Ida B. Wells’ Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography, is one of the most inspiring stories throughout African American history. As an activist and civil rights leader, Ida B. Wells played an important role in establishing African American women’s ability to secure and use the right to vote. In the south, lynching, killing by mobs usually hanged, often involved gruesome injury as well as murder, were popular events in the post-Reconstruction.(pg.331). However, Ida B. Wells took matters into her own hands and contributed significantly to increase public awareness about the terrors of lynching, a movement that led to the classification of lynching as a federal crime.
Born in 1862 in Mississippi, Ida B. Wells was orphaned at the age of sixteen by a yellow …show more content…
As a crusader protesting and writings about the horrors, Ida fought against any of these illegal and violent acts. “While I was thus carrying on the work of my newspaper,... there came the lynching in Memphis which changed the whole course of my life…(pg.354).” Thomas Moss and his associates, owned a grocery store in a populated suburb which became detrimental on a white man’s grocery store who made a monopoly off of the colored population. Usually, lynching often takes place because a black men is accused of raping white women. However that was not the case when Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart were lynched because a group of white men thought they could eliminate the competing grocery store. In the end Thomas Moss and his associates were lynched. Wells concluded that Moss’s crime had been the competition that his successful grocery business posed to whites. “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negros who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger