Bond - Beale Street

Few African Americans owned property on Beale Street, but many rented residential or occupational spaces in buildings on the street or on neighboring streets and alleys. Robert (Bob) and Anna Wright Church were exceptions to this rule. In the late 1800s, Church made his fortune in real estate, saloons, and billiard halls in the Beale Street area. He paid $1,000 to purchase Bond No. 1 to help the city regain its charter in the 1890s. Anna Wright Church, one of the first generation of African American teachers in the city, was a prominent figure in African American womens cultural, literary, and social organizations. (Mississippi Valley Collection.)

Born in Memphis before the Civil War, Martha Ferguson operated a hand laundry business that specialized in fine linen, lace, and silk. Like many other African American women, she used the income from this profitable business to support her family and to educate her daughter, Ida, who attended a school in Antioch, Ohio, with Anna Wright and also taught in the citys black schools. (Mississippi Valley Collection.)

Dora Clouston was the wife of Joseph Clouston, an antebellum free black man and one of a small number of African Americans who owned property in the Beale Street neighborhood before and after the Civil War. Joseph Clouston also operated a grocery store and barbershop at 145 Beale Street in the late 1800s. (Mississippi Valley Collection.)

Most African Americans in Memphis were working-class people, many of whom migrated to the city from the Mississippi Delta or eastern Arkansas. In 1860, African Americans were only 17 percent of Memphiss population. Ten years later, in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, blacks were nearly 39 percent of the citys population; by 1890, in the aftermath of yellow fever epidemics and rural migrations, blacks were 44 percent of the total population. Most black men worked as domestic servants or as laborers in the citys cotton-related industries, while most black women worked as cooks, domestic servants, midwives, nurses or laundresses. As writer George W. Lee noted, Saturday night [Beale Street] belongs to the cooks, maids, houseboys and factory hands, who enjoy the streets theaters, poolrooms, or juke joints. But Sunday was also the time that many of the same people spent in the churches in the Beale Street neighborhood. Lizzie Rollin and Andrew, shown in these two photographs from the collection of photographer Abraham Frank, were servants in the Frank household and most likely weekend visitors to Beale Street establishments. (Mississippi Valley Collection.)