SOURCE: McMurry, Linda O. “Indictment of Lynching: ‘The cold-blooded savagery of white devils.’” In To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells, pp. 150-68. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, McMurry delineates Ida B. Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching activism and career after the journalist's controversial departure from the Memphis Free Speech.

“We cannot see what the ‘good’ citizens of Memphis gained by suppressing the Free Speech,” the St. Paul Appeal declared in August 1892. “They stopped the papers of a few hundreds subscribers and drove Miss Ida B. Wells to New York, and now she is telling the story to hundreds of thousands of readers.” Another black newspaper noted, “If those sneaking cowardly Negro hating Memphis copper-heads think they have gained anything by this arrangement they are welcome to it.”¹ Memphis whites probably had no idea that driving the Free Speech from their city would...