Church's Park

Church's Park opened on Beale Street in 1899, six acres built by Robert R. Church Sr. because Memphis had no municipal park for Black residents. Church, born enslaved and often described as the South's first Black millionaire, had bought Memphis property cheaply after the yellow fever epidemics. He put up an auditorium seating about 2,200, with a bandstand, picnic grounds and a playground, reportedly at a cost of $50,000, and W.C. Handy led the orchestra there. Church had been shot and left for dead in his own saloon during the massacre of 1866, thirty-three years earlier. A 1906 journal called it one of the largest stages in the South. President Theodore Roosevelt spoke there on November 19, 1902, to a reported crowd of over 10,000, far more than the hall could hold. Booker T. Washington and his party breakfasted in its banquet hall in 1909. Bishop C.H. Mason's Church of God in Christ held convocations there before Mason Temple was built. The Lincoln Republican League was founded there in 1916, and Tennessee's first NAACP branch was organized there in 1917. Church also founded Solvent Savings Bank in 1906, the first Black-owned bank in Memphis. He died in 1912. The city bought the park in 1921, built a later auditorium and in 1941 renamed the grounds Beale Avenue Park. Church's name came back in 1956 after years of protest. The original fabric was razed in the early 1970s under urban renewal. A gate-like structure and columns from a 1987 rebuilding mark the approximate site of the auditorium, and a monument given by Roberta Church in 1994, dedicated to her father, carries a bust of her grandfather.