lynching, Wells owned and edited the only Black newspaper in town, the Memphis Free Speech. In the weeks following the lynching she wrote successive editorials demanding that the murderers be arrested and tried. When the white-owned newspapers responded by alleging that Black men were lynched because they raped white women, Ida B. Wells replied with an editorial coup de grâce that almost cost her life. She wrote: "Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."”