The 1866 Memphis Massacre

For three days beginning May 1, 1866, white mobs attacked the Black neighborhoods of South Memphis, in one of the worst episodes of racial violence of Reconstruction. The Third U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery had just been mustered out at Fort Pickering, on the bluff south of the city, and its men were waiting for their discharge pay near families who had settled nearby. A fight between Black veterans and Irish policemen on April 30 was followed the next day by a confrontation on South Street, and a police officer was killed. Mobs that included police, firemen and businessmen then went through the settlements. General George Stoneman at first refused to use force and disarmed the returning soldiers, leaving the neighborhoods unprotected. Martial law came only on May 3. A congressional committee reached Memphis on May 22 and heard 170 witnesses. Its count was 46 Black people and 2 white people killed, 75 injured, 100 robbed, five women raped, and 91 homes, four churches and schools burned; accounts put the schools at eight or twelve. Robert Church, later a Beale Street landowner, was shot and wounded in his saloon. News of the violence fed the case in Congress for the Fourteenth Amendment, and the findings fed Radical Reconstruction. Congress's own report called it, in its words, in reality the massacre. Even so, when Phyllis Aluko and others sought a marker for the 150th anniversary, the Tennessee Historical Commission kept the title The Memphis Race Riot of 1866. The NAACP paid for its own, worded 1866 Memphis Massacre, and it was unveiled in Army Park at Second and G.E. Patterson on May 1, 2016.