Overview

On May 1, 1866, a minor exchange between white Memphis city police and a group of black Union soldiers quickly escalated into murder and mayhem. Changes wrought by the Civil War and African American emancipation sent long-standing racial, economic, cultural, class, and gender tensions rocketing to new heights. For three days, a mob of white men roamed through South Memphis, leaving a trail of blood, rubble, and terror in their wake. By May 3, at least forty-six African American men, women, and children and two white men lay dead. An unknown number of black people had been driven out of the city. Every African American church and schoolhouse lay in ruins, homes and businesses burglarized and burned, and at least five women had been raped. As a federal military commander noted in the days following, ""what [was] called the ‘riot’"" was ""in reality [a] massacre"" of extended proportions. It was also a massacre whose effects spread far beyond Memphis, Tennessee. As the essays in this collection reveal, the massacre at Memphis changed the trajectory of the post–Civil War nation. Led by recently freed slaves who refused to be cowed and federal officials who took their concerns seriously, the national response to the horror that ripped through the city in May 1866 helped to shape the nation we know today. Remembering the Memphis Massacre brings this pivotal moment and its players, long hidden from all but specialists in the field, to a public that continues to feel the effects of those three days and the history that made them possible.

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9780820356518

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Beverly Greene Bond is a professor of history at the University of Memphis. She is the coeditor, with Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, volumes 1 and 2 (both Georgia) and coeditor of Images of America: Beale Street, and codirector of the Memphis Massacre Project, a public commemoration of Reconstruction. Susan Eva O'Donovan is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis. She is the author of Becoming Free in the Cotton South and coeditor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, part of the ongoing scholarship of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. She is also codirector of the Memphis Massacre Project. Greg Downs has been the least successful high school varsity basketball coach in Tennessee, the editor of a muckraking weekly newspaper on Chicago's South Side, a karaoke performer profiled in the Boston Phoenix, and a reporter on the tail of a fugitive cult leader. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is an assistant professor of history at the City College of New York. Downs's stories have appeared in such publications as Glimmer Train, Meridian, Chicago Reader, and Sycamore Review. Jim Downs is a professor of history and American studies at Connecticut College. He is the author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (Georgia) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America. Timothy S. Huebner, an associate professor of history at Rhodes College, is author of The Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy and coeditor, with Kermit L. Hall, of Major Problems in American Constitutional History, second edition. He and Paul Finkelman edit the series Studies in the Legal History of the South. Joshua D. Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Alabama and director of the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South. He is the author of Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 and editor of Reforming America, 1815-1860: A Norton Documents Reader.

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