| Chapter : | Introduction |
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By 1883, when the two-year legislative terms of Cassels and Norris ended, Black political power was stifled through the erosion of voting rights, threats of violence, and economic intimidation.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the diminution of Black political power and civil rights in Memphis was buttressed by legal segregation. In its infamous 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court upheld the policy of “separate but equal” facilities on railroad cars and, thus, paved the way for legal segregation throughout the South.
Building a Community and Shaping a History: 1900 to 1950
By the early 1900s, Beale Street had become the cultural, religious, and business center of Memphis’s Black community. The street is perhaps best known as a cultural mecca, the place where W. C. Handy, Gus Cannon, and Memphis Minnie got their start. Handy, who moved to Memphis in 1908, is credited with using his formal training to transcribe rural folk music—gut-bucket blues and field hollers—into blues compositions such as “Beale Street Blues,” which he wrote at Pee Wee’s Club on Beale. The rural folk tradition is represented by banjo player Gus Cannon, who organized jug bands, such as Gus Cannon and the Jug Stompers. The self-taught composer of “Walk Right In” and “Come on Down to My House,” blew on a jug top to make blues music with a country sound. Lizzie Douglas, known as Memphis Minnie, began playing on Beale by age fourteen and became the reigning blues queen of the 1920s, with compositions such as “Bumble Bee Blues” and “Dirty Mother For You.” These artists, as well as Furry Lewis and Memphis Slim, played in Beale Street’s saloons, nightclubs, and gambling joints—places like the Monarch Club, Ashford’s Saloon, and the Lincoln Theater, the first Black-owned club. In the 1930s, Ethyl Venson and her husband founded the Cotton Makers’ Jubilee and, in the 1940s, Nat D. Williams organized Amateur Nights and Midnight Rambles at the Palace Theater; these events became venues for Black music and other cultural forms.