Stretching from the Mississippi River toward the east, Beale Street
is Memphis's most famous avenue. On the infamous section of Beale Street
between Main and Lauderdale Streets, the "Blues was born," and as Beale
Street's reputation for a culturally rich, African American urban life
spread, visitors arrived from all over the region.
For decades,
the area beyond Beale Street was the southern boundary of downtown
Memphis. Racial segregation prohibited African Americans from the main
business district except as workers and customers who entered side
("Colored") entrances to be waited on last. As a result, African
Americans frequented Beale Street, where Jewish immigrants, other
European Americans, and black businessmen offered them exclusive
services and low-priced goods. Just a few blocks away on Lauderdale
Street, wealthier African American families built fine homes and
extended their community further into South Memphis.
From 1862 to
1867 Civil War displacements and Union army occupation produced a
phenomenal growth in the African American population of the city; by
1865 the number of blacks had tripled, and they accounted for 16,509 of
Memphis's 27,703 inhabitants. Almost all these rural migrants lived in
contraband camps, including Camps Dixie and Shiloh ("New Africa"), south
of Beale Street near Fort Pickering and President's Island. Some of the
migrants would make their fortunes in Memphis, providing goods and
services to the large, postwar freedmen population.
Beale Street
soon became the cultural center and the local headquarters for civil
rights, politics, and religion for African Americans. Joseph Clouston,
an African American barber, invested in Beale Street real estate. From
1866 to 1874, twenty black-owned businesses and a Freedman's Bank
existed in the area. African Americans controlled the barbering and
local taxi (hack) and freight (dray) businesses until the streetcar
system and immigrant competition put them out of business in the 1880's.
Tennessee's
oldest surviving African American church edifice was built on Beale
Street in 1864, when Beale Street Baptist Church erected a frame
structure. In October 1866 the congregation and the Reverend Morris
Henderson (1802-1877) purchased a lot and began construction of a brick
and stone building. At the time of Henderson's death the building had
not been completed, but the congregation numbered over 2,500 members.
Former president of the United States Ulysses S. Grant visited the
church on April 14, 1880, escorted by Edward Shaw, Memphis's leading
African American politician. Pastor Taylor Nightingale ran for the city
Board of Education in January 1886. Ida B. Wells, later a nationally
known civil rights activist, assumed coeditorship in the Free Speech and
Headlight newspaper as a result of her friendship with Nightingale and
her attendance at the Beale Street Baptist Church. After the turn of the
twentieth century, Beale Street Baptist Church's George A. Long led the
opposition against Mayor Edward H. Crump, the Democratic leader of the
corrupt political machine that ruled Memphis for decades. Crump and the
local police were infuriated when Pastor Long allowed the radical Negro
union leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph to hold a
rally in the church. But Long replied that "Christ, not Crump, is my
Boss."
Robert R. Church Sr. (1839-1912), a freedman who
migrated into the city during the Civil War, helped to transform Beale
Street from an upper-middle-class neighborhood for European Americans to
a commercial street for Negroes. By the 1880s European-American
families had started their flight from Beale Street, and in 1899 Church
responded to the city's segregation practices by purchasing six acres of
land to build Church Park and Auditorium for Negroes. The two-story
auditorium seated two thousand persons and included a parlor, meeting
rooms, and a refreshment stand. Church hired W. C. Handy as the park's
orchestra leader. A college-educated man who put the rural blues to
written music, Handy became known as the "Father of the Blues." Among
the famous visitors to the park was President Theodore Roosevelt, who
addressed some ten thousand people in 1902. Church's auditorium became
the meeting place for the Lincoln Republican League under the leadership
of Robert R. Church Jr. (1895-1952), who kept his offices at 392 Beale.
During the 1940s, after a racially motivated city hall changed Church
Park and Auditorium's name to Beale Avenue Park in retaliation against
the younger Church, Matthew Thornton (1873-1963), "Mayor of Beale
Street," led a successful African American movement to restore the
Church name. In 1969, the Memphis Sesquicentennial Commission erected a
plaque on the Church Park grounds. The city redeveloped the park in
1987.
In his book Beale Street: Where the Blues Began, George W.
Lee recalled "all nite Halloween Balls, and Big Jitterbug Contests" on
the famed thoroughfare. Mac Harris, "King of the Gamblers," strutted
down Beale in a cutaway coat, striped trousers, a wide felt hat,
sporting a twisted mustache, a beard, and a cane. Jimmy Turpin ran the
Old Monarch gambling joint. During the early 1880s, Lymus Wallace
operated a saloon at 117 Beale Street. George Jackson opened the first
black drugstore on Beale by 1893. Around 1903 Lucie E. Campbell
(1885-1963), Tennessee's famous writer of gospel songs and music
pageants, organized a group of Beale Street musicians into the Music
Club. Bert Roddy (1886-1963) and Robert Lewis Jr. opened the Iroquois
Cafe across from Church Park. Roddy was the first president of the
Memphis branch of the NAACP. In 1917 Beale Street's African American
businessmen included William Burrows (contractor), George R. Jackson
(pharmacist), L. J. Searcy (real estate broker), Paul Sneed
(bookkeeper), A. F. Ward (cashier), and C. A. Terrell (physician).
Church's Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Company was also on Beale.
During the Great Depression, owners of the secondhand clothing stores on
Beale stood on the sidewalks and enticed customers inside to buy coats
for $1.95 and dresses for twenty-five cents. Before his exile to Chicago
during the 1940's, Elmer Atkinson, a political ally to Church Jr.,
operated his Beale Street Cafe. By the 1960's pawn shops, clothing
stores, movie theaters, nightclubs, restaurants, and backstreet
apartments filled Beale Street. Blues singer B. B. King and gospel
singer Mahalia Jackson, among others, performed in Church's Auditorium.
There also the annual Negro Cotton Carnival ("Cotton Makers' Jubilee")
and parade were held.
After the riots of 1968 Beale Street and the
downtown area began to decline. Businessmen and developers shifted
their center of operations to East Memphis. In 1969 the city undertook
urban renewal projects, including Beale Street I and Beale Street II,
which erased the area's housing, demolished 474 buildings, and placed a
block-wide barrier of empty lots and parking spaces between African
Americans and Beale Street. This project left a thin commercial (blue
light) district between Second and Fourth Avenues, where African
American businesses were forced out through condemnation of buildings
and high property resale prices. The Memphis Press-Scimitar (June 10,
1979) declared the "Urban renewal destroyed Beale Street." In 1979 a
preservation and neighborhood revitalization movement emerged too late
to save the Beale Street local African Americans had known.
Beale
Street became a National Historic Landmark historic district, with
businesses reopened to attract tourists. Beale Street remained home to
several African American institutions, however, including Church Park,
the Beale Street Baptist Church, the R. Q. Venson Center for the
Elderly, the Mohammed Ali Movie Theater, and the main branch of
Tri-State Bank, among a few others. The Beale Street Baptist Church,
isolated by vacant lots at the far end of the street and outside the
Beale Street historic district, was listed individually in the National
Register of Historic Places. Although the auditorium no longer exists,
Church Park was placed on the National Register in 1994 and became part
of the Beale Street historic district.
Source: tennesseeencyclopedia.net
Source: mamarocks.com
