1892 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

Ida B. Wells hears at Natchez March 10 that her friend Thomas Moss and two of his business partners were taken from their jail cells the day before, put onto a train, and lynched one mile outside Memphis (see 1887). They had owned a grocery store that was taking business away from a white competitor and had shot three whites who wanted to raze the store. Wells returns to Memphis and launches an anti-lynching campaign, urging blacks to arm themselves in self-defense; she herself begins wearing a pistol, and, quoting her friend's last words, urges Memphis blacks to emigrate west. Wells travels to the newly-opened Oklahoma Territory so that she can report back on conditions there, and in 2 months some 6,000 blacks have followed her advice, some ministers leading their entire congregations to Oklahoma. The white business community of Memphis watches in alarm as its black customers abandon the city, departing by wagon if they cannot afford train fare, and Wells urges those who remain to boycott the local trolley-car system. The boycott is so effective that owners of the traction company come to visit with her and beg that she call off the action. Wells follows newspaper reports and visits scenes of lynchings, interviews eye witnesses to document the circumstances of the 728 lynchings over the preceding decade, and finds that only one third of the victims were even accused of rape. Wells receives death threats, moves to Philadelphia, and proceeds to New York (see 1895).

Italy raises to 12 the minimum age for marriage for girls.

A presidential proclamation April 19 opens some 3 million acres of former Arapaho and Cheyenne lands in Oklahoma to white settlement (see 1891; 1893).

Arab slaveholders in the Belgian Congo rebel beginning in mid-May; Belgian forces under Baron François Dhanis, 31, defeat them November 22. Forced labor is introduced December 5 in the guise of taxes to be paid in labor.