Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of July 16th
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It is the 197th day of the year, leaving 168 days remaining in 2022.
Soon to be a freewoman because of the Emancipation Proclamation, she told her stories of the horrors of lynching in newspapers across the country. She also wrote about society's deep prejudice and animosity against Black people because of their color and the fear they would successfully compete about whites.
As an young adult, Wells and several relatives moved to Memphis, Tenn. She became a teacher, but after becoming involved in a legal case in which she refused to move to the "colored car" while riding a train, she began to write for local newspapers. She then became a co-owner and writer for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. She covered racial segregation and other acts of inequality.
One incident solidified her career: Three Black men who owned a grocery store in Memphis were arrested after a fight. Instead of being tried in a courtroom, the sheriff had them removed from jail, taken to a railyard, and shot to death.
Wells wrote about it, and told Black people to leave Memphis. She said the city doesn't protect them, but "murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons." After her newspaper office was ransacked by a white mob, she fled the city and wound up in New York City. There she started investigating and writing about lynching for the New York Age.
She compiled some of her reports in a book, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases. A few years later, after marrying and moving to Chicago, she published her second book, The Red Record.
It told stories of lynching and how common it was. She reported how white people concocted tales of Black men raping white women to justify their terrorism. But in reality, she showed, white supremacists had always used violence to control Black people and enforce slavery.
Instead, she showed, the lynching cases were the result of efforts by white mobs to suppress political and business activities by Black people after the Civil War.
Wells continued to write and speak about lynching and other method to impose white supremacy. She went on speaking tours across the country and in Britain. She became a civil rights and women's rights activist.
Well died in 1931 in Chicago.
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