The People's Grocery and the Ida B. Wells Connection

1892. Three Black men had the audacity — the unmitigated nerve — to run a clean, profitable grocery store in Memphis, Tennessee, winning customers away from the white-owned grocery store across the street.

So of course, they had to die.

I want you to know their names. Thomas Moss. Calvin McDowell. Will Stewart. Memphis, Tennessee.

I'm talking about the People's Grocery, and what happened when three Black men ran a better store than the white man across the street.

The People's Grocery

About a mile outside the Memphis city limits there was a neighborhood called the Curve, named for the spot where the streetcar line bent. Mostly Black, some white, working people. And on the corner that's now Mississippi Boulevard and Walker Avenue stood the People's Grocery Company.

It wasn't one man's store. It was a company, and the community owned it. Moss was president, McDowell was manager, Stewart was a clerk, and about ten other Black men held stock. Your neighbors were your investors. Your customers were your partners. Every dollar spent there stayed on that corner.

Thomas Moss was one of the first Black letter carriers in Memphis. He walked his mail route by day and worked the store at night. Married to Betty, a little girl named Maurine at home, another baby on the way. One of the stops on his route was the office of a Black newspaper called the Free Speech and Headlight, and one of its owners was his friend, a young journalist and former schoolteacher named Ida B. Wells. She owned a third of the paper. She wrote later, "A finer, cleaner man than he never walked the streets of Memphis."

A competitor across the street

Now the conundrum. Across the street was a white grocer named W. H. Barrett. Before the People's Grocery opened, Barrett had the Curve to himself. Then the customers started crossing the street.

He couldn't beat them on price. He couldn't beat them on trust. So he went looking for another way.

It started with children. Black boys and white boys quarreled over a game of marbles, and the boys' fight turned into a grown men's fight. Barrett used it. He showed up at the People's Grocery with an officer, hunting for a man he claimed they were hiding. McDowell told him he was lying. Barrett struck McDowell with a pistol. McDowell took the pistol away from him and beat him with it. Barrett swore out a warrant, and word went around that white men were coming that Saturday night to clean out the store.

The grocers asked for protection. The police said the Curve was outside their jurisdiction.

So the men armed some friends — in Wells's words, "not to assail, but to resist" — and waited.

The raid and the lynching

Saturday night, March 5, 1892, armed white men came in through the back of the store. The defenders opened fire and three of the men went down wounded. Then it came out who they were: sheriff's deputies, in plain clothes.

Stop right there. Armed men in street clothes, coming through the back door of a Black business in the dark. And now the story in the papers wasn't a raid. It was an attack on the law.

By the next day, dozens of Black men from the Curve had been dragged out of their homes and jailed, Moss, McDowell and Stewart among them. No bail. A Black militia company called the Tennessee Rifles stood guard outside the jail for three days because everybody knew what was coming. Then the sheriff took their guns away.

Around three in the morning on March 9, 1892, a mob of men in black masks took the three grocers out of the jail. They loaded them onto a switch engine in the railroad yard and ran it a mile north of the city. The engine let off steam and blew its whistle to cover the sound of the guns. McDowell fought; he grabbed one of their guns and held on until a bullet shattered his hand. When they asked Thomas Moss for last words, the reports say he told them, "Tell my people to go West. There is no justice for them here."

The coroner's jury said it was done "by unknown men." Nobody was ever charged.

Then they finished the job on the store. A crowd looted it. The creditors took what was left of the stock and sold it to Barrett for less than one-eighth of what it cost. Wells put it plain: Barrett "had indeed kept his word, and by aid of the authorities destroyed the People's Grocery Company root and branch."

Who controlled the story

So how does a lynching get filed away as something else?

You watch the words. The papers called it "the Curve riot." The deputies were officers attacked in the line of duty. The mob was "unknown men." Three businessmen became three criminals, and a competitor's grudge became law and order. By the time the story reached the history books, if it reached them at all, it sounded like a tragedy that just happened. It didn't just happen. It was a business deal, and the paperwork went through the courthouse.

Ida B. Wells keeps the receipts

Ida B. Wells saw that clearer than anybody. She said Tom Moss's murder was "what opened my eyes to what lynching really was." Not punishment for a crime. A way to stop Black people from getting ahead.

And she did something about it.

Free Speech told Black Memphis to take Moss at his word. Leave a city whose laws won't protect you. Wells wrote that six thousand people left Memphis in two months, hundreds of them walking out toward Oklahoma. Businesses failed. Whole blocks of houses went up for rent. The men who ran the streetcar line came to the newspaper office themselves and asked her to tell Black riders to come back, because the cars were running empty. When Free Speech kept writing, Edward Ward Carmack, the editor of the white-owned Memphis Commercial, called for retaliation, and a mob destroyed the paper's office. Wells was out of town that day, and she didn't come back to the South for thirty years.

She didn't stop. She started counting. Out of Tom Moss's grave came one of the first real investigations of lynching in this country. Here's what she wrote down, case after case:

• the name of the person killed
• the date and the place
• what the mob claimed they had done
• what the facts actually showed

She published it that same year, 1892, in a pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She kept the receipts.

There's a photograph from around 1893. Ida B. Wells sitting with Betty Moss, Tom's widow, and Tom Moss Jr., the son he never got to meet.

Today there's a historical marker at the Curve. On the 125th anniversary, in 2017, people gathered at Zion Cemetery and at Second Congregational Church on Walker Avenue to say three names out loud.

The receipt

So here it is. For everybody. Now you know.

Barrett got the stock for pennies on the dollar. He never got the story. That went to the woman with the pen.

Know their names. Thomas Moss. Calvin McDowell. Will Stewart. Tell a person and share the receipt.

The Receipts R the Recipe.

Sources & Further Reading

• Lynching Sites Project of Memphis — "People's Grocery Lynchings: Thomas Moss, Will Stewart, Calvin McDowell"
• Executed Today — "1892: The People's Grocery Lynchings of Memphis" (extended excerpts from Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice)
• Zinn Education Project — "People's Grocery Lynchings"
• Tennessee Encyclopedia — "Memphis Free Speech"
• African American Intellectual History Society — "Postal Work and the Struggle for Black Freedom"
• The Daily Suffragist — "The lynchings of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart"
• Historic Memphis — "People's Grocery"