| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Better educated than their forbears, they achieved many “firsts”: Dr. Georgia E. L. Patton finished Meharry Medical College and became the first Black woman licensed to practice medicine in Tennessee; Virginia Broughton, a graduate of Fisk University, is believed to be the first African American woman in the South to earn a college degree; and Thomas F. Cassels, an Oberlin graduate, was the first African American lawyer to practice in Memphis. Education was a high priority for these professionals, who enrolled their children in the Hooks Cottage School, founded by Julia Hooks, or in LeMoyne Normal School, founded in the 1860s by the American Missionary Association to educate former slaves. Others, such as property owner Robert R. Church, who was born a slave but became one the South’s wealthiest Blacks, sent his children to schools in Ohio. The community had to rebuild after the destruction of twelve colored schools in the riot of 1866, but by 1885, when Ida B. Wells joined the Clay Street School faculty, the city had five Black schools and twenty-three Black teachers but no public high school until the end of the century.
Men and women moved to Memphis not only to acquire an education but also to gain greater economic advantages. Although most of the migrants found jobs as laborers (porters, coopers, hackers, draymen, bricklayers, boatmen, and blacksmiths), the more fortunate established grocery stores, saloons, restaurants, barbershops, shoe shops, livery stables, and print shops. Joseph Clouston, who owned a farm, grocery store, barbershop, and downtown property; and Edward Shaw, a lawyer who also had a farm, saloon, and newspaper, were among the incorporators of the Tennessee Colored Banking and Real Estate Association of Memphis. An index of the Black community’s assets is the fact that the Memphis Branch of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank had deposits of $56,755 by the time it closed in 1874. Most Black women worked as domestics, but some owned small businesses, such as hair salons, restaurants, and boarding houses; Mrs. Williams L. Spillman, for example, rented rooms at 15 Wright Avenue, and Louisa Ayers owned a hairdressing establishment at the time of her marriage to Robert R. Church.