![]() | Remembering the Memphis Massacre : An American Story 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. Beverly Greene Bond (Editor) 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 (Editor) 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. |
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