From An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee,

edited by Aram Goudsouzian and Charles W. McKinney Jr.

Richard Wright was walking down Beale Street in a tattered overcoat, lugging a cardboard suitcase. It was a
cold, gusty Sunday morning in November. He was seventeen years old, a migrant from Mississippi. Leery of
sordid tales about Memphis, he had strapped all his cash to his body, even if all that sin was just a scent in the
air, a remnant of Saturday night carousing.

Beale Street was famous for its con men and crap games, its saloons and scamps, its pickpockets and
prostitutes. It was also the place where W. C. Handy wrote “Memphis Blues” and “St. Louis Blues,” launching
a new American musical tradition. It was the place where Robert Church Sr. laid the foundation for his
economic empire, becoming the nation’s first black millionaire, and where Robert Church Jr. built a political
machine, leveraging black votes for influence with the city’s “boss,” E. H. Crump. It was the place where Ida
B. Wells published her crusading newspaper Memphis Free Speech, and where a mob deposited the severed
head of a black lynching victim named Ell Persons. Beale Street condensed the entire African American
experience into a few blocks of bars, bordellos, shops, and offices.

Wright had lived in Memphis once before, arriving with his family in 1911, when he was just three. In his
memoir Black Boy, he described this initial stint as a baptism in depravity. He wrote of murdering a kitten, of
fighting for his grocery money against a band of tough boys, of entertaining saloon crowds by getting drunk.
His father, a victim of Beale Street’s temptations, abandoned the family. His mother, unable to feed her kids,
sent them to an orphanage. When he was eight or nine, she gathered them again and headed for Elaine,
Arkansas, another stop along the lower Mississippi River, part of a long wandering loop in search of a better
life.

When Wright returned in 1925, Memphis was a center of southern industry, with about 160,000 residents, one-
third of whom were black. The city’s downtown boasted the new twelve-story Peabody Hotel and impressive
edifices such as Lowenstein’s Department Store, the Cotton Exchange Building, and the Union Planter Bank
Building. If Memphis had a reputation as the murder capital of America, it was also a land of opportunity,
drawing migrants from the rural plantations of the Mississippi Delta. Wright soon found respectable lodgings
and a decent job at an optical company.

For Wright, though, Memphis was a cruel riddle. Jim Crow asked terrible questions that had no good answers.
Surviving the South meant hiding behind a mask. White people could never know your frustrations, your fears,
your aspirations, or your intelligence. At the optical company, the white men told Wright that another young
man wanted to kill him, and they told the other worker the same thing—they just wanted to see two black boys
fight. That racism, and the corresponding poverty, poisoned his fellow blacks. The elevator operator at the
company, an otherwise smart and proud man named Shorty, would shuck, jive, and let white people kick him
in the rump for a quarter, rationalizing that “my ass is tough and quarters is scarce.”

Reading was Wright’s salvation, his gateway to a wider world. One day he read an editorial in the Commercial
Appeal that chastised H. L. Mencken. He grew curious. Who was this prickly social critic, and how had he
inflamed these white southerners? Satisfying his curiosity meant wearing another mask. To be allowed to
check out books from the Memphis Public Library, Wright forged a note from a white man: Dear Madam:
Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken? He had to leave the South. If he
accepted his inferior station, he would hate himself. If he succumbed to booze and sex, he would be just like
his father. If he turned into an angry revolutionary, the racists would kill him. He read Mencken and then
Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, and although they described essentially alien
worlds, “these writers seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived in
it.” And so in 1927 Richard Wright boarded a train for Chicago. Those novels and essays had served as an
inspiration, like “a tinge of warmth from an unseen light.”
But Wright could not see the lights that shone in Memphis. His zeal to migrate north blinded him to the
various ways African Americans had shaped the politics and culture of this city at the crossroads, sitting atop a
Mississippi River bluff, with the fertile and oppressive Delta fanning to its south. Black Memphians found
salvation and independence in churches. They did the courageous and calculated work of political organizing.
They made music that became a seminal American art form with global impact. And they forged a brilliant,
complicated, dynamic movement for freedom. Wright could see only the shadow that racial oppression cast
over this variegated history; he could not see the ways in which black people survived, accommodated,
subverted, battled, and wrestled with the persistence of racial subordination. Throughout these struggles, black
Memphians forged stories as individuals and as a people.

This book tells some of the stories of those “unseen lights.”

“Something is happening in Memphis,” intoned Martin Luther King. “Something is happening in our world.”
Outside, the skies were filled with ominous rumbles of thunder, crackling lightning, and violent sheets of rain,
but inside Mason Temple, he recalled great periods in human history, from the biblical Exodus through
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural speech. Despite the crises of the present time, he cherished the moment.
Throughout the world, people were yearning to be free. “I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this
period to see what is unfolding,” he said. “And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.”

The date was April 3, 1968, and this was King’s final speech. He had come to support the city’s striking
sanitation workers. Their struggle reflected the larger plight of black people in Memphis and beyond. King
used the occasion to remind the packed church about sacrificing for the common good, about using their
economic leverage, and about maintaining the discipline of nonviolence. He spoke, too, of the threats on his
life—“but it doesn’t really matter to me, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.” Even if he did not complete
the journey himself, his people would get to the Promised Land.

King was shot and killed the next day. The assassination rocked the nation and hung like a gloomy cloud over
Memphis. With some justification, that singular tragedy dominates the memory of the city’s civil rights
struggle—in one way or another, most history books on race in Memphis revolve around 1968. That moment
in time was further memorialized with the construction of the National Civil Rights Museum, a monument
erected at the Lorraine Motel, the site of the killing. Yet this iconic moment rested on an expansive history of
black struggles for freedom—struggles that were born in the dawn of freedom and would continue long after
King’s death. An Unseen Light provides context for understanding this rich history of African Americans in
Memphis, beyond King’s murder. It is not a comprehensive history, but it includes intriguing stories, profiles
of compelling people, and portraits of a city that suggest both remarkable progress and unfinished work. And
as we look back, we hope the essays in this book provide some lessons to carry us forward.

While it has been long recognized as a major epicenter of black life, history, and culture, Memphis remains
one of the more underresearched (or “unseen”) major cities in the United States. This unfortunate reality belies
a rich history worthy of critical intellectual scrutiny. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century,
Memphis became the most populated—and most vibrant—metropolitan area for black people in the entire
Mid-South region. The congregation of recently freed African Americans led to the development of a civic,
political, cultural, religious, and economic universe whose impact reverberated far beyond the boundaries of
the city’s black communities. In the crucible of segregation, African Americans in Memphis took on the task
of reshaping the city—and the nation—to better conform to the principles of equality. They were creating a
“light” of their own in the Bluff City.

For decades, the population of Memphis surpassed that of other New South cities such as Atlanta, Richmond,
and Birmingham; only New Orleans counted a larger population among Mid-South and Deep South cities.
Blacks in Memphis rightly regarded northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, DC, as their
city’s cultural, economic, and political peers. When it came time to locate the headquarters of the largest black
evangelical denomination in the country—the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)—Charles Mason built its
base of operations in Memphis. Scores of black-owned businesses, such as banks and insurance companies,
anchored the economic vitality of the city. Beale Street, the iconic center of black culture, nurtured generations
of musicians and attracted a spectacular array of talent that included Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, B. B. King,
Howlin’ Wolf, Carla Thomas, and Isaac Hayes. The city’s African American activists cultivated one of the
nation’s largest and most active chapters of the NAACP.

Blacks in Memphis also nurtured a large constellation of civic and community organizations. Rooted in
religious, fraternal, civic, and political networks, this wide assortment of black women and men formed
groups, worked together, contended for space and recognition, and ultimately drove momentum in the effort to
attain racial equality. While grappling with the constraints of gender, class, and race, labor activists carved out
a space for union activity that helped shape the economic, social, and racial contours of the city. This vibrant
movement for justice spanned the twentieth century.

In the past few decades, historians have crafted a body of work that has extended and improved our collective
understanding of the African American pursuit of equality in the nation’s urban centers. Scholars in fields such
as politics, culture, labor, modernity, activism, and internationalism have illuminated the lives of black folks.
Much of this work has been geographically specific, tending to focus on major cities with large black
populations. These cities have much to tell us about the inner workings of black communities, how those
communities made sense of the world around them, and how they constructed collective movements for
freedom and equality. Recent works on New York, Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and a few
other cities perform crucial work in this regard.

It is our hope that An Unseen Light will help situate Memphis alongside these other cities in the critical
conversation about the nation’s African American experience. It builds on the work of a generation of
historians of Memphis, many of whom are contributors to this volume. They have enriched, deepened, and
complicated our understanding of the city by employing many of the lenses that inform how historians
approach the larger black freedom struggle: an emphasis on a “long civil rights movement,” an appreciation for
the centrality of women and gender, a focus on local movements and grassroots activism, an examination of
the interplay between politics and culture, and a determination to avoid a triumphalist narrative that wraps
America’s history of racial inequality in a tidy box. This book brings together their perspectives.

“The issue is injustice,” continued Martin Luther King in that final speech at Mason Temple. He was talking
about the striking sanitation workers, but he was also talking about the fight for a greater freedom. Yes, he
called for more nonviolent marches, but he also implored black Memphians to boycott the goods of companies
that discriminated against black workers. He called for people to buy their policies from black-owned
insurance companies, to deposit their money in the black-owned Tri-State Bank. And he called for a
reorientation of national priorities. “God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here and
His children who can’t eat three square meals a day,” he said. “It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem,
but one day God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the
new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee.”

Taken together, the essays in this volume reveal the determination of African Americans to craft a new
Memphis. That struggle spanned centuries, and it is ongoing. It reminds us that while Memphis is still scarred
by King’s assassination, it is more deeply haunted by its failure to heed King’s call for true equality.