Memphis moves you! - includes recommended reading and visitor information

American Visions, August-Sept, 1994 by Henry Chase

As the 20th century opened - and W.C. Handy, the "Father of the Blues," arrived in the Mississippi River port - Memphis was raw, vibrant and seductive, and nowhere more so than on Beale Street, the heart of the African-American quarter. Beale Street swarmed with gamblers, loggers, boatmen and the city's respectable-by-day white elite. It also swarmed with musicians. Handy settled here in 1912 and quickly gave the United States its first original musical genre, the blues.

("Another night," Handy once explained, "my brother and I sat in a Beale Street barber shop till midnight. |When will you close up?' Charlie asked, yawning and stretching his arms. |Humph?' the barber answered, surprised. |I never dose up till somebody gets killed.' That was my cue to write the |Beale Street Blues."')

The city and the street have long since risen above their raucous past - but the musicians remain, as does Beale's appeal. Today, it's B.B. King and Lucille who pack them into B.B. King's Blues Club at night, while by day, the Beale Street Blues Museum, the W.C. Handy Home and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame pull people off Memphis' streets. The Hall of Fame prominently honors Sam Phillips (and his Sun Studio), who helped bring King, Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters to the attention of mainstream America and then virtually started the crossover of black music into mainstream consciousness by producing the wild elixir of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and rock |n' roll.

Memphis' black past - which includes the heroic anti-lynching effort of the 19th-century black journalist Ida B. Wells and the 20th - century martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. - and its present appeal rest on a much more profound foundation than music alone. No two people know this better than Elaine Lee Turner and Joan Lee-Nelson. The two sisters are entering their second decade operating Heritage Tours, a Memphis firm specializing in tours of black historical sites (see "Black Operators in Heritage Touring," American Visions, April/May 1994).

When people ask us why we started the tours," explains Lee-Nelson, "we can say, |In remembrance of Dr. King and the movement,' but actually it was because we grew up knowing our family history right down to the name of our ancestor who was stolen from Africa in the early 1840s. The history has always been a part of us."

Whether the visitor chooses to be shepherded on a 30-site, 2 1/2-hour bus tour of Memphis' black past by these sisters or undertakes a self-guided exploration of the town, Memphis has several landmarks of significance.

A quarter of a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of Memphis' Lorraine Motel by one in a long line of white supremacists who believed that the African-American quest for complete equality could be forestalled by terror. Though his status afforded him privilege unavailable to most of his fellow African Americans, in death King fully shared the Southern black experience of resistance to white supremacy.

Today, the story of this resistance in the 1950s and |60s, from the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through King's martyrdom in 1968, is the centerpiece of Memphis' National Civil Rights Museum, which is erected on the site of the motel where King was assassinated. From the courts to the streets, the decisive civil rights epoch is captured through vignettes, with exhibits highlighting the Brown case; the attempt to prevent school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark.; the Montgomery. us boycott; the lunch-counter sit-ins; the Freedom Rides; the battle to integrate the University of Mississippi; the March on Washington; and black Birmingham, Ala.'s battle with Bull Connor. The emotional climax of the museum's effort "never to forget" is rooms 306 and 307 of the Lorraine Motel. Here, King's room can be viewed as it was on the day he closed its door and met his fate.

Resistance in an earlier era has also left an imprint on Memphis. Visitors to the First Baptist Beale Street Church walk in the footsteps of the militant Ida B. Wells, who edited and published the Free Speech newspaper out of its basement. In 1889, during Wells' heyday in Memphis, the church housed the largest black Baptist congregation in America - though its size could not prevent a white mob, incensed at her fiery attacks on lynching, from driving Wells out of the city and destroying her press.

Not far away is the Burkle estate, which is now known as Slave Haven, in commemoration of its role as an Underground Railroad station. The Gemian immigrant Jacob Burkle housed runaways in his cellar - sometimes for months at a time - before they made their way via a tunnel to the Mississippi River, where they boarded boats that carried them to the Ohio River and then into free Illinois.

LeMoyne-Owen College, one of the South's oldest historically black colleges, also has a tale to tell of Memphis' past. The school's history dates back to the Union capture of the city in 1862. Shortly thereafter, American Missionary Association (AMA) activists arrived to begin educating the 16,000 slaves who had swarmed into the city in search of freedom, food and employment. By 1866, the AMA was teaching 2,000 pupils in schools and black churches. Then a minor collision between two carriages, one driven by a black man and the other, by a white (the former arrested and the latter not), sparked several days of racial rioting. After a crowd of recently discharged black Civil War veterans attempted to prevent the arrest, white mobs rampaged through the city's black shantytown, killing about 50 people and burning black churches and schools.