The People's Grocery

She was born into slavery on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation. She lost both parents and a younger brother to the 1878 yellow-fever epidemic and at sixteen took a teaching post to keep her younger siblings fed. On March 9, 1892, three of her closest Memphis friends — Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, owners of the People's Grocery — were lynched. She published the pamphlets Southern Horrors in 1892 and The Red Record in 1895, documenting the names, dates, and circumstances of 728 lynchings. The Memphis paper offices that had published her column were burned. She co-founded the NAACP in 1909. She died in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at sixty-eight.

Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in the Holly Springs Reconstruction childhood — and follows the arc through the Rust College years, the Memphis teaching and the 1884 railroad-coach lawsuit that the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned, the Free Speech newspaper years and the 1892 lynching of her friends, the Lloyd-George-financed British speaking tours of 1893 and 1894, the 1895 marriage to Ferdinand Barnett, the founding of the Negro Fellowship League, the long Chicago years, and the 1931 death at Daily Defender house.

What emerges is a portrait of the most important anti-lynching investigative journalist in American history — and the work she did alone, with a notebook and a railroad pass, before the institutions she helped build existed.