| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Shifting from racial militancy to accomodationism, the controversial Griggs wrote didactic novels, such as Imperium in Imperio and The Hindered Hand. The most acclaimed creative writer was George W. Lee, known as the “Boswell of Beale Street,” whose first novel, Beale Street, Where the Blues Began (1934) became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection. He published another novel, River George (1937) and a collection of short stories, Beale Street Sundown (1942).
George W. Lee was also a political leader, insurance executive, and one of the most important men on Beale Street in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Manager of the local branch of Atlanta Life Insurance Company, he was a leader in Memphis’s Black Republican organization, the Lincoln League, and he was a major player in national politics for over twenty years. Through the buck and the ballot, Lee followed in the footsteps of such Race Men and Women as Ed Shaw, Ida B. Wells, B. F. Booth, Julia Hooks, Bert Roddy, and Bob Church, who created political and civil rights organizations to attack segregation and to uplift their people.
In 1905, nine years after the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for legal segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Memphis streetcars were segregated. Attorneys J. T. Settle and B. F. Booth challenged the Jim Crow law, in 1905, by arguing—unsuccessfully—before the Tennessee Supreme Court that segregated streetcars were illegal. In spite of segregation, the colored citizens of Memphis—who now made up 49% of the population—reacted by creating their own institutions: banks, parks, schools, hospitals, colleges, and insurance companies. They also exerted pressure on the city through their dollars, their votes, and their organizations. Although most African Americans of the period supported the Republican Party, from 1909 to 1954 the city was controlled by Democrat E. H. “Boss” Crump, who patronized Blacks to obtain their votes. (Allegedly, he distributed watermelons on election day, and he also persuaded Handy to write his campaign song, “Mr. Crump.”) In 1911, Roddy, H. H. Pace, and Bob Church founded the Colored Citizens Association, which led a registration drive and lobbied to obtain park facilities, paved streets, and sprinkling service from city government.