Black Newspapers, Real Property, and Mobility in Memphis after Emancipation

Abstract

“I am an exile from home,” Ida B. Wells wrote in the summer of 1892. Shaken but unwavering in her resolve, she recorded the reasons she could not return to Memphis. Her words would not bring back Thomas Moss, Will Stewart, or Calvin McDowell, murdered by a white mob in May; nor could they rebuild the offices of her newspaper, the Free Speech, destroyed just days earlier. Those losses were irrevocable. Yet Wells explained, “I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth.” The New York Age published her story on 25 June 1892. Seven columns long, and printed on the cover of one of the nation’s most widely distributed black newspapers, her article detailed the “names, dates, and places” of the Memphis lynchings and other murders across the United States (see fig. 1).