7

Bob Church Versus Jim Crow

1862

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

After he swam to freedom in the Mississippi and emerged on the shore of the Union-occupied town of Memphis, Robert Reed Church was first finally a free man, but he also faced starting life over on land. He had a small savings from tips he earned on the boat, but no friends or allies to speak of in town. He decided to seek out his best possible lifeline: his father, Captain Church. He showed up on his father’s doorstep, and Captain Church invited him in. They retreated to the parlor, sat together in armchairs, and talked. Captain Church expressed regret for having turned Robert over to the Confederacy. “I had no choice,” he told him. Robert forgave the captain, who agreed to do what he could to back him in his endeavors in Memphis—without, of course, openly acknowledging that they were father and son.

In his first days as a free man in Memphis, Robert also met a woman named Louisa “Lou” Ayers. She was a former house slave for a prominent white Memphis family and had remained as a servant with them after the Union forces had arrived. Lou had been provided with an education while she was in their service and could read, write, and speak a few words of French. She was seventeen with soft features, skin the color of sand, loosely curled hair pinned in an updo, and deep-set eyes. She was best known for her laugh, which was lilting and infectious and charmed everyone she met, including Robert.

Robert lacked Lou’s formal education and genteel manner. To most who encountered him, he was gruff and spartan, betraying his upbringing as a riverboat slave. Often he spoke only when spoken to and lapsed into broken English. In social situations, however, he was convivial, telling stories and chatting about current events, channeling the southern charms of his father and the businessmen on his boats.

He began to call on Lou often after they met and thought about asking for her hand in marriage. As he was falling in love with her, however, he was nagged by thoughts of his slave wife, Margaret Pico, and their daughter, Laura Church, in New Orleans. In Memphis there was peace, as the colored troops of the Union held control of the city, but elsewhere the Civil War made much of the South a dangerous battlefront, and there was no way he could get to them. He and Lou were falling for each other; perhaps, he thought, the best thing to do would be to move on from Margaret. A few months after they met, he asked Lou to be his wife.

Robert and Lou married in Memphis in 1863, in front of friends of the family, in the yard of a mansion that belonged to the family that owned her. Captain Church attended, and the family that owned Lou purchased her an expensive wedding dress from New York City. A few months after they were married, Lou gave birth to a daughter on September 23, 1863, the day after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. They named her Mary Church, after Captain Church’s wife and daughter.

After Robert became a father for the second time, he was eager to introduce his daughter to his father. He traveled across town to his father’s estate. In Captain Church’s parlor, the old ship commander bounced Robert’s daughter Mary on his knee. “You’ve got a good girl here, Bob,” he told him. “You have to make sure to raise her right.” Captain Church was proud of Robert even if he did not say it aloud. The two shared a bond that could not be openly spoken of; it would be years before Robert would reveal to his own child that Captain Church, his former owner, was her grandfather.

IN 1866, AFTER THE WAR ENDED AND AFRICAN AMERICANS WERE emancipated, Robert traveled to New Orleans to see Margaret Pico and seven-year-old Laura in New Orleans. When he found his former wife, she was married to another man and had given Laura her new husband’s surname: Napier. Robert requested that he be allowed to take Laura to Memphis, where he would pay for her to be put in school. A year later he sent for Laura and had her brought up to Memphis via steamboat. In Tennessee, she lived with Robert, Lou, and Mary and changed her name to Laura Church.

In the months after Emancipation, the Union troops stayed in town to keep the peace. The town was full of Confederate luminaries such as Nathan Bedford Forrest and the ex–Confederate president Jefferson Davis, as well as a population of former slaves. Its streets, made of wood planks, creaked as they were patrolled by a police force made of Confederate veterans; the local government was dominated by rebel-sympathizing Democrats. In many towns in the South, including the Memphis Union brigades, colored troops were left in place to protect the free black population after slavery ended. However, the troops’ presence stirred resentment in the ex-Confederates in those towns, who felt they were being occupied by Northern emissaries of the federal government.

The Union troops in Memphis were mostly black men, many of them former slaves. During the day, they patrolled the streets and kept order, to the chagrin of many whites in town, especially the police force. At night the colored troops enjoyed drinking and carousing in parlors and brothels. Robert, who had come of age working in the parlors of Captain Church’s ships, saw a business opportunity. With a loan from his wife, who had opened a successful wig shop, he started a billiard hall. In 1866, he applied for a business license but was denied on the basis of his color. To hell with them, he thought, and set up his business without the paperwork. His billiard hall was in a storefront on Gayoso Street just off Second Avenue near the riverfront. Inside, he set up pool tables, a bar stocked with whiskey, and a cash register. In an adjacent room, he built a ballroom where he threw soirees and dances attended by locals, which on occasion devolved into brawls that spilled out into the street.

One night, two white police officers showed up at Church’s Billiard Hall and arrested him for operating a billiard hall without a license. Robert hired a lawyer and the case went to trial in April 1866, just days after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act was passed by the Radical Republican caucus in Congress, overriding a presidential veto of Andrew Jackson. It declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens and entitled to equal treatment under the law. On April 17, the charges against Church were dropped. Confederates in Memphis saw his victory as an affirmation of the Radical Republicans’ Civil Rights Act. He swaggered away from the courtroom a free man but also a marked one. The events occurred against a backdrop of escalating racial tensions in Memphis, making Church a hero among blacks and a villain among the ex-Confederate white population.

In Memphis, an uneasy peace existed between the races. It was shattered by free black men taking a liberty that the ex-Confederates could not stomach: having sex with white women. A riot began with a quarrel between the Memphis police and black Union soldiers outside a brothel by the riverfront, where black Union troops were known to bed white prostitutes. The scrum escalated, and several of the Union troops were gunned down. The Memphis police then went on a murderous crawl through the city, shooting black men and white northern carpetbaggers and raping black women. As the riots raged on, word reached Robert that the mob was looking for him. They wanted to kill the black man who had opened a business in spite of the state and then used the Civil Rights Act to get off scot-free. As Robert dressed that day, Lou, pregnant with their second child, begged him to remain home for fear he’d be killed. He slicked his black hair, goatee, and mustache straight with oil and put on his jacket. “No,” he told her. He was not going to hide.

He showed up at his billiard hall and opened shop. He stayed until nightfall, but hardly anyone showed up. Still he refused to close up. He wasn’t hoping to avoid the white mob, he was waiting for them. “Never be a coward,” Captain Church had taught him. It had just begun to rain when the group of men finally showed up. “Get out here!” the men standing outside wearing police uniforms and holding guns yelled. David Roach, an Irish police officer, told Robert to close up the hall. Robert went back in the shop, turning his back on the men. He heard the crash of shattering glass as bullets started to ring out. He then heard a pop and felt a burning in the back of his neck. It took him a moment to realize he’d been shot. The men stormed the store as Church lay on the floor, bleeding from the head. They drank from the bottles and barrels of whiskey at the bar. They removed several hundred dollars from the cash register. They broke his pool tables. Finally they left him for dead and put a torch to his building with him inside. The rain slowed the flames as they engulfed the store, and somehow Robert dragged himself from the burning building, half dead with a bullet wound in his head. He had escaped possible death for the third time.

NO ONE IN TOWN HEARD FROM ROBERT IN THE AFTERMATH OF the riots. Was he dead? Had he run? A bipartisan consort of congressmen led by the Radical Republican Elihu Washburne arrived in town from Washington, D.C., to conduct an investigation of the riots. They interviewed black Tennesseans, local government officials, and the police officers involved in the riot. Toward the end, a man with a wound on his head came ambling up to speak with the congressmen. He introduced himself as Robert Reed Church.

“How much of a colored man are you?” Washburne asked. He, perhaps, was shocked that the rioters had attacked a man who looked so white.

“I do not know, very little. My father was a white man. My mother was as white as I am.”

Robert told his story of being shot and lying bleeding as the rioters had ransacked his store. He named his assailant as Officer Dave Roach, adding, “He is down at the tavern right now.” After the investigation, the federal government opted not to bring any charges as a result of the riots and most of the policemen kept their jobs. Forty-six black people were killed; five black women raped; seventy-five people, including Robert, injured; over a hundred were robbed; ninety-one homes, twelve black schools, and five black churches burned; and $100,000 ($1.6 million) of property damage was done. “We have decided this does not merit federal charges,” the investigators concluded.

In the aftermath of the riot and the government’s inaction in dealing with its perpetrators, thousands left Memphis, but thousands more stayed, refusing to give in to mob terror. Among them was Robert Reed Church. As merchants closed their stores and families left their homes, Church began buying real estate. He purchased five properties in what was coming to be known as the Beale Street District. In 1867, months after having nearly died, Robert became a father again, this time to a son, whom he and Lou named Thomas. With his family and business portfolio growing in Memphis, Robert was resolute about staying and helping to rebuild the city. The Beale Street District was the heart of black Memphis. After the riots those in the African American community who remained flowed into the southern tip of Memphis, a district extending from the riverfront for eleven blocks into the city. Its dirt streets held an office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a black church, black rooming houses, brick stores and bars, and wood-frame houses. In Beale, the African American community built a stronghold after the riots, dancing to the music of traveling black brass bands in saloons and dressing in their best clothes to attend church. Following Sunday church service, men still dressed in suits with gold and silver watch chains hanging from the pockets congregated on corners to socialize, laugh, and make small talk. The throngs of black people on the streets were a constant source of complaint for white women who had to cross through the district to run errands.

One Sunday afternoon, Robert was standing on a street corner talking with a group of men. A police officer approached the men and told them to disperse. When they didn’t comply, he grabbed Robert by his collar. Robert wrestled free, drew his gun from his hip, and fired a warning shot over the officer’s head. The officer then pulled his gun, pistol-whipped Church over the head, and dragged him off to jail. Church hired a lawyer and evaded any formal charges.

The white rioters had burned Church’s billiard hall to the ground the night they had shot him, but in 1870 it was rebuilt. He leased a two-story brick building on Beale Street. The first floor held a bar in its main room, laid out much like the parlors in his father’s ship. The bar was stocked with liquors, fine wines, and expensive cigars. The next room held a billiard hall with new pool tables. In a third room was a barbershop with its own entrance. Outside the building was a watermelon stand where a boy Church employed called out, “Watermelon, watermelon!” luring foot traffic toward Church’s corner. Over each entrance was a black sign lettered with gold leaf that read R. R. CHURCH.

ONE WINTER A FEW YEARS LATER, IT SNOWED IN MEMPHIS FOR THE first time in memory. A snowfall in the Mississippi delta was unexpected, but Robert Reed Church had foreseen such an event and was prepared for the occasion. In a previous year, on a trip up North, he had purchased a sleigh. His friends had made fun of him, thinking he was insane to have brought a sled back to Memphis, a hot, muggy city year-round. Robert predicted that “one day it will snow here” and he would have an opportunity to use it. “You’ll see,” he told them. When the snow finally did come, he affixed it to his horse and rode around town with his young daughter Mary next to him. As they glided through the streets of Memphis, pulled by a galloping steed, they watched as people on the sidewalks and in their yards played in the snow and tossed snowballs at one another. At one point he was struck by a hail of snowballs and laughed, thinking it to be good-natured fun. But when he picked up one of the snowballs, he found that it was a rock covered in snow. A larger rock then came hurling at him and hit him in the face. Robert pulled out the revolver he kept at his side and pointed it at the men who had thrown the rock. He let off a shot, and they scattered. Robert drove the sled home. “My father had the most violent temper of any man I ever met,” his daughter recalled.

Church saloons were a constant center of police activity. On many nights, his bars were the sites of brawls, shootings, and stabbings. In the late 1860s, his old friend from the docks Blanche K. Bruce walked into his bar. Since Emancipation he had become one of the wealthiest black men in Mississippi, having purchased a large sharecropping plantation there. He was weighing a run for the US Senate and wanted to know what Church, a black man of similar background and status, thought of the idea. If elected, he would be the second-ever black senator. Church advised Bruce to run. “I’ll support you,” he assured him. After Bruce announced his candidacy, he returned to Church’s saloon several times to raise money or talk strategy with him. In 1875, he was elected to the Senate from Mississippi. After Bruce’s election and with his own money, celebrity, and political connections, Church became a political power broker seemingly overnight. Their rough-and-tumble environment aside, his saloons also served as de facto headquarters for black political and civil rights activity. Aspiring black politicians would wade through a crowd of gamblers and partiers to talk to him. Local Republicans would often visit his bar to ask for an endorsement or advice. His burgeoning political machine was mockingly called ’de ’siety by white racists, who doubted that Church and his friends, as black men, had the ability to make any political impact.

Church and his band of black political mavens would face an uphill battle. In 1877, the remainder of the Union forces in Memphis left the city when the newly elected president, Rutherford B. Hayes, decreed that he was returning the South to “home rule.” Hayes ordered away the Union troops that had protected blacks and their white Republican allies in the South. Almost immediately ex-Confederates returned to power, as the constituents of an antiblack Democratic party, eager to reverse a decade of racial progress.

THE SUMMER OF 1878 WAS MUGGY AND HOT AND BESET BY SWARMS of mosquitoes. On the first day of August, a steamboat worker who had slipped out of a yellow fever quarantine in Vicksburg, Mississippi, sat down to eat in a restaurant by the docks operated by a woman named Kate Bionda. He infected Bionda, who died just over two weeks later, but not before infecting numerous others and beginning a yellow fever outbreak in Memphis. The infection often resulted in the vomiting of blood and the developing of jaundice, which gave the eyes and skin of the infected a yellow hue. It spread quickly and could kill within a few weeks. In Memphis, the epidemic exploded with more than a thousand infections and two hundred deaths within its first few weeks.

When Robert heard of the first cases, he rushed home and packed all his children’s things into a trunk. He then took Thomas, eleven, and Mary, fifteen, to the train station. At the station, people who were departing were weeping, as were those they abandoned. “You are leaving us poor folks behind,” a voice shouted from the crowds. “But you better watch out. Death can find you where you are going just as easy as it can find us here with yellow fever.”

Church’s father also left Memphis during the outbreak. He moved to Monmouth, Arkansas, with his wife and daughter to receive medical treatments for rheumatism and perhaps escape the possibility of catching the fever. Robert couldn’t give too much thought to his father’s departure; he was much more concerned with the fate of his children and his loved ones who remained in Memphis. Shortly after arriving in Arkansas, however, Captain Church died of a brain aneurysm.

Church barely had time to grieve as the outbreak worsened and the death toll rose. As he walked to his saloon every day he saw bodies lining the streets. Each day as he worked he heard funeral bells chiming nearly every hour as deaths mounted to more than two hundred a week. Just as blacks had fled Memphis after the race riots, whites fled Memphis in even larger numbers during the outbreak, leaving behind whites without the means to relocate and the majority of the African American population. As the outbreak wore on, African Americans who were infected with yellow fever died at a lower rate than whites, perhaps due to a resistance developed by African Americans from increased exposure to yellow fever during slavery.

One day, while he was walking the streets, he lifted up one of the rickety wood planks that was used to pave the roads, as something told him to take a closer look. When he peeled up the rotted wood, he found a pool of filthy foul-smelling water. He theorized that the unsanitary condition of the streets had to be responsible for the spread of sickness. He came to believe that once the streets were paved over, the yellow fever epidemic would subside. The pools of water under the streets were indeed the culprit, as they served as the breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which scientists would later learn were the vector for the yellow fever virus.

Church followed through on his hunch by buying up houses for pennies on the dollar from families fleeing Memphis and became a large-scale property owner in the city, knowing that if the city rebounded after the fever, he would become rich. He also increased his purchase order for whiskey, which he sold as an antiseptic during the worst days of the plague.

In 1879, when the epidemic began to abate, the city of Memphis emerged bankrupt. After years of people and businesses fleeing, the city was out of money. In order to pay down its debts, the local government issued bonds. The first bond was sold for $1,000 ($27,092) to Robert Reed Church.

To the surprise of many, Memphis’ most hated black citizen was the first to step up to try to save the city. After his bond purchase, other prominent local businessmen and families followed suit. Church’s actions helped Memphis survive the outbreak and rebuild after it, garnering him goodwill from Memphis’ white citizens and solidifying his reputation as the city’s most prominent black son. Meanwhile, the money from the bonds was used to rebuild Memphis, and as one of the city’s largest property owners Church stood to make a hefty sum from the redevelopment.