Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Ash Stephen V. A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year after the Civil War . New York : Hill and Wang , 2013. xiii + 269 pp. $19.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8090-6797-8 .
Book Reviews
On May 1, 1866, the city of Memphis exploded in racial violence that resulted in the death of 46 African Americans and three whites. Like many so-called race riots to follow, it was more of a massacre than a riot. The 1866 Memphis riot was the first incident of large-scale racial mob violence following emancipation, with later massacres in Louisiana, Mississippi, and elsewhere to follow. As the first of its kind, however, the 1866 Memphis riot bore enormous consequences for President Andrew Johnson's lenient Reconstruction policy. Along with the New Orleans riot in July of that year, the violence highlighted for Northerners the refusal of Southern whites to provide basic justice to freedpeople, as well as Johnson's inadequate response.
The Memphis riot was unique, however, in that it did not actually pit ex-Confederates against the city's black population. Instead, the perpetrators were all Irishmen, most of whom had not fought in the Confederate army and so were not disfranchised by Tennessee's postwar Radical reforms removing ex-rebels from the electorate. With blacks not yet enfranchised, and white rebels disenfranchised, the Irish were the only major group left to vote in and dominate Memphis city politics, including the police department that played such an important role in the riot. As a result, the 1866 Memphis riot resembled...