"Civil Wrongs: Reflections on a Massacre" is a collaboration between WKNO-FM 91.1 and the University of Memphis' Institute for Public Service Reporting. For a deeper dive into this history, a 4-part podcast was written by the students in this story about the Memphis Massacre and its connection to some current events.
TRANSCRIPT OF PART 1:
CHRISTOPHER BLANK: It sounds like a typical assignment for a seasoned journalist: find some interesting piece of Memphis history, maybe something that has never really been explored and then make a podcast about it.
That's exactly what Laura Faith Kebede intended back in January when she started teaching her first journalism class at the University of Memphis. She's with the Institute for Public Service Reporting.
Hi Laura good to see you.
LAURA KEBEDE: You too.
BLANK: So the podcast is finished.
KEBEDE: Yes, it was definitely a learning experience for everyone.
BLANK: Now, last year we worked together on a series for WKNO called "Civil Wrongs" and the concept is that some historical injustices still reverberate today. How did you come up with the theme for this second round?
KEBEDE: Well, you know, Memphis is kind of synonymous with civil rights, but most people think of it as it all happened in the 1960s. You think of segregation and Martin Luther King Jr. But very few people know about what we call the Memphis Massacre, which happened right after the Civil War.
BLANK: That's going way back.
KEBEDE: Yes, but in so many ways, we're still living the outcomes of this history.
BLANK: Well Laura, I just so happen to have some brand new podcast music by Andrew J. Crutcher who worked with us last time. I wonder: what if we did a little version of our own podcast right here?
KEBEDE: Let's do it.
BLANK: Okay here goes.
[Music]
I guess I'll do the intro... This is is "Civil Wrongs" a three-part story by WKNO and the Institute for Public Service Reporting. Today, Part 1: the Memphis Massacre and why it still matters.
KEBEDE: Here at South Main Street and G.E. Patterson, there's history on every corner: Central Station, The Arcade—the oldest restaurant in the city, the famous dive bar Earnestine and Hazel's. All a block away from the Lorraine Motel and the balcony where Dr. King was killed.
Here comes the trolley...
If you close your eyes and tune out the cars and jukeboxes, it's still hard to imagine that this was once a site of mass carnage — buildings on fire, bodies in the streets.
In 1866, a year after the Civil War, there was a Union Army fort just down the street. It was made up mostly of black soldiers. Around it: a growing Community full of recently emancipated people. Let's think of it as one of Memphis's first black neighborhoods, with churches, schools, homes. So how does all this promise — this hopefulness — turn into a nightmare of murder, arson, theft, rape and police brutality?
My class is in room 202 in the University of Memphis's journalism building. I've got computers, a projector, a whiteboard and 13 undergraduate students. Greta Hullman is one of three from Germany.
GRETA HOLMAN: I was really looking for classes that would teach me about this country and its history.
KEBEDE: Then there were students like Cal Tuttle from Baltimore, here because the class he wanted was canceled.
CAL TUTTLE: This was the only option left.
KEBEDE: No offense, he adds. I also had some locals. Turner Schneider is among the majority who tell me a version of this:
TURNER SCHNIDER: I've lived in Memphis my whole life and I've never heard of the Memphis Massacre until this semester, so...
KEBEDE: So in a lot of ways, we really are starting from scratch.
There are a few reasons the Memphis Massacre had been largely forgotten and certainly not taught in schools. For one, it had a different name in documents and even on a historic marker. It was called the "Memphis Race Riots of 1866," and if that suggests Black people destroying property to you, that was the intention.
BRYAN STEVENSON: We have tolerated narratives that are not factually accurate.
KEBEDE: That's Bryan Stevenson with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama talking with WKNO back in 2016 on the 150th anniversary of the Massacre.
STEVENSON: Until we change the landscape with these markers and with these images and with a new iconography, we're going to be living in a space that is compromised by the absence of truth.
KEBEDE: He and others have been working to set records straight across the South. The truth of what happened got a boost by the first major book on the subject written in 2013 by the late University of Tennessee history professor Stephen V. Ash. He put the word "massacre" in the title.
So why emphasize Massacre?
On April 30th 1866, the Union Army was shutting down its operations here. Black soldiers were once again civilians. On this day a group of veterans got into a brief dispute with the members of the city's Irish police force. But without government backing, long-simmering tensions boiled over the next day.
Here's how Ash, speaking at a Rhodes College lecture, described what happened:
STEPHEN V. ASH: Mobs of white men armed with pistols and clubs formed up spontaneously Downtown, marched down to South Memphis and began shooting and beating Black people indiscriminately. Men, women and children: everyone they spotted on the street. Just shooting them down, or clubbing them.
Over the next 36 hours, other mobs repeatedly returned to the Black section of town and attacked Blacks on the streets, in their homes and set fires. Almost all the rioters were working-class Irishmen, including many policemen. The police were, in fact, basically the leaders, if you can call them that, of these mobs.
CHRISTOPHER BLANK: I remember, Laura, that the Tennessee Historical Commission would not put their stamp of approval on a marker here unless the words "race riot" were kept in the heading of it.
KEBEDE: Right? And this was the same time that they were trying to keep Memphis from taking down a statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. And five years later, there's still a lot of questions in education about whether you can even talk about these things at all in public schools.
BLANK: How so?
KEBEDE: Well, in 2021, state lawmakers passed a bill banning the teaching of certain divisive concepts, and one of those concepts is that racism is systemic. That it's baked into American history. Here's what governor Bill Lee said at the time:
TENNESSEE GOV. BILL LEE: What I'm most concerned about is that our education system reminds students that history is important, civics is important, American exceptionalism is important, and that political commentary is not important when teaching our children. That's what this bill will accomplish.
BLANK: Were you worried that a journalism class about the Memphis Massacre might be seen as one of those divisive concepts?
KEBEDE: Yes, and even more so 10 days into the semester.
[Sounds of news coverage surrounding the release of video and audio footage from the beating of Tyre Nichols.]
KEBEDE: I mean, here we are studying this event that happened 150 years ago, Memphis police exacting mob violence against Black people, and now it was happening again.
If that's not systemic, what do we call it?
And if it is systemic, how do we talk about it in schools or in a podcast for that matter?
BLANK: I've been talking with Laura Faith Kebede. This "Civil Wrongs" conversation with the Institute for Public Service Reporting continues tomorrow (June 14, 2023) as even more connections emerge between past and present.