People's Grocery

People's Grocery stood at the southeast corner of today's Mississippi Boulevard and Walker Avenue, a neighborhood called the Curve for the streetcar turn, and what happened to it in 1892 set Ida B. Wells on the campaign of her life. It was a Black-owned cooperative store, just outside the city limits, run at night by Thomas Moss, a letter carrier. The state marker calls Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart co-owners; other accounts have McDowell and Stewart working the counter. Its success cut into the trade of William Barrett, a white grocer nearby. A fight among boys over a game of marbles in early March grew into a confrontation between the two sides. On the night of March 5, armed white men, some deputized, went to the store. Shots were fired and several were wounded. Dozens of Black residents were arrested, Moss among them. Before dawn on March 9, some 75 masked men took Moss, McDowell and Stewart from the Shelby County Jail to a rail yard about a mile from the city and killed them. A mob ransacked the store, and Barrett bought it within months for a fraction of its cost. Moss was a close friend of Wells, whose newspaper, the Free Speech, was published on Beale Street. She urged Black Memphians to leave the city, and thousands did. She began investigating lynching across the South, and her reporting showed that the charge of rape used to excuse it was often false, and that many of those killed had never been accused of it. In May a mob destroyed her newspaper's office while she was away, and she did not come back to the South for nearly thirty years. A state historical marker has stood at the corner since 2018.