November 2025 Edition
How Ida B. Wells Exposed a Lie and Challenged the South
It had been a generation since the Civil War ended, Black Americans were being killed by gangs of white men ever more frequently, and no one, not even the “best class” of Black people, were doing or even saying anything to stop the scourge, until one woman stood up and spoke up.
Armed with nothing more than the First Amendment, a petite school teacher turned reporter refused to back down, although her livelihood was destroyed, her savings lost, and her life threatened. She continued to speak out despite withering criticisms at home and abroad, and in spite of being called divisive, a liar, and vile. Nothing deterred Ida B. Wells from drawing the attention of the world to the South’s shameful fib. 1
The press and pulpit were silenced by the lie, abandoning an entire people who were systematically othered and criminalized by civil authorities.
“The Christian world feels that while lynching is a crime, and lawlessness and anarchy the certain precursors of a nation's fall, it can not by word or deed, extend sympathy or help to a race of outlaws, who might mistake their plea for justice and deem it an excuse for their continued wrongs,” Wells said.
As a Black, single, disenfranchised, southern woman, Wells should have been easily dismissed and discredited. But she persistently spoke the truth, and when America wouldn’t listen, she took her message overseas. Wells' campaign began in 1892, and by the end of 1894, every Confederate Governor felt the need to respond to her charges, including Virginia’s Gov. Charles Triplett O’Ferrall, who was head of the state when Joseph McCoy was lynched in Alexandria.
They Commandeered the Government and Shut Down All Opposition
Since the end of the Civil War, conservative southerners refused to give Black people the rights accorded to citizens. As the newly amended Constitution guaranteed these rights, they had to be underhanded about it. So, they employed fear, violence, and death to terrorize Black residents into quietly accepting an unequal status.
To cover up the violence, they invented stories first of criminal behavior and “rioting” that required Southern officials to aggressively impose law and order. But over time, it became harder to convince the rest of the states that with conservatives back in charge, these frequent “emergencies” continued unabated. So they began to use an unquestionable justification for mob violence… the rape of white women and children.2
Nothing could have 'hit upon' or been 'better calculated to accomplish its brutal purpose,” said Frederick Douglass, adding, the charge of rape against Black men marked them with the most “shocking” crime a man can commit. “All pity, fair play, and mercy” were instantly driven away.
The intention, he said, was to destroy the Black man’s character and make him unworthy of citizenship…unworthy to vote in elections. “It is a crime that places him outside of the pale of the law, and settles upon his shoulders a mantle of wrath and fire that blisters and burns into his very soul,” said Douglass.
The charge of rape became synonymous with lynching. It was made with unanimity. It was repeated. It was drummed into the public conscience. It isolated Black people and destroyed relationships.
“It has heated his enemies,” Douglass stated, and “deceived his friends at the North and many good friends at the South, for nearly all of them, in some measure, have accepted this charge against the Negro as true. Its perpetual reiteration in our newspapers and magazines has led men and women to regard him with averted eyes, dark suspicion, and increasing hate.”
The white press of the day, undaunted by facts, sensationalized stories of rape, egged on the mob to action, and dramatized every detail of the hunt and kill to the members of the mob, who in turn bought their papers to read about their imposition of their “righteous indignation.”
No preacher, white or Black, even if they believed a lynching victim innocent, felt that they could speak out against what was happening. If they dared to, the condemnation would be swift and, if the pastor was Black, could be deadly.
“Press, platform and pulpit are generally either silent or they openly apologise [sic] for the mob and its deeds. The mobocratic murderers are not only permitted to go free, untried and unpunished, but are lauded and applauded as honourable [sic] men and good citizens, the high-minded guardians of Southern virtue,” Douglass stated.
White officials in former confederate states had purposefully engaged in a 30-year campaign to criminalize Black people, to steal their labor with chain gangs, and take away their ballot. After decades, the message had sunk in and empowered the charge of rape, loaded as it was with Biblical condemnation, and gagged any opposition. Who dared question the charge of rape or stand up for someone accused of such an immoral, unacceptable act? Who would dare to make a woman face her accuser after experiencing such terror? With the press as their tool, the thunderous strike of type stole the voice of an entire people and any who might attempt to help them.
“This cry has had its effect; it has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment, and hushed the voice of press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law throughout this ‘land of liberty,’ wrote Wells, adding, “Men who stand high in the esteem of the public for Christian character, for moral and physical courage, for devotion to the principles of equal and exact justice to all, and for great sagacity, stand as cowards who fear to open their mouths before this great outrage. They do not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country.”
The Catalyst
In 1883, at least 53 Black people were lynched. That same year, the Supreme Court nullified the 14th and 15th Amendments by defanging the two Civil Rights Acts (1866, 1875) meant to enforce them. Over the next decade, lynchings increased, peaking in 1892 when at least 161 Black people became victims of mob violence.3
That same year, a thriving Black community in Memphis, Tenn., Wells’ community, experienced its first lynching. On March 9, 1892, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee Stewart were killed by a white mob. The three principles of a successful and growing co-op grocery in a mixed neighborhood that had been targeted by a rival businessman.
In her autobiography Crusade for Justice, Wells confesses she had come to accept the idea that lynchings, though extrajudicial and therefore wrong, were caused by rape. But when her friends were killed, despite any such charge, she began to question the premise.
“I then began an investigation of every lynching I read about,” Wells said.
The impact of Thomas’s death, in particular, was felt throughout the community. Wells wrote that he was upstanding, “a favorite with everybody; yet he was murdered with no more consideration than if he had been a dog…with the aid of the city and county authorities and the daily papers, that white grocer had indeed put an end to his rival Negro grocer as well as his business.”
Thousands packed up and moved from Memphis after the lynching, fearing that if someone as impeachable as Moss was so easily murdered, they could meet the same fate any time, any day. Wells used her columns in the Free Press to encourage migration to the irritation of the white businessmen.
The remaining Black community wanted to hold the lynchers and those who consented to the murders responsible. They boycotted the white owned businesses that were complicit. Some of the owners appealed to Wells, as co-owner of the Free Press, an African American newspaper, hoping she would encourage the community to return. Instead, Wells let her neighbors know they were having an effect.
The third week in May, the Free Press published a scathing editorial where Wells shared her findings that in each lynching that had happened since Memphis, no rape had occurred. “I stumbled on the amazing record that every case of rape reported in that three months became such only when it became public,” she wrote, attributing the mob violence to misinformation in some cases and, in others, the discovery of consensual relationships.
Her detractors used the editorial as a pretense to shut down Free Speech. In “defense of the virtue of white women,” Wells’ paper was overtaken and sold by creditors, just as had been done to Moss’ grocery after his death. The mob threatened to kill Wells if she returned to Memphis.4
Little did the prominent white citizens of Memphis realize, their actions would set off an International Antilynching Campaign that would force southern officials to answer to the injustice of mob law.
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Upcoming Events
Discussion: Addressing Our Housing Shortage: History, Policy, and Solutions
Mon. Dec. 8
6:30-8 p.m.
The Alexandria History Museum at The Lyceum, 201 S. Washington Street
Free
Mayor Alyia Gaskins will be joined by Yoni Appelbaum, Deputy Executive Editor of the Atlantic and Laura Dobbs, Director of Policy, Housing Opportunities Made Equal of VA to talk about ways to explore the historical roots of our current housing shortage and consider policy solutions.
Tables of Conscience Dinners to support the ACRP Scholarship Program
Spots are available at our November Tables of Conscience book-themed dinner. Please consider attending. We also have three Winter Tables of Conscience open for reservations - purchase the book and dinner, and give a truly meaningful gift this holiday season. Each reservation costs $125 (guests purchase the book separately,) and all proceeds go directly to Alexandria’s Memorial Scholarship Program that honors the lives of Joseph McCoy and Benjamin Thomas, who were lynched in this city in 1897 and 1899. Pick a book you want to read and reserve a space to attend the dinner. The location of the dinner is revealed along with the host a week beforehand.
A Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, Michael Eric Dyson
Friday, Nov. 14
6-9 p.m.
1 Space Left!
The Department of Defense was so concerned about Americans finally starting to grapple with racism that they banned Michael Eric Dyson’s book, Long Time Coming. In a collection of letters written to recent victims of racial violence: Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Dyson exposed the anti-Blackness that infiltrates our culture, feeds police violence and injustice. The award-winning author, a professor at Georgetown University and an ordained Baptist minister, shares a way toward healing by the end of the book. The Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson has called the book both formidable and compelling, with “much to offer on our nation’s crucial need for racial reckoning and the way forward.
Reserve a space here for free, then pay $125 per ticket by donating on our campaign page with the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria.
The Hill We Climb, Amanda Gorman
Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026
6-9 p.m.
10 Tickets Available!
This short book encapsulates the poem written and performed by the young poet, Amanda Gorman, at the inauguration of President Joseph Biden. The verses acknowledged this nation’s difficult history, present divisiveness in a moving tribute. It is a message of hope, a desire for unity, and a future where justice flourishes.
Reserve a space here for free, then pay $125 per ticket by donating on our campaign page with the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria.
The Origin of Others, Toni Morrison
Saturday, Feb. 7
6-9 p.m.
8 Spaces Available!
This short, impactful book by Toni Morrison draws on a series of lectures she gave at Harvard University about fear of the other. Morrison reflects on the desire to belong and the impact race, fear, borders, and immigration have on this essential human need. She includes her own work when she examines how literature has played a role, both negative and positive, in such constructions. While this book has not yet been banned, the author has been and that’s why we believe it fits this series of Tables of Conscience.
Reserve a space here for free, then pay $125 per ticket by donating on our campaign page with the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria.
Crusade for Justice, Ida B. Wells
Saturday, Mar. 7, 2026
6-9 p.m.
8 Tickets Available!
Ida B. Wells' autobiography inspires readers to stand up and speak up for justice. Her pros are not antiquated; on the contrary, they are clear, concise, and direct. This book provides an intimate insight into the perspective of a woman born into slavery, who grew up watching Black people become citizens, write state constitutions, and serve in legislatures, only to then see their positions and rights taken away. Her parents died when she was young, and she taught school while taking care of her younger siblings. She began writing for the church newspaper and discovered her talent for reporting. She soon became the voice of her generation; she was as much a civil rights crusader as those who came after her.
Reserve a space here for free, then pay $125 per ticket by donating on our campaign page with the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria.
In The News
The Remembrance Students began their Banned Truth Tour of Alexandria on Saturday, Nov. 1 at the Freedom House Museum and then Gadsby’s Tavern Museum, where they learned about the lives of the enslaved and free Black community in Alexandria, Virginia, from the 1700s through 1860. Members of the Urban League of Northern Virginia met the students at the Freedom House Museum, and guild member Isabel Crocker, 95, shared stories with the students about Alexandria’s Secret Seven. These African American community leaders negotiated on behalf of and helped their community through years of segregation in Alexandria. The other Urban League members who joined the students included Ms. Loretta Britten, Mr. Michael Brown and Mrs. Denise Brown. We are still working to raise an additional $1500 for this school year’s program. To learn more or to donate, please visit our campaign page.
Upcoming Meetings
The Steering Committee will next meet on Nov. 19 at 5:30 at Alexandria’s Black History Museum.
Alexandria Community Remembrance Project
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project (ACRP) is a city-wide initiative dedicated to helping Alexandria understand its history of racial terror hate crimes and to work toward creating a welcoming community bound by equity and inclusion.
In Memoriam
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Office of Historic Alexandria
City of Alexandria, Virginia
ACRP@alexandriava.gov