No city reflects the tumultuous journey of African-Americans more vividly than Memphis, a Mississippi River port city whose many cultural landmarks inevitably invoke both smiles and tears.
In the years before the Civil War, the city’s economy soared thanks to King Cotton and the backs of slaves that worked the fields for the white landowners. After the war, waves of newly freed African-Americans flocked to Memphis for the rail and river commerce it still enjoyed, despite the race riots and epidemics of Yellow Fever that plagued the city.
In the late 1800s, Robert Church, America’s first southern-born black millionaire began to invest in properties near Beale Avenue. Beale, at the time, was a busy thoroughfare known as a haven for traveling musicians. With Church’s backing, other black-owned endeavors in the area soon began to flourish, including Free Speech and Headlight, a newspaper published by Ida B. Wells. Wells, partnering with Rev. R. Nightingale in 1889, later became the co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The flourishing Beale Avenue even inspired local composer, W.C. Handy, to commemorate it with the bouncy ‘Beale Street Blues’ in 1914.
Today, Beale Avenue is still bouncing with barbecue joints and tourist-friendly nightclubs that continue to pound out the kind of gritty country blues that Elvis Presley and others at Sun Studios eventually molded into a force called Rock & Roll. The Avenue is bursting with the soul-drenched sounds of Stax Records and hometown artists like; Otis Redding, Booker T & The MG’s as well as Isaac Hayes. The Soulsville Museum provides a living soundtrack of a more innocent time wrapped in the welcoming presence of a well-worn Memphis neighborhood.
Ironically, Soulsville is only a few blocks away from the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1986. The National Civil Rights Museum currently occupies the area, in a complex literally wrapped into the Lorraine and two other buildings that played vital roles in King’s assassination. Exhibits tracing the roles of Memphis and Dr. King in the Civil Rights Movement – Dr. King gave his “I’ve Been To The Mountain Top” speech at the Mason Temple the night before – and the legacy of those efforts make for an emotionally compelling visit.
If helping us heal our wounds is one of art’s highest achievements, the Center for Southern Folklore is indeed a place of daily therapy. The Center, just around the corner from the Peabody Hotel and its legendary parading ducks, opened in Memphis in 1972. It’s a low-key storefront place where folk art and roots music blend. Where black and white patrons and players mingle without pretense, paintings on old screen doors, wine bottle sculptures and soulful music make up the décor. In its own colorful way, the CSF makes color irrelevant as it celebrates the best of what the South has to offer.
For more information on Memphis than Graceland, please visit the Beale Street and City of Memphis websites.