Beale Street Before Urban Renewal

Robert Church Sr. was born enslaved in eighteen thirty-nine. His father was a white steamboat captain who freed him and gave him some opportunity; Church used it. He arrived in Memphis after the Civil War with almost nothing and built himself into the first Black millionaire in the American South. His base of operations was Beale Street.

By the early twentieth century, Beale Street was the most concentrated corridor of Black-owned business in the Deep South. Church's Solvent Savings Bank, opened in nineteen oh six, was one of the institutions anchoring a district that included insurance companies, law offices, medical practices, newspapers, churches, and entertainment venues that served the Black population of Memphis with a range of commercial and civic services that the Jim Crow city denied them in its white-controlled spaces. Church Park and Auditorium, which Church built in eighteen ninety nine on a lot he purchased when no white seller would admit Black buyers to public green space, was the only park in Memphis where Black citizens could gather without restriction.

W. C. Handy's publishing office was on Beale Street. The blues musicians who gave Memphis its sonic identity played clubs and theaters on Beale Street. Robert Church's political network, which organized Black Republican voting power in Tennessee, operated from offices on Beale Street.

Urban renewal arrived in Memphis in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies in the form of federal highway projects and clearance programs. The interstate system cut through Black neighborhoods. The Beale Street commercial district was cleared under urban renewal designations. The buildings that housed the bank, the insurance companies, the law offices, and the community institutions were demolished or fell into disrepair as the people who had used them dispersed.

The Beale Street that exists today as a tourist and entertainment district is a reconstruction. The original buildings were cleared. The institutions they housed are gone. What remains is a version of the street that carries the name and some of the music but not the economic infrastructure that once made it one of the most significant Black commercial addresses in America.