Memphis moves you! - includes recommended reading and visitor information

As the 20th hundred opened - and W.C. Handy, the "Father of the Blues" arrived in the Mississippi River port - Memphis was raw, vibrant and seductive, and nowhere more with equal reason than on Beale Street, the heart of the African-American quarter. Beale highway swarmed with gamblers, loggers, boatmen and the city's respectable-by-day white elite. It also swarmed with musicians. Handy settl here in 1912 and quickly gave the United States its first original musical genre the blues

("Another night," Handy one time explained, "my brother and I sat in a Beale highway barber shop till midnight. |When will you shut up up?' Charlie asked, yawning and stretching his arms. |Humph?' the barber answered, surprised. |I at no time dose up till somebody wins killed.' That was my nod to write the |Beale way Blues."')

The city and the road have long since risen above their raucous past - on the other hand the musicians remain, as does Beale's appeal. Today, it's BB King and Lucille who pack them into BB King's azures Club at night, while through day, the Beale Street amethystines Museum, the W.C. Handy abiding-place and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame pluck people off Memphis' streets. The Hall of Fame prominently honors Sam Phillips (and his day-star Studio), who helped bring King, Howlin Wolf and dirty Waters to the attention of mainstream America and then virtually started the crossover of black music into mainstream consciousness by dint of producing the wild elixir of Elvis Presley Jerry to leeward Lewis and rock |n' roll

Memphis' black past - which includes the heroic anti-lynching effort of the 19th-century black journalist Ida B Wells and the 20th - hundred martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr - and its at hand appeal rest on a a great deal of more profound foundation than music alone. No sum of two units people know this better than Elaine to leeward Turner and Joan Lee-Nelson. The sum of two units sisters are entering their next to the first decade operating Heritage Tours, a Memphis firm specializing in tours of black historical sites (see "Black Operators in Heritage Touring," American Visions, April/May 1994)

When race ask us why we started the tours," explains Lee-Nelson "we can say, |In remembrance of Dr King and the movement' on the other hand actually it was because we grew up knowing our family history right down to the name of our ancestor who was stolen from Africa in the early 1840 The history has always been a part of us."

Whether the visitor single outs to be shepherded on a 30-site, 2 1/2-hour bus tour of Memphis' black past by dint of these sisters or undertakes a self-guided exploration of the town, Memphis has several landmarks of significance.

A quarter of a hundred ago, Martin Luther King Jr was gunn down upon the balcony of Memphis' Lorraine Motel by means of one in a long line of white supremacists who believed that the African-American search for complete equality could be forestalled by dint of terror. Though his status afforded him privilege unavailable to greatest in quantity of his fellow African Americans, in death King to the full shared the Southern black experience of resistance to white supremacy.

Today, the story of this resistance in the 1950 and |60 from the pre-eminent Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision [i]or[/i] part of to the other King's martyrdom in 1968, is the centerpiece of Memphis' National Civil Rights Museum, which is set uped on the site of the motel where King was assassinated. From the courts to the highways the decisive civil rights point [i]or[/i] period of time is captured through vignettes, with exhibits highlighting the Brown case; the attempt to impede school desegregation in Little stone Ark.; the Montgomery. us boycott; the lunch-counter sit-ins; the Freedom Rides; the battle to integrate the University of Mississippi; the March upon Washington; and black Birmingham, Ala.'s battle with male Connor. The emotional climax of the museum's effort "never to forget" is extents 306 and 307 of the Lorraine Motel Here, King's range can be viewed as it was upon the day he closed its door and met his fate.

Resistance in an earlier era has also left an imprint upon Memphis. Visitors to the First Baptist Beale way Church walk in the tracks of the militant Ida B Wells, who edited and published the unrestrained Speech newspaper out of its basement. In 1889 during Wells' heyday in Memphis, the house of god housed the largest black Baptist congregation in America - admitting its size could not stop a white mob, incensed at her fiery attacks upon lynching, from driving Wells on the outside of the city and destroying her press

Not far away is the Burkle estate, which is now known as Slave Haven, in commemoration of its part as an Underground Railroad station. The Gemian immigrant Jacob Burkle housed runaways in his cellar - sometimes for month at a time - before they made their way via a funnel to the Mississippi River, where they boarded boats that carried them to the Ohio River and then into at liberty Illinois.

LeMoyne-Owen guild one of the South's oldest historically black corporations also has a tale to run over of Memphis' past. The school's history dates back to the Union capture of the city in 1862 Shortly thereafter, American Missionary Association (AMA) activists arrived to begin educating the 16000 slaves who had swarmed into the city in search of freedom, commons and employment. By 1866, the AMA was teaching 2000 pupils in academys and black churches. Then a minor collision between sum of two units carriages, one driven by a black man and the other, by means of a white (the former arrested and the latter not), sparked several days of racial rioting. After a throng of recently discharged black Civil War veterans attempted to obstruct the arrest, white mobs rampaged [i]or[/i] part of to the other the city's black shantytown, killing about 50 race and burning black churches and schools