Peoples Grocery lynching

The People's Grocery lynchings of 1892 occurred on March 9, 1892, in Memphis, Tennessee, when black grocery owner Thomas Moss and two of his workers, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell, were lynched by a white mob while in police custody. The lynchings occurred in the aftermath of a fight between whites and blacks and two subsequent shooting altercations in which two white police officers were wounded. The store was located just outside Memphis in a neighborhood called the "Curve". Opened in 1889, the People's Grocery was a cooperative venture run along corporate lines and owned by 11 prominent African Americans, including postman Thomas Moss, a friend of Ida B. Wells. Timeline leading up to the lynching March 2–4, 1892 By the 1890s, there were increasing racial tensions in the Curve neighborhood that spilled over between Thomas Moss, a successful black grocer, and William Barrett, a white grocer. Barrett’s grocery had a virtual monopoly prior to Moss's venture, despite Barret’s bad reputation as a "low-dive gambling den" and a location where liquor could be illegally purchased.