Newspaper Mural
*This date in 1881 celebrates the publication of the Memphis Free Speech newspaper. This was a Black newspaper founded in Memphis, Tennessee, by the Reverend Taylor Nightingale, based at the Beale Street Baptist Church.
In 1888, the publication's name was changed to the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight when J. L. Fleming joined Nightingale, a newspaperman from Crittenden County, Arkansas, who had previously edited the Marion Headlight "until a white mob 'liberated' the county from the black rule and ran him out of town." Ida B. Wells was invited to contribute to the paper the following year but declined to do so unless she was an equal partner. With Nightingale and Fleming's agreement, she bought a one-third interest, becoming the editor. At the same time, Fleming was the business manager, and Nightingale was the sales manager.
As an investigative journalist and campaigner against lynching, Wells wrote articles for the Free Press and Headlight, including a notable editorial on May 21, 1892, refuting what she called "that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."
On May 27, 1892, a White mob ransacked the newspaper's office, destroying the building and its contents. Wells would note in her diary: "I thought then it was the white southerner's chivalrous defense of his womanhood which caused the mob to destroy my paper, even though it was known that the truth had been spoken. I know now that it was an excuse to do what they had wanted to do before but had not dared because they had no good reason until the appearance of that famous editorial." According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, no copy of the Memphis Free Speech survives.
