I’d like to share a story with you that I and my co-founders stumbled on to many years ago when we were first starting People’s Grocery that really inspired us when we found out about it. The irony is that we had already chosen the name People Grocery before we knew of this. The following story is our own compilation of various versions of factual history. While we have taken the liberty to paraphase in places where other authors of said more, the story is entirely true.
In the late 1800s a small grocery store called the People’s Grocery Company was founded in Memphis, Tennessee by 3 black entrepreneurs: Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart. This new establishment became a popular gathering place for the Memphis black community. The store, after all, was not just a thriving and successful business but a powerful symbol of many of the things black people had been striving and struggling for since their emancipation not thirty years earlier. It represented enterprise and independence, success and self-determination. It defied all stereotypes that said what blacks could not be and could not achieve.
The People’s Grocery Company started to compete with a white-owned grocery store nearby, attracting black customers who, until the People’s Grocery Company was opened, had no option but to shop at the white-owned store. From the day it opened, this business became the target of white resentment. A group of angry white men decided that they would “eliminate” the competition and threat from this black-owned business. “The Negroes are getting too independent,” they said, “we must teach them a lesson.”
At about ten o’clock on a Saturday night in 1892 a mob of white men attacked the People’s Grocery Company. But the black owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. The owners of People’s Grocery were then arrested, charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot, and thrown into jail. The People’s Grocery store was looted and burned.
The next morning the newspapers printed exaggerated headlines telling how officers of the law had been wounded by “Negro desperadoes” while fulfilling their duties of hunting up criminals whom they had been told were harbored in the People’s Grocery Company, and that the People’s Grocery was “a low dive in which drinking and gambling were carried on: a resort of thieves and thugs.”
These sensationalized depiction’s gave rise to another white mob. On March 9 1892, the mob dragged Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart from their jail cells, took them out of the city, and lynched them. The three black businessmen were found a mile north of the city limits.
The People’s Grocery’s greatest crime was that it competed successfully against the white power structure and dared to actualize a dream for a better life by establishing a successful business that could build power, resources and wealth for the black community, serving as a center that black people could rally around and feel proud of. The three owners of the People’s Grocery had never harmed anyone. But the success and popularity of the People’s Grocery had undoubtedly threatened the white community and presented a symbol for thousands of black people. The black owners had violated two unspoken rules: They had prospered, and they had forcefully challenged white authority. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart died for defending their property, their people and their dreams. They were true warriors and heroes of their people and their memory lives on.
