...This essay examines the role of Memphis in the Meredith March against Fear, a demonstration for black freedom that moved through Mississippi in June 1966. James Meredith began his journey from Memphis and was shot by Aubrey Norvell, who hailed from a suburb of the city. In the aftermath...

...What happened to Martin Luther King’s dream of economic equality in Memphis? For most of the city’s history, 80 percent or more of the black community has consisted of black workers. Slavery set the terms of cheap labor as the measure of profitability in Memphis, and white economic elites have...

... a detailed history of Wyler's two documentaries, the celebrated Memphis Belle and Thunderbolt. Coward Noël Private Lives Dark Angel The film 1935 Franklin Dark Angel The screenplay Hellman Franklin Sidney The Dark Angel Froeschel George Guardsman The Franklin Hellman...

...In An Unseen Light, eminent and rising scholars offer a multidisciplinary examination of Memphis’s role in African American history during the twentieth century. The city was at the epicenter of the civil rights movement on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr...

...Josie discovered that the major topic of conversation in her hometown, as in Memphis, concerned the pros and cons of secession upon her return to Bowling Green. She repeated the fears and opinions expressed by her parents and praised the attempts of rational residents to curb the growing hostility...

...Davis’s squadron scored a victory in the one-sided battle of Memphis. Union navy ironclads destroyed the Confederate ram fleet, and Union forces captured the city and opened the Mississippi River to Vicksburg, Mississippi. The victory at Memphis capped a spring of Union successes in the West...

...The introduction provides an overview of the book's themes, arguments, and chapters. It describes how Memphis, Tennessee, was on the cutting edge of formal black political mobilization in the Jim Crow South and reveals the extent of black political action taking place elsewhere. It argues...

...This essay investigates black life in the aftermath of the Memphis Massacre of 1866, chronicling how new migrants helped reconstitute cultural life and political strength. It examines an alliance of black benevolent associations with white elites during the 1876 election. This alliance reflected...

...In 1917 Ell Persons was lynched in Memphis, Tennessee. Persons, a black woodchopper in his thirties, was burned alive in front of a crowd of at least 15,000 spectators at the Wolf River Bridge after being accused of raping and murdering a sixteen-year-old white schoolgirl by the name of Antoinette...

...By the mid-1930s, Lonzie Odie (L. O.) Taylor was one of Memphis’s leading Baptist ministers. But his influence extended beyond the pulpits of the churches he pastored from the 1930s through the 1960s. A self-trained photographer and videographer, Taylor produced thousands of black-and-white...

...In the fall of 1940 black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of Memphis police known as the “Reign of Terror.” These actions were carried out under the direction of local political boss E. H. Crump as more black Memphians, tiring...

...This essay explores the relationship between black Memphians and John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency in 1960 and his subsequent administration. Drawing on archival research in Memphis and at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, as well as oral histories, this essay shows that blacks...

...This essay concerns the fight to desegregate Memphis libraries, which encompassed not only legal challenges but also a 1960 sit-in campaign that inspired direct action protests throughout the city. Allegra Turner sought access to the white-only Cossitt Library in 1949, and eight years later her...

...Stax Records served as a neighborhood anchor institution throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, employing but also profiting from the wealth of talent in the South Memphis community. In the years after the assassination of Martin Luther King and then the decline and shuttering of Stax Records, South...

... flashpoints can focus intense energy and attention on specific issues, they often obscure the complex set of social, political, racial, and tactical dynamics that make up the tensions of domination, survival, and insurgency. When we reinterpret these moments in Memphis history, we are better able to make...

... stereotypes of black inferiority. They not only ensured that the Republican Party allowed their political participation and took stands for black civil rights, but they also helped change the Democratic Party to a party that pushed for civil rights. Using Memphis, Tennessee, as a case study, this book shows...

...—and the risks taken by those who spoke out against either. It notes that Josie began her diary during the Christmas holidays of 1860 as she prepared to visit her sister and brother-in-law in Memphis. prisoners aid to Underwood Johanna Louisa “Josie” Russellville Female Institute Underwood Lucy Craig Henry...

...Josie began her diary in early December as she prepared to visit with her sister and brother-in-law in Memphis. The diary chronicled a slave wedding, parties, social calls, and romantic visits that enlivened the holidays, but more serious concerns quickly overshadowed these social festivities...

...The introduction opens with Richard Wright, adrift and morose amidst the vagaries of Jim Crow Memphis, and pans back to examine the political and social circumstances of the segregated city, from blues music on Beale Street to the vice trade to the Crump machine. It later skips to Martin Luther...

...Charles Harrison Mason was the founder of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which from its Memphis roots grew into the largest black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, with profound theological and political ramifications for poor and working-class black Memphians. This essay traces...