Notable Black Memphians By Miriam DeCosta-Willis

Three years later, two undertakers established the Fraternal Bank and Trust Company, which merged with Solvent in 1926 to form Solvent-Fraternal Bank, but it failed just before the Depression. Another important financial institution was founded in the Beale Street area. In 1920, Dr. J. E. Walker, a physician and insurance executive, moved Mississippi Life Insurance Company from Indianola, Mississippi to Memphis, with headquarters on Hernando Street, near Beale. When the company closed, he founded Universal Life Insurance Company at the same location, in 1923. Two years later, he relocated the company to a two-story brick building on Hernando, and, in 1940, moved Universal to a new $500,000 building at 408 Linden. In 1946, Dr. Walker and his son, A. Maceo Walker, founded Tri-State Bank of Memphis, located at 392 Beale Street on the site of the failed Solvent-Fraternal Bank.

Many Black-owned businesses, including Jackson’s Drug Store, the Gillis Brothers’ Hotel, Hooks Brothers Photographers, and Tri-State Casket & Coffin Company, were located in the Beale Street area. The barbershops, florists, print shops, and restaurants, such as the Iroquois Café and Johnny Mill’s Barbecue Shack, drew customers to Beale. One of the most astute businesswomen of the period was Emma Currin Barbee Wilburn, who opened the Emma Wilburn Funeral Home in 1914, and bought the 75-acre New Park Cemetery in 1933. In 1919, businessman Bert M. Roddy founded the first chain of Black-owned grocery stores in Memphis—Roddy’s Citizens’ Co-operative Stores—with headquarters on Beale, and, within a year, he had fifteen stores, a fleet of trucks, and 9,000 investors. Although Roddy’s stores failed in 1922, another business venture emerged in that decade: Negro baseball. In the early 1920s, mortician Robert S. Lewis built Lewis Park, the first baseball park in the country owned and operated by Blacks, and he organized the Memphis Red Sox, the first Black professional baseball team in the city. In 1927, the four Martin brothers—physician W. S., pharmacist J. B., physician A. T., and dentist B. B.—bought the team and the park, which they renamed Martin Stadium. Three of the brothers also built Martin Medical Building on South Third near Beale, where they had offices, a restaurant, and barbershop.