The Memphis riot grew out of the tensions that existed between the Irish-American and African-American workers just after the war. An economically vibrant port city on the Mississippi River, Memphis was also a rowdy, crime-ridden, corrupt place. From 1861 to 1866, Memphis experienced a tremendous rise in its black population, including African-American soldiers. The soldiers were stationed in Fort Pickering, alongside former contraband camps, which by 1866 were transformed into largely black neighborhoods. The influx of black people meant job competition with the large Irish immigrant population of Memphis, a source of steady and growing resentment for the latter group.
Reconstruction policy added to the uneasy atmosphere. Federal troops were still in the city. An unrepentant white citizenry despised Freedmen’s Bureau agents and teachers. The prewar Memphis governing class was stripped of its power, and Confederate veterans were denied the vote. The Irish dominated the polls and controlled all city offices, including the mayorship, the board of aldermen, and the police and fire departments. There were frequent clashes between the Irish police and freedmen in south Memphis, where most of the African Americans lived in disease-ridden shanties. Newspapers played an important role in worsening an already bad situation by printing inflammatory and racist denunciations of the newly freed African Americans: “We are to have the black flesh of the Negro crammed down our throats,” ran one such editorial.
On April 30, four policemen got into a fight with a group of recently discharged black soldiers. After a night of drinking, the soldiers roamed the streets shooting their guns, sparking fear and anger among white people. The next day, a collision between two delivery wagons attracted the attention of a large crowd of soldiers and other black men, who surged forth against the police. Soon, the situation spiraled out of control, and what little professional discipline the Memphis police previously exhibited was gone. The mayor was too drunk, and the sheriff too weak, to organize a restraining posse. Mobs of white people, including policemen and firemen, searched out and attacked helpless African Americans. What followed was a tragic race riot in which 46 black people and two white people were killed, five black women raped, and 80 people wounded. Property damage was estimated at $130,000, and black churches, schools, and homes were looted, destroyed, and burned. Order was restored when federal troops took control of the city.
The Memphis riot had national importance. It demonstrated to the North that the civil authorities in the South would not even minimally protect black freedom. This cast a bad light on President Andrew Johnson’s very lenient Reconstruction program and gave power to the Radical Republicans in Congress, who wanted a harsher policy toward the South.
See also New Orleans, Louisiana, riot.
Further reading: George C. Rable, There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984).
World History
