In 1909 a Black man was brutally lynched in Cairo, Illinois—hanged, shot more than five hundred times, dragged through the streets for the amusement of onlookers, decapitated, and burned. Wells, by then the mother of four young children, at first refused to go and investigate. Her ten-year-old son awakened her in the middle of the night, saying her husband wanted her to get on the train. “Mother,” he said, “if you don’t go nobody else will.”
