After her friends Calvin McDowell, William Stewart, and Thomas Moss were lynched in Memphis on March 9, 1892, journalist Ida B. Wells published editorials urging the black community to leave Memphis since it “will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” A mob retaliated by destroying Ms. Wells’s offices, and on May 27, 1892, she fled for the North. From there she continued her work, becoming the nation’s foremost anti-lynching activist, collaborating with leaders like Frederick Douglass and helping to found the NAACP. Ms. Wells died of natural causes in 1931. Lynchings still raged across the South, and more than six million African Americans fled as refugees from terror. Over the course of the Great Migration, the number of lynchings declined, but not until 1952 did a full year pass without a recorded lynching in the United States.