People's Grocery

The grocery was the Curve's answer to a white monopoly. Opened in 1889 and co-owned by eleven Black businessmen, it competed with William Barrett's store, and a boys' marble game outside it ended in a brawl on March 2, 1892, that Barrett blamed on store worker Will Stewart. On March 5 armed white men approached the store, shots wounded two deputies, and hundreds of deputized whites then arrested about forty more people. About 75 masked men took Thomas Moss, a postman, with Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart from the jail and killed them. About 6,000 Black residents left Memphis.

What the plaque says

People's Grocery Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, all African-Americans and co-owners of People's Grocery (located at this site), were arrested in connection with a disturbance near their store. Rather than being brought to trial, they were lynched on March 9, 1892. Moss' dying words were, "Tell my people to go west--there is no justice for them here." This lynching prompted Ida B. Wells, editor of Memphis Free Speech, to begin her anti-lynching campaign in this country and abroad.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 0.5 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• Elmwood Cemetery — 0.6 mi
  Memphis's oldest active cemetery, a rural garden cemetery of about 1,500 trees opened in 1852, with Black civic leaders, yellow fever victims and the city's whole history in its lots.
• Sun Studio — 1.4 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.4 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Hollis Freeman Price, Sr. — steps away
• The 1960 Memphis Sit-In Movement — steps away
• Dr. Joseph Edison Walker — steps away
• LeMoyne-Owen College — 0.3 mi