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.
Tentang Penulis
JOSHUA D. ROTHMAN is professor of history and chair of the history department at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in the history of slavery, race, nineteenth-century America, and the American South. He is the author or editor of four previous books, including Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861; Reforming America, 181501860: A Norton Documents Reader; Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Georgia), and, most recently, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, which was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery and the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize from the Journal of Global Slavery. He is also the co-director of “Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery.’
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