Download or read book Cotton Row to Beale Street written by Robert Alan Sigafoos and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memphis' fascinating economic history overrides all matters of urban concern. It has influenced people and events and been influenced by them. Readers who have wondered how Memphis got to be what it is today will be helped by this book. It may also help them to be more constructive and forgiving critics of Memphis today.
Download or read book Battling the Plantation Mentality written by Laurie B. Green and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-12-08 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American freedom is often defined in terms of emancipation and civil rights legislation, but it did not arrive with the stroke of a pen or the rap of a gavel. No single event makes this more plain, Laurie Green argues, than the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, which culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Exploring the notion of "freedom" in postwar Memphis, Green demonstrates that the civil rights movement was battling an ongoing "plantation mentality" based on race, gender, and power that permeated southern culture long before--and even after--the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. With its slogan "I AM a Man!" the Memphis strike provides a clarion example of how the movement fought for a black freedom that consisted of not only constitutional rights but also social and human rights. As the sharecropping system crumbled and migrants streamed to the cities during and after World War II, the struggle for black freedom touched all aspects of daily life. Green traces the movement to new locations, from protests against police brutality and racist movie censorship policies to innovations in mass culture, such as black-oriented radio stations. Incorporating scores of oral histories, Green demonstrates that the interplay of politics, culture, and consciousness is critical to truly understanding freedom and the black struggle for it.
Download or read book The Ghosts of Cotton Row written by Louis J. Cuccia and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2010-07-14 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Well-known Memphis detective Lou Cros heads up the investigation team to find a serial killer, nicknamed the Mangler, whose victims are homeless men. In a bizarre coincidence, the victims are linked to the Union Avenue Mission and the historic districts of Beale Street and Cotton Row. As part of his investigation, he searches for a homeless man who might be the only living person with information that could lead to the Manglers identity. Under intense pressure from the mayor to find the serial killer and solve the crime, Lou finds himself getting too close to some of denizens of the darker side of the street culture in MemphisGlitter, Big John Fagan, Boots, J, Bones, and a mysterious newcomer known only as Rocky. Pushed to his breaking point, Lou forces himself to search the abandoned Cotton Row District, where ghostly premonitions threaten not only his life but that of his partner, Sue Nash, as well.
Download or read book Gateway to Justice written by Jennifer Ann Trost and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Juvenile Court of Memphis, founded in 1910, directed delinquent and dependent children into a variety of private charitable organizations and public correctional facilities. Drawing on the court's case files and other primary sources, Jennifer Trost explains the complex interactions between parents, children, and welfare officials in the urban South. Trost adds a personal dimension to her study by focusing on the people who appeared before the court-and not only on the legal specifics of their cases. Directed for thirty years by the charismatic and well-known chief judge Camille Kelley, the court was at once a traditional house of justice, a social services provider, an agent of state control, and a community-based mediator. Because the court saw boys and girls, blacks and whites, native Memphians and newly arrived residents with rural backgrounds, Trost is able to make subtle points about differences in these clients' experiences with the court. Those differences, she shows, were defined by the mix of Progressive and traditional attitudes that the involved parties held toward issues of class, race, and gender. Trost's insights are all the more valuable because the Memphis court had a large African American clientele. In addition, the court's jurisdiction extended beyond children engaged in criminal or otherwise unacceptable conduct to include those who suffered from neglect, abuse, or poverty. A work of legal history animated by questions more commonly posed by social historians, Gateway to Justice will engage anyone interested in how the early welfare state shaped, and was shaped by, tensions between public standards and private practices of parenting, sexuality, and race relations.
Download or read book Beale Street written by Dr. Beverly G. Bond and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once celebrated as the Main Street of Negro America," Beale Street has a long and vibrant history. In the early 20th century, the 15-block neighborhood supported a collection of hotels, pool halls, saloons, banks, barber shops, pharmacies, dry goods stores, theaters, gambling dens, jewelers, fraternal clubs, churches, entertainment agencies, beauty salons, pawn shops, blues halls, and juke joints. Above the street-level storefronts were offices of African American business and professional men: dentists, doctors, undertakers, photographers, teachers, realtors, and insurance brokers. By mid-century, following the social strife and urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s, little remained of the original neighborhood. Those buildings spared by the bulldozers were boarded up and falling down. In the nick of time, in the 1980s, the city realized the area's potential as a tourist attraction. New bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues opened along the remaining three-block strip, providing a mecca for those seeking to recapture the magic of Beale Street."
Download or read book Capital Moves written by Jefferson Cowie and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Find a pool of cheap, pliable workers and give them jobs—and soon they cease to be as cheap or as pliable. What is an employer to do then? Why, find another poor community desperate for work. This route—one taken time and again by major American manufacturers—is vividly chronicled in this fascinating account of RCA's half century-long search for desirable sources of labor. Capital Moves introduces us to the people most affected by the migration of industry and, most importantly, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor." Jefferson Cowie tells the dramatic story of four communities, each irrevocably transformed by the opening of an industrial plant. From the manufacturer's first factory in Camden, New Jersey, where it employed large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants, RCA moved to rural Indiana in 1940, hiring Americans of Scotch-Irish descent for its plant in Bloomington. Then, in the volatile 1960s, the company relocated to Memphis where African Americans made up the core of the labor pool. Finally, the company landed in northern Mexico in the 1970s—a region rapidly becoming one of the most industrialized on the continent.
Download or read book Dying in the City of the Blues written by Keith Wailoo and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an "invisible" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering. Set in Memphis, home of one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine. Using medical journals, patients' accounts, black newspapers, blues lyrics, and many other sources, Keith Wailoo follows the disease and its sufferers from the early days of obscurity before sickle cell's "discovery" by Western medicine; through its rise to clinical, scientific, and social prominence in the 1950s; to its politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking forward, he considers the consequences of managed care on the politics of disease in the twenty-first century. A rich and multilayered narrative, Dying in the City of the Blues offers valuable new insight into the African American experience, the impact of race relations and ideologies on health care, and the politics of science, medicine, and disease.
Download or read book On Beale Street written by Ronald Kidd and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Memphis, in the 1950's, when fifteen-year-old Johnny is introduced to the blues, he ventures to the infamous Beale Street and finds the friendship with an up-and-coming young musician Elvis Presley.
Download or read book Memphis and the Paradox of Place written by Wanda Rushing and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrated as the home of the blues and the birthplace of rock and roll, Memphis, Tennessee, is where Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Johnny Cash, and other musical legends got their starts. It is also a place of conflict and tragedy - the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination - and a city typically marginalized by scholars and underest...
Download or read book Robert Church written by Cookie Lommel and published by Holloway House Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the first African-American business man in the South. After the Civil War, Robert Church settled in Memphis and started several businesses. He set a pattern of civic-mindedness and political involvement.
Download or read book Enslavement in Memphis written by G. Wayne Dowdy and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first forty-five years of the city's existence, slavery dominated the cultural and economic life of Memphis. The lives of enslaved people reveal the brutality, and their perseverance contributed greatly to the city's growth. Henry Davidson played a crucial role in the development of the city's first Methodist church and worship services for slaves. Mary Herndon was purchased by Nathan Bedford Forrest and sold to Louis Fortner, for whom she was put to work in the field, where she "chopped cotton, plowed it and did everything any other slave done." Thomas Bland secretly learned to read and write from a skilled slave and later used that knowledge to escape to Canada. Author G. Wayne Dowdy uncovers the forgotten people who built Memphis and the American South.
Download or read book No Depression in Heaven written by Alison Collis Greene and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nowhere was the transition from church-based aid to federal welfare state brought about by the Great Depression more dramatic than in the South. For a moment, the southern Protestant establishment turned to face the suffering that plantation capitalism pushed behind its image of planter's hatsand hoopskirts. When starving white farmers marched into an Arkansas town to demand food for their dying children and when priests turned away hungry widows and orphans because they were no needier than anyone else, southern clergy of both races spoke with one voice to say that they had done allthey could. It was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt.When Roosevelt promised a new deal for the "forgotten man," Americans cheered, and when he took office, churches and private agencies gratefully turned much of the responsibility for welfare and social reform over to the state. Yet, argues historian Allison Collis Greene, Roosevelt's New Dealthreatened plantation capitalism even while bending to it. Black southern churches worked to secure benefits for their own communities while white churches divided over loyalties to Roosevelt and Jim Crow. Frustrated by their failure and fractured by divisions over the New Deal, leaders in the majorwhite Protestant denominations surrendered their moral authority in the South. Although the Protestant establishment retained a central role in American life for decades after the Depression, its slip from power made room for upstart Pentecostals and independent evangelicals, who emphasized personalrather than social salvation.
Download or read book Cinderella of the New South written by Lynette Boney Wrenn and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the story of the cottonseed industry from its antebellum origins through its transformation during the first half of the 20th century. Details the mechanics of cottonseed oil production, the organization of the industry, and the effects of cottonseed price fixing and politics, WWI, antitrust legislation, and the New Deal. Includes bandw photos and diagrams. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Frommer s Nashville and Memphis written by Linda Romine and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents guidance and tools for visitors to Nashville and Memphis, including trip planning information, itineraries, lodging and dining suggestions for different budgets, and details on history, culture, and things to see and do.
Download or read book Historic Shelby County written by John E. Harkins and published by HPN Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fever Season written by Jeanette Keith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the American South had grown to expect a yellow fever breakout almost annually, the 1878 epidemic was without question the worst ever. Moving up the Mississippi River in the late summer, in the span of just a few months the fever killed more than eighteen thousand people. The city of Memphis, Tennessee, was particularly hard hit: Of the approximately twenty thousand who didn't flee the city, seventeen thousand contracted the fever, and more than five thousand died-the equivalent of a million New Yorkers dying in an epidemic today. Fever Season chronicles the drama in Memphis from the outbreak in August until the disease ran its course in late October. The story that Jeanette Keith uncovered is a profound-and never more relevant-account of how a catastrophe inspired reactions both heroic and cowardly. Some ministers, politicians, and police fled their constituents, while prostitutes and the poor risked their lives to nurse the sick. Using the vivid, anguished accounts and diaries of those who chose to stay and those who were left behind, Fever Season depicts the events of that summer and fall. In its pages we meet people of great courage and compassion, many of whom died for having those virtues. We also learn how a disaster can shape the future of a city.
Download or read book A History Lover s Guide to Memphis Shelby County written by Bill Patton and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This tour of Memphis goes well beyond the traditional guidebook to offer a historical journey through the Home of the Blues. Explore the city's African American heritage from Church Park to beautiful Mason Temple, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final, prophetic speech. Visit Court Square, where a young Thomas Edison delighted children and adults with his popular invention: the cockroach shocker. Discover hidden gems like the nineteenth-century dueling grounds on the banks of the Mississippi and a charming Depression-era country store. From Beale Street to the bluffs, author Bill Patton traces the incomparable history of Memphis.
