| Chapter : | Introduction |
|
|
The citizens worked to strengthen their community. They built churches: Collins Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in 1859; Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded by Black Union soldiers during the Civil War; and Morris Henderson’s First Church (Beale Street Baptist Church) was erected around 1866. They formed fraternal organizations, such as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Daughters of Zion, and Independent Pole Bearers. They organized welfare societies, including the Colored Benevolent Society and the Old Folks and Orphans Home, founded by Julia Hooks in 1891. When the yellow fever epidemic decimated the city in the 1870s and the city had to relinquish its charter, colored regiments, such as the Zouaves and the McClellen Guards, secured property and buried the dead.
They also found it necessary to protect themselves from the racist backlash against their Reconstruction-era rights, and from the political reverses that heralded the end of Reconstruction. To secure their civil rights, community activists organized the Negro Mutual Protection Association and the Committee for Civil Rights. To raise social and political consciousness, Edward Shaw started the Memphis Weekly Planet and Ida B. Wells became part owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, a newspaper founded by Taylor Nightingale. When the Fifteenth Amendment gave Black men the right to vote in 1869, city leaders such as Shaw and Frederick Savage became active in Republican politics and ran for public office, gaining seats on the school board, city council, and state legislature. In the 1880s, Memphians Thomas F. Cassels and Isham F. Norris, both Republicans, served in the Tennessee General Assembly, where they lobbied against repressive legislation. In 1881, Isham introduced a bill to outlaw discrimination on the railroads, fought against racial discrimination in public facilities, worked to improve education for Blacks, and tried to revoke the ban on interracial marriage. Ironically, 1881 was the year in which Tennessee passed its first Jim Crow law mandating segregation on the railroads. Two years later, Ida B. Wells filed suit against the railroad after being forcibly dragged from the first-class car.