Lauterbach’s ‘Memphis’ a fascinating history of the Bluff City

A REVIEW OF
Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis
Preston Lauterbach
W.W. Norton & Co.
26.95 336 pages

By Jim Ewing
Special to The Clarion-Ledger

Glancing at the title of Preston Lauterbach’s previous book, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ’n’ Roll, one might expect his book about Beale Street in Memphis to focus on music. Indeed, Lauterbach gives fascinating details about the musical importance of Memphis, an arguable birthplace of the blues.
But, it’s far more than that. Beale Street is an important and impeccably researched social and political history of Memphis that may be one of the best historical narratives of black life in the American South from the end of the Civil War to the 1940s. It’s also a riveting tale that’s hard to put down.
Beale Street starts with rampant violence waged against blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. It’s difficult to read, but to gloss over these violent and racist events is to present a false history. And, as Lauterbach also reveals, it serves to contrast the vital role black citizens played in the city’s survival when a yellow fever epidemic struck, dropping the population from 50,000 to less than 20,000 — of which, an estimated 14,000 were black.
The resulting racial cooperation in maintaining order and rebuilding commerce gave a unique twist to the city that served to make the Beale Street area “a nexus of black culture and power for the ensuing century.”
Like its Mississippi River sister city New Orleans, Memphis had a wide-open system of vice that actually served to fund city services centered on Beale Street — however denounced by some, prostitution was regulated and sanctioned until the 1940s.
Also like the Crescent City, it had substantial mixing of cultures that formed the plurality of its citizenry, even as staunch white segregationists pulled the levers of power.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, who earned fame (and infamy) as a hard-riding Confederate cavalry general (and later, a Ku Klux Klan founder) was the city’s early finance minister, and Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, briefly settled there.
But it’s the story of the nation’s first black millionaire, Robert Church, the half-black son and slave of a riverboat captain — rising from king pin of vice to respectability — who forms the basis of the book’s narrative. He and fellow Mississippi native Ida B. Wells (the first woman and first black woman in America to own a newspaper) shaped the culture of Memphis and provided civil rights milestones noteworthy today.
National, state and local political leaders courted Church’s favor, through his organizing of the most extensive registration of black voters in America until nearly a half a century later with the Civil Rights Movement.
Mississippians “made” Memphis — from Church and Wells, to Blues pioneer W.C. Handy (although from Alabama, adapting blues tunes from Clarksdale) to E.H. “Boss” Crump, from Holly Springs, from whom Chicago could learn a thing or two. (His choice for governor one year carried Memphis 60,208 to 881 votes.) Even William Faulkner figures in, opining about “that three or four Memphis city blocks in comparison with which Harlem is a movie set.”
It’s often said that north Mississippians claim Memphis as their capital and south Mississippians claim New Orleans. With Beale Street in Memphis and Gary Krist’s Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder and the Battle for a Modern New Orleans, Mississippians now have no-holds-barred histories of the two “co-capitals” of their state.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in stores now.

4 June 2015