Memphis Free Speech

I was going to write a book about the 1920s and the 1930s and the establishment of those institutions that Jonathan Rauch calls the constitutions of knowledge, a free and objective press.

The notion that we have of the free press really gets established, you know, around World War I, 1920s, the first code of ethics.

It says, seek truth and report it.

That dates from 1923.

But what really fires her and gives her her mission is when a good friend of hers who operated a people's grocery, a co-op grocery in a Black neighborhood in Memphis, ends up getting lynched.

she decides then that she's going to tell the truth about lynching.

And in her paper, which conveniently, for my purposes, is called The Memphis Free Press, she publishes an editorial that says no one believes the lie, no one down here in the South believes the lie that black men rape white women.

That story, that notion that unless we have a great yoke on the shoulders of black men, they're gonna run rampant and rape white women.

During this time, she began working as a journalist.

Writing under the pen name Iola, by the early 1890s, she gained a reputation as a clear voice against racial injustice and became co-owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper.

She had no shortage of material.

In the decades following the Civil War, Southern whites attempted to reassert their power by committing crimes against Black people, including suppressing their votes, vandalizing their businesses, and even murdering them.