| Chapter : | Introduction |
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The U.S. Civil Rights Bill was passed in 1866, and, in 1868, the Tennessee General Assembly ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship, equal protection under the law, and due process to colored citizens.
During this period, two militant figures emerged in Memphis to lead the struggle for civil rights and to protest the erosion of those rights in the post-Reconstruction era. Edward Shaw and Ida B. Wells epitomize, through their efforts, the economic, political, and social struggle that Black leaders undertook to elevate their community after the devastating experience of slavery. Shaw was born free in Kentucky and, in 1867, moved to Memphis, where he became a fearless and outspoken editor, businessman, and city official who defied segregation on the railroad and returned the fire of the Ku Klux Klan. After running for the Shelby County Commission and the U.S. Congress, he was finally elected to the Memphis City Council in 1872. Wells was born a slave in Mississippi and, in 1884, moved to Memphis, where she became a public school teacher and fiery journalist. After the lynching of three Black Memphis grocers in 1892, she launched an international antilynching campaign, and she urged African Americans to leave Memphis, which they did by the droves. This exodus of Blacks from the city initiated the Great Migration of Memphians to the West and North, a movement that would continue well into the 1930s.
The lives of Wells and Shaw, as well as of other nineteenth-century notables, are a testament to the emergence of a Black consciousness movement in Memphis. Between 1860 and 1900, these Memphians built schools and churches, founded newspapers and welfare organizations, opened stores and boarding houses, and became doctors and lawyers, creating a Black working/middle class that would forge a distinctive community. In-migration increased: for example, businessman Robert R. Church and Attorney Benjamin Franklin Booth moved to Memphis from Mississippi; missionary educator Virginia Broughton from Virginia; Attorney Thomas Frank Cassels from Ohio; and music teacher Julia Ann Britton Hooks from Kentucky.