Ida B. Wells-Barnett dedicated her life to social justice and equality. She devoted her tremendous energies to building the foundations of African-American progress in business, politics, and law. Wells-Barnett was a key participant in the formation of the National Association of Colored Women as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She spoke eloquently in support of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The legacies of these organizations have been tremendous and her contribution to each was timely and indespensible. But no cause challenged the courage and integrity of Ida B. Wells-Barnett as much as her battle against mob violence and the terror of lynching at the end of the 19th century.

After the Civil War, blacks were provided with rights they probably never dreamed of having during slavery. They were made citizens of the United States and given equal protection under the laws. If you were male, and of a certain age, you were also given the ballot. Each of these things represented both a great victory for for the freed people, and the promise of a bright future.

We know, however, that during the 1870s and 1880s, these rights were slowly and systematically taken away from blacks through the use of Jim Crow laws. Blacks saw their rights begin stripped away through legal, illegal, and often violent means. The vast majority of blacks were losing ground, and being forced back into conditions that were just slightly better than slavery. Blacks were kept down by various methods -- economic, social, and political -- but most typically through violence.

By the end of the 19th century, lynching was clearly the most notorious and feared means of depriving Blacks of their rights. This was not always the case because lynching had a long history -- but in Ida Wells' day, lynching was racial terror. The great majority of people lynched between 1882 and 1930 were black. During that period there were almost 4800 recorded lynchings in the United States. There were many more, no doubt, but we know about 4800. 3400 victims of this mob justice were black. The period from 1889 to 1893 accounted for the worst years. 579 blacks were lynched as opposed to 260 whites. That is a ration of 2.2 blacks lynched for every white. This is a significant difference already, but only part of the story. By the end of the century the racial nature of lynching had revealed itself, completely and unmistakably. Between 1899 and 1903, 543 people were lynched in the United States -- men and women. Of that number only 27 were white. That is a ratio of 22 blacks lynched for every white.

The numbers make a compelling case, but they do not tell the entire story because by themselves they reveal nothing of what lynching really involved. It was widely believed that lynching was spontaneous thing -- sudden and emotional acts of revenge committed by irrational mobs. But we know now that lynchings were often planned out in advance, and frequently with the sympathy and cooperation of local leaders and law enforcement officials. In some cases lynchings were even advertised. Days before they occurred men would move through neighborhoods and from town to town, distributing flyers by hand and sometimes printing announcements in newspapers. Transportation might be arranged to bring people in. Historians have also discovered that tickets were sold for some lynchings. The event, then, was a mass spectacle -- a public ritual that involved torture as well as execution. It might be witnessed by thousands of people, including children.

To justify this kind of brutality the person being lynched certainly had to be found guilty of committing the most horrible crime imaginable. It was assumed that this crime had to be sexual: in other words, black men assualting and raping white women. This assumption came out of popular stereotypes of blacks. In the minds of the majority of white Americans, blacks were defined by popular myths regarding their inferiority. Blacks were supposed to be less intelligent and lazy; they lacked discipline and self-control. Blackness was feared especially during the late 19th century because it was associated with overt and uncontrollable sexuality. Tragically, black men were special victims of this stereotyping. Popular belief declared that they were "naturally" prone to savagery and violent criminality. It was this kind of racist stereotyping that made millions of people throughout the United States condone the barbarity of the lynch mobs.

How widespread was this belief? Historian Paula Giddings said that this charged was leveled so consistently against black men, and came from such impeccable sources, that the whole nation seemed to take it for granted. Even some blacks began to wonder. Frederick Douglass began to believe that "there was an increasing [criminality] onthe part of Negroes." Ida Wells had doubts herself, because rape was the most foul crime that she could imagine. "Like many other people who had read of lynching in the South," she wrote, "I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed -- that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order . . . perhaps the brute deserved death . . . and the mob was justified in taking his life." Something happened after Wells wrote these lines; an event that changed her life and thinking forever.

Three black men -- Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart -- all friends of Ida Wells, founded a business in Memphis, Tennesee: the People's Grocery Company. From the day it opened this business became the target of white resentment: first, because the store sold items that attracted customers away from the white-owned grocery nearby. Also, the new establishment became a popular gathering place for Memphis blacks. The store, after all, was more than just a business. It was a powerful symbol - a symbol of many of the things blacks had been striving and struggling for since their emancipation not thirty years earlier. It represented enterprise and independence, success and self-determination. It defied all stereotypes and popular notions that said what blacks could not be and could not achieve.

The People's Grocery's greatest crime was that it competed successfully against the white store that once had a monopoly on black trade. The animosity that arose from this competition led to a violent face-off between the races. Three white men were shot in the malay. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were quickly arrested, charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot, and thrown into jail. Three nights later, on March 9 1892, a mob stole the men from their cells, took them out of the city, and lynched them.

A newspaper account of the execution revealed that the three did not die without a struggle. McDowell tried to wrestle a gun away from one of his murderers. Thomas Moss pleaded unsuccessfully to be spared; not for himself but for the sake of his unborn child. When asked if he had any last thing to say before he was killed, Moss replied: "Tell my people to go west. There is not justice for them here."

The murders sent a shockwave through Memphis' black community, and especially Wells. Her newspaper, the Free Speech, responded by urging the city's blacks to heed Moss's final words. Wells wrote an editorial that said that Moss was right: there was no justice for blacks in Memphis. Clearly, equal protection before the law and due process did not apply to blacks who dared, like her three friends did, to compete with whites in business. She called on her brothers and sisters to leave the city. Within weeks Memphis witnessed an exodus. Some said as many as two thousand blacks left in the aftermath of these killings, spurred on by the Ida Wells' words.

Wells also called on the black community to strike back by boycotting white businesses; especially the city's new streetcar system. She targeted the streetcars because they were dependent on black patronage --- and most vulnerable to black economic power. Wells told her community to walk rather than ride -- to save its money for the more important journey -- west to Oklahoma where blacks could rebuild their communities free from injustice.

Memphis's City Railway Company suffered just a Wells predicted. The boycott she called for was so successful that, within weeks, the streetcars were pushed to the brink of bankrupsty (by comparison Martin Luther King's bus boycott in Montgomery went on for nearly a year before the city was forced to compromise). The executives of the rail company were so alarmed by the turn of events and so desperate for reconciliation they came to the offices of the Free Speech to ask Wells to tell blacks that they should go back to the streetcars. Wells publicized this meeting, and the fact that the visitors failed to convince her that Memphis blacks would improve their condition by riding its street cars again.

Shortly after this meeting, Wells traveled to Philadelphia to participate in the African Methodist Episcopalian convention. While she was in the northeast, friends sent word from Memphis that the white establishment was after her blood. Her newspaper had been closed down and orders were given to punish anyone who tried to open it again. Wells was warned that there were plots to lynch her -- that armed men watched every train coming into the city, ready to kill her on sight.

Wells knew that her economic boycott had angered the city fathers. Its success had driven the white establishment to close the Free Speech. But it was her final editorial in that paper that took the tensions to a new level and aroused the mob. The power and truth contained in that last article provoked the mob to destroy her offices -- much like the People's Grocery had been destroyed -- and threaten to kill her -- just as it had murdered her three friends.

Wells' editorial attacked lynching without compromise: both its practice and the theory that supported it. She thought a great deal about the ways blacks were denied the right to compete as equals and achieve in business. She argued that the law offered no protection from the mob because many of those whose duty it was to enforce the law -- equally and without regard to race or color -- were themselves a part of the lawless mobs. In the meantime the rest of the nation looked on in silence, because it was all too ready to believe the lies told about blacks. Lynching was allowed to go on because the conscience of most Americans at the end of the 19th century had been poisoned by the idea that lynching was spontaneous -- an act of revenge taken against black rapists and child molesters.

Wells began to investigate reports of lynchings, carefully gathering facts about each case. It was May 1892, and eight black men had been lynched since the previous issue of the Free Speech had been published a month earlier. Five of them had been charged with rape. Wells discovered that these men had either been falsely accused, or the details of their cases had been distorted and exaggerated. Wells called the rape accusations "thread-bare lies," told deliberately in order to punish black men with impunity. Ida pledeged to expose the men and women of the south for both their "foul and corrupt lies," and their murderous system.

When this editorial appeared the response was swift and brutal. The Free Speech office was looted and burned to the ground. The staff fled, barely escaping the mob. And Wells was given an explicit warning that she would be hanged from the nearest lamp-post if she ever returned to Memphis. So, within a few months in the spring and early summer of 1892, Wells had lost three dear friends and many of the material things she had struggled to build. Regardless of this and the fact that she was now virtually exiled in the north, Wells was determined to carry on the fight. In June of that same year another important black newspaper, the New York Age, published her most recent findings on anti-black violence in the United States. The front-page article was touted as the "first inside story of Negro lynching."

The article documented hundreds of lynchings for alleged rape; citing names, dates, places, and circumstances. It marked perhaps the first time so thorough a study had been done on the lynching phenomenon. Ten thousand copies of this issue of the New York Age were printed. A thousand copies of this edition were sold on the streets of Memphis alone. For the next three years, Wells was in great demand. She traveled around the northeast and in Europe, giving anti-lynching lectures before large audiences. This demonstrates that the public was hungry for the truth about lynching. Black folds especially. For they had seen the truth of their experience revealed at last.

Wells' investigations revealed that regardless of whether one was poor and jobless --- or middle-class, educated, and successful, all blacks were vulnerable to mob violence. She argued that the only way to combat anti-black violence -- or bigotry of any kind -- racial, ethnic, religous, or gender -- was directly and without compromise. This conviction put her at odds with the most famous African-American of her time: Booker T. Washington. Washington called for a reconciliation between blacks and whites based on blacks surrendering their political rights. He wanted blacks to concentrate on gaining working skills, "proving themselves," to whites, and "earning" their rights back, when they were deserved.

Part of this strategy made it appear that Washington condoned lynching. In fact, in his famous book, Up From Slavery, Washington talked as if the lynch mob was as much a victim as the person being murdered. This philosophy infuriated Wells. In her mind, Blacks had worked in this country for nearly four hundred years -- 350 of those years without compensation. Blacks had built this country and were as deserving of equal rights, the vote, and equal protection under the laws as anyone else who may call themselves American. She believed that Washington's opinions on lynching revealed him as a coward, and said as much.

Her courage and outspokenness against probably the most brutal crime this country has ever seen made Ida B. Wells' place in the history of this country secure. Her anti-lynching crusade signified a new role for women in the struggle for racial justice. Wells courageously pointed to a fact that had been almost completely ignored before: the fact that black women, too, were victimized by mob violence and terror. Occassionally they were lynched for alleged crimes and insults, but more often these women were left behind as survivors. They lost fathers, brothers, and sons. They had the awsome duty of keeping the black family and community alive in the aftermath of this brutal crime. Wells was clearly a champion for their courage.

Ida B. Wells continued the fight against mob violence and lynching to the end of her life. She showed us the way towards achieving real social justice by participating in the founding of the NAACP -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- in 1909. This alliance of whites and blacks represented a new stage in the crusade to stop racial violence and inequality. The great legal, moral, and political victories won by the NAACP and the civil rights movement stand as proof of one of Ida Wells' deepest convictions. Wells understood that justice could not be fully achieved without interracial cooperation.