Years earlier, he had suffered a second gunshot wound to the head. In 1878, while in Arkansas, he had gotten into a fight with a white police officer who had accosted a female associate of his. The officer pulled his gun and shot him. He survived, but began using morphine to cope with the pain. The drug worsened his already violent temper.
Near the turn of the century, he lost his friend Blanche K. Bruce. Bruce’s death was preceded by the passing of Robert’s younger brother James Wilson. Wilson and Church had been reunited after the war, trading stories of how it sickened them they had been forced to work for the Confederacy. Wilson passed without a wife or children; Church buried him on an empty plot of land he owned in Memphis.
Church became angrier, more morphine dependent and sank deeper into the world of vice he was building on Beale Street.
In 1884, he divorced Lou and began courting Anna Wright, a well known black educator. Wright carried herself with an aristocratic air and dressed in the latest fashions. She was ashamed of her roots in slavery and claimed that her family had never been enslaved but rather had been willing servants of white patrons. She encouraged Robert to whitewash his past as well and wouldn’t stand any reference to his enslavement. Wright was just 29 years old, just a few years older than his daughter Mary Church. Anna had fair skin, curly hair and angular features and proudly claimed to be as much Indian as negro.
They were married on New Year’s Day, 1885. They honeymooned in New Orleans, where they were hosted by P.B.S. Pinchback, the black former governor of Louisiana. After returning, Robert and Anna built a mansion on a two acre lot that Robert had purchased during the Yellow Fever outbreak. Church hoped the construction of the new home would spur other African Americans to build homes nearby and develop a wealthy black enclave. To his chagrin, it was wealthy white families that began to build around him.
Nonetheless, the Church mansion, the home of the richest black man in the South, became a meeting place for America’s black elite. Pinchback and other black dignitaries stayed at the Church residence whenever they passed through Memphis.
The prominence of the visitors aroused the curiosity of the white neighbors who would think up any excuse to try and see the interior of the house. Anna Church refused to deal with the white neighbors herself, she would dispatch a servant to the door and leave the room with her silk dresses whirling behind her, as she looked down on them.
As Church’s gambles in real estate bore fruit, a young Memphis based journalist published critiques of him. Ida Be Wells wondered if the richest black man in the South had sold his soul for riches. “All of us can not be millionaires” she wrote, “what material benefit is a leader, if he does not to some extent, devote his time, talent and wealth to the alleviation of the poverty and misery and elevation of his own people?”
Church knew of Ida B. Wells. She attended the local Baptist church and socialized in the same circles as his daughter Mary. In the summer of 1886, Wells left Memphis to take a teaching job in California. She immediately regretted the decision but had no money to return. She wrote to Robert Reed Church to ask for a loan. She wrote in her diary “I told him that I wrote him because he was the only man of my race who could lend me the money and wait for me to repay it.” A month later she received an envelope with a check inside from R.R. Church.
When she arrived back in Memphis, she sought him out. When she found him, she promised to repay him. “No” he told her. She didn’t protest, Church wasn’t the type of man to quarrel with. “My gratitude for his kindly act and his trust in a girl he only knew by reputation warms my heart,” she remembered. Wells continues to critique Beale Street in her writings, but eased up on her critiques of Church.
In 1888, perhaps influenced by Wells, Church began to transform Beale Street. In 1889 he built a hotel that took up an entire city block. He recruited black lawyers, doctors, dentists and publishers to Beale Street. His effort civilized Beale Street during the day, when it was full of black professionals. After they shuttered their shops for the day, and the sun went down, Beale returned as a red light district.
In the 1880s, Church joined the Tennessee Rifles, a volunteer milia of black men formed to fight potential lynch mobs. In 1892, an African American man opened a grocery store in Memphis called the People’s Grocery. The owner, Thomas Moss, cut into the business of the white grocer named William Barrett, who owned a store a few blocks away. Barrett began harassing Moss, resulting in violent skirmishes between the two men and their employees.
Late in March, six white men entered the People’s Grocery carrying guns. Moss’s men defended themselves, shooting and wounding three of their attackers. Moss and the two employees, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell were arrested and put in the Memphis City Jail.
After the arrest, Robert Church and the rest of the Tennessee Rifles kept watch over the jail to protect the men from being lynched. A few days later, the Rifles were given assurances that Moss and his men would not be charged and the police would protect them from lynching. Taking the authorities at their word Church and the rest of The Rifles left.
At 2 a.m. a lynch mob entered and took Moss and the two men from their cell. The lynch mob had given the white papers notice of the lynching and journalists met them at the rail yard where the execution would be staged.
McDowell fought against his lynchers and in retaliation, they shot and mutilated him before he was killed by multiple gunshots to the face. Will Stewart was next to die. He was stoic and refused to the lynchers any fear. The papers described him as “obdurate and unyielding to the last.” Moss begged for his life. When it was clear he would receive no such mercy, he gave a final statement to the reports present. “Tell my people to go West, there is no justice for them here.” He was then shot dead.
The lynching sent shock waves through the African American community. Church had believed the law would protect the men. After the lynching, more than a hundred blacks formed a group to leave Tennessee and relocate to Oklahoma. Church donated $10,000 ($270,000) to the group. He would never leave. He’d been shackled, shot and burned out, but for better or worse, Memphis was his home.