Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (15 page)

B
EFORE
L
ILLIE WAS ARRESTED
,
Alice had spent just one night—the night of the murder—alone in jail. But now that Lillie was back at home with her family, Alice was all alone again, with an extremely short list of permittable visitors, and a relatively long wait before her case would be heard in court.

If Alice kept any records of the six months she spent in jail, they have been lost, but it seems unlikely that she would ever again commit her feelings to the page. Her letters from the last few years, especially those precious ones she and Freda had exchanged, were now being bandied about by men as power plays. They wanted to define who she was, to appropriate her personal story—her love—by controlling documents that contained her most intimate concerns. And the worst humiliation was yet to come. It was only a matter of time until those love letters were presented in court, and then reprinted in newspapers across the nation. If Alice had written letters or kept a journal while she was behind bars, she probably disposed of it herself, rather than relying on someone else. At that point, who could she trust? She had asked Freda, her love, to destroy her letters—and that request had obviously been ignored.

Like so much about Alice, we will never know exactly what it was like for her to be alone in jail during those long months before the lunacy
inquisition. At best, we can surmise that the many weeks and months were plagued by loneliness and gloom and monotony.
⁷⁹
At worst, life in jail was downright frightening.

I
N THE EARLY HOURS OF
M
ARCH
9, 1892,
Alice may have been asleep in her cell, but it was unlikely she slept through the night. A mob of angry white men descended on the jail between two and three in the morning, demanding that three African American men be released into their custody. Had Alice not committed murder, she would have never resided in a cell near the men they were after, and had the jail they all occupied not been in turn-of-the-century Memphis, those men may not have been incarcerated at all. But she was in jail, and that meant she might have seen what justice looked like from the other side.

Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Henry Stewart were joint operators of the People’s Grocery Company, a cooperative market in “the Curve,” Memphis’s densely populated African American neighborhood. The Curve already had a grocery store, owned and operated by W.H. Barrett, a white man who resented the competition. It was one of a series of clashes over the nature of free market competition reverberating throughout Memphis. The city’s white population had become incensed at the increasingly improved economic status of, and increasing competition posed by, African Americans. In this case, tensions reached a head after store hours, when Barrett entered through the front door of the People’s Grocery, and his white friends through the back.

The People’s Grocery had been expecting this, and had sought legal counsel in advance. The Curve was a mile beyond city limits, and there was no police protection, thus the three men were advised to arms themselves—but with extreme caution. In the heat the moment, however, three of the intruders
were wounded. They wore plain clothes for afterhours trespassing, but during the day, it turned out they donned the uniforms of deputies. Once McDowell, Moss, and Stewart realized this, they threw down their firearms and offered themselves up for arrest. The injured aggressors were taken to the doctor, and the ones who had initiated the violence but emerged unscathed were let go. Dozens of African Americans were arrested and taken to jail. Bail was denied, as was communication with the outside world.

It is hard to imagine that a posse of angry white men, out for blood, was met with much resistance at the jail. This was a group whose members Alice, and likely most white Memphians, would have recognized. Some were neighbors, and others were likely community and business leaders.

It was rumored that Judge Julius DuBose—who presided over all of the cases in the jail— was among the white mob in those early morning hours. If he was not part of the gang, he was certainly sympathetic to their cause. His personal history was typical of white men who felt threatened by social and economic changes in the post–Civil War South. He had been raised by a planter who benefitted from slavery. His family suffered financially after their slaves were emancipated and they were finally required to pay wages to those who stayed on as staff. The judge was a founding member of the Tennessee Ku Klux Klan, not simply out of bigotry but, it seems, as a way to protect the material interests of his family and community.

Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart were taken to an open field just outside of the city limits. Their bodies were later found, disfigured by shotgun and buckshot wounds. McDowell’s eyes had been gouged out, and his fingers reduced to bloody stubs.

The
Appeal Avalanche
celebrated the lynching for being “one of the most orderly of its kind ever conducted.”
⁸⁰
No white men were ever arrested for participating in the horrific killings.

The next day, the sheriff led a hundred men to the Curve with strict instructions to “shoot down any Negro who appears to be making trouble.”
⁸¹
To give the whites an even greater advantage, the arms and ammunition of the Tennessee Rifles, the African American guard, were confiscated. The money drawer of the People’s Grocery was emptied by those tasked with patrolling the Curve, who also helped themselves to various goods, no doubt celebrating with the wine and cigars they pilfered. Barrett bought whatever stock was leftover—at one eighth of its cost—and added it to his own store’s offerings. The message was received, and the People’s Grocery did not survive long after the lynching.

Alice may have heard the lynching that night. She may have known those being lynched. It is almost guaranteed that she knew at least some of the men who carried out the lynching. Regardless, they all lived in the same city, and travelled on the same roads. Alice probably passed Thomas Moss during Freda’s stay at the widow Kimbrough’s home. He was one of the oldest letter carriers in Memphis, and had continued to deliver mail while the nascent People’s Grocery worked on becoming a sustainable business. His route included the office of the
Free Speech
, the African American press on Hernando Street.

News of the lynching quickly reached Ida B. Wells, a twenty-nine-year-old editor and writer whom Thomas Moss had befriended. She was enraged by the brutal murders—and unsettled by them. There had been a sharp increase in lynchings in Memphis, with the violence usually justified as retribution, an appropriate form of vigilante justice after allegations of rape by an African American man.
⁸²
Wells, born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, was well acquainted with this rationale. But the People’s Grocery lynching lacked any accusation of sexual assault. The retaliation was mostly economic in motivation, clearly meant to reinforce white preeminence in Memphis.

Two months after the lynching, Wells began to write a series of groundbreaking, provocative editorials rejecting “the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women.” She warned men of the South who terrorized
those around her with impunity: Their continued violence would inevitably force a realization that “will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”
⁸³
If white women engaged in sexual relations with African American men, it likely occurred because they instigated it.

An African American paper daring to publish the news that white men were lying, that they were using the virtue of their women as an excuse for violence, would itself have been a major affront in the 1890s. The suggestion that, in the rare instances when sex between black men and white women did occur, it was the white women who had likely
invited
the transgression absolutely incensed white Memphians. The outrage expressed by local papers—the same ones covering Alice’s case with the utmost reverence for white fathers and a paternalistic view of women—declared it an unbearable degradation that should be handled immediately, and without restraint.
⁸⁴

The
Public Ledger’s
only nighttime competition, the
Memphis Evening Scimitar
, assumed Wells was a man, and that the community should make an example out of him.

Patience under such circumstances is not a virtue. If the negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’ shears.
⁸⁵

They did not brand or carry out any other form of violence on Wells, but it was not for lack of trying. A white mob, one that may have again included Judge DuBose, destroyed the
Free Speech
offices on Hernando Street. By that time, they had realized that Wells was a woman, but their much lauded sense of chivalry did not extend to African American women. Wells was out of town during the violence, but her absence did not go unnoticed. If she returned, the vigilantes promised a lynching. She ultimately left Memphis for New York, where she would become one of the most well known and respected political activists in America.