In March of 1892, business partners Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Henry Stewart were arrested after defending an attack on their store, The People's Grocery, when a white competitor and the deputy sheriffs he hired were met with gunfire and several deputies were wounded but survived. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were nevertheless taken from the downtown jail by masked vigilantes, dragged to a deserted railroad yard in north Memphis, and shot to death. They were part of a thriving black community at the Curve, where most attended the same church and belonged to the same lodges. Twenty-one-year-old Calvin McDowell was a member of the Tennessee Rifles, a black military organization respected for protecting the city during the Yellow Fever epidemics of the 1870s. Thomas Moss was one of the first black postal carriers in Memphis and a close friend of Ida B. Wells, who was godmother to his three-year-old daughter Maurine, while his wife Betty was expecting their second child. Activist Mary Church Terrell, deeply affected by his murder, remembered Tom Moss as one of her best childhood friends. The funerals of the three men were held at Avery Chapel Church, attended by over 2,500 people, and all three were buried at Zion Cemetery, where Betty Moss fainted at her husband's graveside. Seeking to understand the killings, Ida B. Wells traveled the South investigating racial violence against blacks and concluded that white mob violence was driven not by rape but by black economic progress, publishing her findings in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases in 1892. Zion Cemetery, founded by the United Sons of Zion in 1873, became the resting place for over 30,000 members of Memphis's historic black community before later being abandoned and neglected, and a community project established in 1990 began restoring and administering the site with help from schools, churches, and community groups.
