In 1892 Wells found a focus for her militancy following a triple lynching in Memphis. After three young black men opened the People's Grocery, a white competitor's resentment triggered a chain of events that led to their murders. Earlier lynchings had angered her, but the deaths of three friends brought the evil close to her. She had believed lynchings happened to innocent people but not to respectable ones. Turning the full force of her powerful pen against lynching, Wells attacked the premise that lynching was a necessary deterrent to black rapists.

Sensing the pending breakup of the Union and tired of suppressing his sympathies for the nation and against slavery, Lieber left South Carolina in 1856 and moved to New York. He accepted Columbia College's offer of a chair as well as the honor of titling it. By his own design he became professor of history and political science, thereby becoming the first officially named political scientist in America. He made clear in his inaugural address that he took his field to be "the very science for nascent citizens of a republic." During the Civil War he advised the U.S.