Good Morning POU!
Robert Reed Church saved Memphis. He literally saved Memphis – how will the city thank him? Read on to see!
At the turn of the century, Robert Reed Church was 60 years old. He now walked with a cane, but his eyes were still fiery and bloodshot and he remained fearless and quick-tempered.
A decade earlier, in 1889, he had begun to draw up plans for a park and arena for black citizens in Memphis. As their construction neared completion, he wondered how white Memphis would react to his project. His life had been filled with attacks by Confederates, racist police officers and segregationists for daring to strive as a black person. What would they do when he opened a $100,000 ($2.9 million) arena?
As a young man he had dealt with white men with his fist and gun, now gray and wrinkled, he decided to exert a skill he acquired with age: diplomacy.
In 1900, a group of ex-Confederate soldiers decided to throw a reunion for Confederate veterans in Memphis. As they struggled to raise $80,000 to build a temporary auditorium in which to hold the affair, they received an unexpected donation of $1,000 ($29,245) from Church, a former slave.
“I never gave a cent in my life, so cheerfully or gladly as I gave that check to the veterans entertainment fund” he said afterwards. He hoped that $1,000 would be enough to protect his arena from the same resistance as his pool hall which a white mob had burned down when he was a young entrepreneur.
Church Park and Auditorium opened a few weeks after the Confederate reunion without incident. The 1,200 seat auditorium had two levels, including a balcony. Behind the curtain was a dark stained wooden stage with a bandstand. The auditorium sat on a 4 acre park ringed by flower gardens with carnival rides, an outdoor theater, gazebos and orange trees. Peacocks roamed its grounds, spreading their colorful tails to the delight of visitors. He put on concerts with big bands, hiring W.C. Handy as the bandleader. Eventually he called his park a “resort for colored people.”
Since he built the park without loans or partners, black newspapers began to refer to him as the wealthiest black man in America. Church and his park’s visitors were left alone. It seemed that his $1,000 donation bought him and Memphis’ African American population enough rook to enjoy the paradise he had built for them.
Shortly after the park’s opening, Church became a delegate to the Republican National Convention. There he nominated Theodore Roosevelt for Vice-President and William McKinley for President. Church became acquainted with Booker T. Washington when Washington was starting the National Negro Business League.
Church was one of the first to join, however, he and Washington didn’t see eye to eye on virtually anything. Church sent his children to boarding school, to college at Oberlin and donated to black schools. Having been deprived of an education himself, he resented Washington’s focus on “manual labor” instead of “education and ballots.”
Differences aside, Church invited Washington to speak at Church Auditorium. When McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and Roosevelt became president, Church invited the President to give an address to the colored people of Memphis in Church Auditorium.
In 1902, Roosevelt took the stage and stared out at a sea of brown faces, with Church sitting behind him in a pinstriped suit and bowler hat, rocking back and forth holding his cane in his hands. A brass band played “Dixie” followed by “The Star Spangled Banner” and then after speeches from the mayor of Memphis, and governor of Louisiana, Roosevelt took the stage. Church was now a serious power broker, politically, socially and economically.
Church continued his ascent, until by 1906, he owned most of the Beale Street district. That year he opened a bank, the Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Co. For years he had lent out rolls of cash from behind the bar and in the back rooms of his saloons, now he was officially the first black owner of a bank in Memphis. He deposited $25,000 ($671,272) of his own money and the bank promised to pay 3 percent on deposits.
During the Panic of 1907 his bank could have failed if all of his depositors took out their money at once. He staved off a run on the bank by exhibiting stacks of money in the plate glass window, assuring his customers that he was solvent. In 1908, when a white bank tried to foreclose on the black Baptist church that Ida B. Wells had attended as a young woman along with his daughter Mary, Church and his bank swooped in and paid off the loan, saving it.
Several years later, in 1910, Robert Heberton Terrell, his son-in-law, was nominated to the Washington DC circuit court. He became the first black judge in Washington.
As a young man, Church worked around the clock in his first saloon, keeping the lights on till the wee hours of the morning. In his last years, he did the same at his bank. Working beside his son from his second marriage, Robert Reed Church Jr., the heir of the dynasty. Without fail, as the sun set and people took to Beale Street for a night on the town to see W.C. Handy and others perform a new type of music called the blues, they’d see the light on in Bob’s office.
In the summer of 1912, Church began having heart trouble and friends and family members flocked to Memphis to say good-bye. In his final hours, Booker T. Washington went in to see Church. He was the last person to see him alive. In August 1912, Church died of a heart attack. He left behind a wife and five children and an estate worth well over a million dollars.
Robert Reed Church left hundreds of his residential properties in the Beale Street District to his children from this first marriage, Mary Church Terrell and Thomas Ayers Church. Although the value of the properties declined due to Beale Street being maligned as a black slum and vice district, both heirs thrived despite the diminished inheritance. Mary became a teacher and prominent suffragette. Thomas became a lawyer and publisher.
The bulk of the liquid assets were left to Robert’s second wife Anna Church, and their children Annette Church and Robert Reed Church Jr, who used their father’s bequest to maintain the family’s commercial business. Church Jr. became politically influential, establishing the Lincoln League in 1916 to work to register black voters, fundraised to help cover poll taxes, and advocate for the interests of African Americans in the Republican Party. Within a short time, he signed up 10,000 new black voters in Memphis.
With the rise of the New Deal in the 1930s and the increasing defection of African Americans to the Democratic Party, Church Jr’s political influence began to wane. Not surprisingly, Memphis Mayor Edward Hull “Boss” Crump now cultivated Democratic leaders among Memphis African Americans Church and Crump were neither friends but the Memphis political boss had earlier recognized Church’s political influence. Now, the Crump machine challenged Church’s power directly. In the early 1940s, the Crump Machine used its influence with the Roosevelt Administration to weaken Church Jr. When the Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to convict him of tax evasion, Church Jr was forced to moved to Chicago to avoid continued harassment.
Church Jr died in 1952, leaving one daughter, Sara Roberta Church.
In the 1940’s the city of Memphis, as acts of retaliation against the Church family for their success and civil rights activism, changed the name of the park and auditorium to “Beale Avenue Auditorium.”
In 1953, the city of Memphis hosted a demonstration of fire equipment during which the home Robert Church had built for his family in a wealthy mixed race neighborhood was burned to the ground.
The event was an act of revenge on the part of Memphis Mayor “Boss” Crump for the Church family’s black voter rights activism. The Tri-State Defender called the burning of the Church house “An act of infamy.” In 1955 the house and the surrounding neighborhood were paved over by the city to make way for public housing complexes designated exclusively for African-Americans.
Decades later, a black Memphis resident, Lester Lynom, described it as “almost a lynching of the Negroes of Memphis.” He added, “It wasn’t just the house, it was what the house represented.”
Eventually, the government’s urban renewal program had the structures on the site of the park and auditorium demolished and left it empty. In 1987 the park was given new landscaping and refurbished into a tree-shaded grass area.
Church’s Park was registered in the National Register of Historic Places and made a part of the Beale Street Historic District in 1993. Sara Roberta Church, the granddaughter of Robert R. Church Sr. donated a white granite and bronze memorial monument of her grandfather inscribed with historical information in 1994.
She died in 1995 after a career working as an administrator for the federal government. She was the last known surviving descendant of Robert Reed Church Sr.