Memphis Massacre
1-3 May 1866South Memphis, Shelby County, TN
White mobs, including much of the city police force, attacked South Memphis for three days, killing 46 Black residents and burning every Black school and church in the district.
Note: Describes rape and mass arson.
A year after the Civil War, South Memphis held thousands of freedpeople, many of them families of Black soldiers mustering out of the Union army at Fort Pickering. On 1 May 1866, after a street altercation between Black veterans and white police officers, white mobs moved into the neighbourhood of South Memphis.
Over three days they shot Black residents, raped Black women, and burned homes, four churches and twelve schools - every Black school in the city. Policemen and firemen were among the mob, and the Irish-American city government did not intervene. Forty-six Black people and two white people were killed. Ninety-one houses were burned.
A congressional committee took testimony from survivors, including women who described being raped, and published it the same year - among the earliest official records of such testimony in the country. The report helped persuade Congress that the former Confederate states could not be trusted to protect freedpeople, and fed directly into the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts. No one in Memphis was prosecuted.
46 Black and 2 white people were killed; 91 houses, 4 churches and 12 schools were burned.
Sources
- Memphis Race Riot of 1866Tennessee Encyclopedia, Tennessee Historical Societytennesseeencyclopedia.net
- Memphis Riots and Massacres, House Report No. 101, 39th CongressUS House of Representatives Select Committee (1866)Survivor testimony taken weeks after the attack, including evidence of rape.