mar 9, 1892 - The People’s Grocery Lynching, Memphis, Tennessee on March 9, 1892

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Three African American men, William "Henry" Stewart, Thomas Moss, and Calvin McDowell, ran the People’s Grocery in a multiracial Memphis neighborhood known as the Curve.
A white grocer in the same area, angered by this new black-owned business that threatened his monopoly, led a series of campaigns of harassment against the People's Grocery.
Refused protection by local law enforcement and fearing a mob attack, the Black grocers armed themselves and prepared for self defense. Sure enough, that attack came, and gunfire was exchanged. With multiple white men wounded, Stewart, Moss, and McDowell were arrested and jailed.

A few days later, the jail was stormed by 75 men in black masks who took the men to a railroad yard. All three were shot and killed. According to a local newspaper, Moss was the last to be shot with these final last words: "Tell my people to go West, there is no justice for them here." This lynching, like many others in the South, was a punishment for becoming an economic competitor to whites. The white men felt threatened that the black men were becoming their equal and they felt that the black men needed to be put down in their place---a place of inferiority to the white race.

Moss was a friend of Ida B. Wells and this incident was what sparked her journalism and investigations into lynchings.

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