Notable Black Memphians By Miriam DeCosta-Willis

Many professional men and women, including at least sixteen lawyers, dentists, and doctors, had offices on the famous thoroughfare; among them were Dr. Fannie Kneeland, a pioneering woman physician; Dr. C. A. Terrell, founder of Terrell-Patterson Infirmary; and Dr. J. C. Hairston, who established Hairston Hospital. In 1910, Dr. William S. Martin and Dr. John T. Wilson leased land to build a 35-bed hospital, Collins Chapel Hospital and Old Folks Home at 418 Ashland, which was expanded to 53 beds in 1928. Most of Memphis’s early physicians graduated from Meharry Medical College, but, in 1907, Dr. Miles V. Lynk relocated to Memphis the University of West Tennessee, which he had founded in Jackson, Tennessee in 1900. The university trained legal and medical professionals from several states and six countries; it also educated many Black Memphis physicians, including Benjamin F. McCleave, William O. Speight, and Ransom Q. Venson. Dr. Lynk also published the first medical journal in the country, co-founded the National Medical Association, published a magazine, founded a publishing house, and wrote three books, including an autobiography, Sixty Years of Medicine or the Life and Times of Dr. Miles V. Lynk (1930).

Through their autobiographies, biographies, and histories, Black Memphians began to tell their own stories in the first quarter of the twentieth century. One of the most important of these early writers was G. P. Hamilton, principal of Memphis’s first public high school, whose books—The Bright Side of Memphis (1908) and Beacon Lights of the Race (1911)—record local and national history through biographies and photographs. He also wrote a short history of Booker T. Washington High School. T. O. Fuller published four books, including an autobiography and two church histories, but his most important work is the Pictorial History of the American Negro (1933), a monumental study of African American history, illuminated with more than 400 photographs. The most prolific writer was Sutton E. Griggs, pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church, who published eighteen books between 1899 and 1929, and who is regarded as one of the most important writers to predate the New Negro movement of the 1920s.