1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park

For three days in May 1866, white mobs attacked the Black neighborhoods of South Memphis, where freed people and the families of Black soldiers lived near Fort Pickering. It began as a clash between the mostly Irish city police and Black soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, who had just been mustered out. Police officers and firemen joined the mobs. Forty-six Black people and two white people died, and by the congressional count the mobs burned 91 houses, four churches and a dozen schools.

The dead and the injured had names. Lucy Tibbs, twenty-four and pregnant, was robbed and raped when a mob broke into her home. Harriet Armour was raped by intruders. Shadrach Garrett, gravely ill, was taken from his house and shot while his wife watched. Jackson Godall, a drayman, was beaten and shot on his way to bring dinner to his sick wife. Rachel Hatcher, a girl, was killed trying to save a neighbor from a burning house. No one was ever prosecuted.

The marker stands in Army Park, about a block from the National Civil Rights Museum. The Memphis NAACP paid for it, and it went up in 2016, after the Tennessee Historical Commission pressed to put "race riot" at the head of a state marker and the NAACP withdrew that application. A House committee heard about 170 witnesses that summer, and the outrage over Memphis and New Orleans helped carry the Fourteenth Amendment, which Tennessee ratified in July. Plan ten minutes here, and read it all.