“Memphis used to have the largest and most developed metropolitan area in Tennessee,” explained a black former city councilman who acknowledges that a fear of integration is what kept Memphis small and rather underdeveloped. “It can’t be blamed on the people who are in power today,” he says, “but those who were making decisions in the 1950s and 1960s created a problem between the races and within the corporate community that was hard to correct.”
The city’s black elite seem to be painfully aware of how much better their black counterparts are doing in Nashville—a city whose metropolitan area had once been less affluent, less respected, and less populated than that of Memphis. In fact, most of the Memphis black elite who had grown up in the city prior to the 1960s had to leave town and go to Nashville in order to get their education. Although the town had the small, all-black LeMoyne College since 1870, it lacked the truly elite black institutions that Nashville had: Fisk University and Meharry Medical College. The black Memphians also lacked Nashville’s Tennessee State University, a black public college that ran itself like an elite private school.
“Although I grew up in Memphis—a city that looked down on Nashville at the time,” explains a sixty-year-old physician who attended Fisk, “I always had the feeling that Nashville was going to catch up and then leave us behind—intellectually and racially. Memphis had no premier schools for whites or blacks, and Nashville had Vanderbilt for whites and these other top schools for us. White Memphians—and even some black Memphians—seemed to get more backward and more provincial as other cities outgrew us. So few blacks here were able to break out of the box and really gain national exposure the way that blacks in Nashville did.”
One of the black Memphis families that did manage to gain national exposure—particularly in politics—was the Ford family. In 1974, Harold Ford Sr. made national news when, at the age of twenty-nine, he became the first black U.S. congressman from Tennessee. Twenty-two years later, in 1996, his son, Harold junior, at age twenty-six, took his place in Congress and made national news again as the youngest member of the House of Representatives. Although he is a resident of Memphis, it is a stretch to say that this sophisticated, Washington-raised graduate of St. Albans School, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School is a typical example of what Memphis’s integrated schools were producing in the 1970s.
“Our family first entered politics when my father ran for the Tennessee State House in 1964,” explains Dr. James Ford, an ophthalmologist who joined the Memphis City Council in 1980 and now serves as a county commissioner in Shelby County, the area that includes Memphis. “My brother, Harold, was the first member of our family elected—when he joined the Tennessee legislature in 1971.”
“We were able to gain a foothold in a city that had once been run by Boss Crump because our family had owned property and businesses in Memphis for so long,” says Barbara Ford Branch, the sister of James and Harold senior. “Our father, Newton, founded N. J. Ford Funeral Home in the 1930s, and our great-grandfather Newton had been a major landholder who donated the funds and land for Ford’s Chapel AME Zion Church in the 1890s.”
Like other members of the old Memphis black elite, Barbara and her siblings were sent to Nashville to get their college education. Among the generation of siblings, five brothers have held elected political positions. One brother, John, was on the Memphis City Council from 1972 to 1980, and then he was elected to the state senate. James served on the council from 1980 until 1994, when he was elected county commissioner. A third brother, Emmett, was elected to the statehouse in 1974. Joe was elected to the city council in 1994.
As a child visiting my Memphis relatives during the summers, it was a required activity that my brother and I go door-to-door with uncles, aunts, and grandparents to pass out literature for any one of the Ford politicians who happened to be running at the time. When Harold senior ran for Congress in 1973, he was taking on a longtime white incumbent, Dan H. Kirkendal, who my relatives were certain had no interest in serving the black constituents who populated his district in overwhelming numbers. “It’s like living on a plantation,” my grandfather used to say when we would sit in one of the restaurants that he and my grandmother owned along Florida Street. “These white people don’t want educated blacks here. This place is home, but your parents did right by getting out of here and raising you in New York.” Many times my relatives reminded me that divisions between local blacks and whites were based on race and not on class. Even the wealthiest of them had little or no interaction with whites.
“When I was growing up here, it was very obvious that the city was segregated enough to ensure that the old-guard black families did not socialize with anyone but blacks,” says Ronald Walter, executive vice president of WREG-TV, the CBS affiliate in Memphis. “When I got married in 1987, we had black and white guests, but not very long ago, influential whites were ostracized for attending a reception or a wedding hosted by a black person.”
Walter, who grew up in the Memphis chapter of Jack and Jill and whose wife, Marianne, is a member of the Links and the Junior League, is one of the best sources on the history of the black Memphis elite. He is a fourth-generation Memphian and was the first black to serve on the Tennessee Historical Commission. An unabashed supporter of the city and its residents, Walter acknowledges that Memphis is more like a small town than it is like Chicago or Atlanta. He recalls that one of the first times that prominent Memphis whites attended a black elite wedding was when Fisk graduate Lily Patricia Walker, the daughter of Universal Life Insurance chairman A. Maceo Walker, got married in 1961. “Even though the Walkers were wealthy, powerful, and respected by both races,” explains Walter, “many white citizens in the city were upset that a white mayoral candidate had attended the wedding, and to send him a strong message, they refused to vote for him.”
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Walkers probably had the only black name even acknowledged within the white community. And they were preceded only by the Church family.
“The most affluent and accomplished blacks in this town were the Church family, who were headed by Robert Reed Church,” explains Walter, who worked with Church’s granddaughter, Roberta, on the book Nineteenth Century Memphis Families of Color. Considered the first black millionaire in the South, Church was born in 1839, was raised as a free black, and then became an influential member of the Republican party. As a major property owner who purchased buildings, open lots, a hotel, a saloon, and a restaurant, he eventually opened the Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Company in 1906.
Although the family mansion was later burned down by white residents who resented the Church family’s influence, Robert Church’s ties were great enough by 1900 to make him a delegate to the Republican National Convention and to enable him to build an auditorium and park on downtown’s Beale Street that would host President Theodore Roosevelt when he visited the city.
Church’s son, Robert junior, was a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and eventually joined his father’s bank. In addition to founding the Memphis NAACP, he established groups to encourage blacks to vote even though he received many death threats from white residents. A prominent Republican like his father, he also attended several national conventions.
“I remember when Boss Crump was so threatened by the Church family he literally had them chased out of town in the 1930s,” says Alma Roulhac Booth, who attended LeMoyne School and Emmanuel Episcopal Church with Robert junior’s daughter, Roberta. “They moved to Chicago and that’s why Roberta went to Northwestern University for college. After that, they later moved the family to Washington. It’s a shame after all that family did for Memphis. I’m so glad that the parkland Mr. Church gave to Memphis still carries his name.” In prior years, some white residents attempted to remove the Church name from the downtown park, located near Beale Street.
Robert Church Sr.’s son was not his only accomplished offspring. His daughter, Mary Church Terrell, was probably the most famous member of the f
amily. An 1884 graduate of Oberlin, she became a political activist who fought against segregation and became one of the charter members of the NAACP and the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. In 1891, she married fellow educator Robert Terrell, who had previously graduated from the Groton School, from Harvard University (class of 1884), and from Howard Law School (class of 1889). She became the first black on the Washington, D.C., board of education in 1895, founded the National Association of Colored Women, protested the Jim Crow laws through her speeches and articles, and worked with Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells in their attempts to improve women’s rights in politics and elsewhere. She continued to work on behalf of women and blacks until her death in 1954.
Many members of the old guard quietly comment on the fact that there is another branch of the Church family. “But they live as white people,” says a physician who remembers hearing his grandparents tell stories about the white Churches and the black Churches, and how both families lived in Memphis. “I felt sorry for Roberta Church because she was light enough to pass and therefore was not always immediately embraced by blacks,” explains the physician. “Although she always went as black, she often heard white people say the nastiest things about us. Her color put her in an awkward position in both groups.”
But old stories about mixed races are also passed around about the Fords, the political family that owned acres and acres of property throughout Memphis beginning as early as the turn of the century. “There is no family more dedicated to helping blacks move ahead in this town than the Fords,” remarked a former librarian who says that she has always voted for Fords—whether they were running for city council, statehouse, state senate, or U.S. Congress, “but one has to wonder how a black family was able to start off with so much wealth in the late 1800s, when they had been slaves—not free blacks.” According to this longtime Memphian and others, the Fords had family ties, going back to the early 1800s, to a wealthy white judge—who was also a slaveowner. “Of course this is going back a long time, but old man Newton Ford was born a slave, and people just assumed that the judge was his father and left him property,” says the librarian, before covering her mouth as if she had revealed something she shouldn’t have.
Such ties to white families were a not at all unusual explanation when recently freed slaves had suddenly come into modest inheritances. While some living Ford descendants grudgingly confirm ties to this judge, they freely acknowledge that it was highly extraordinary that their great-grandfather Newton had owned such a great deal of property and had received a minor political appointment at the turn of the century in Memphis.
Although less well known by whites, the Hayes family is another old name in black Memphis history. It’s a name that is first on my relatives’ lips whenever a family member dies. Their name has appeared in virtually all of my deceased relatives’ obituaries since the 1930s. “Everybody knew the Hayes family because they owned the society funeral home,” says Dr. William H. Sweet, a native Memphian who belongs to the Boulé and grew up with my parents and their siblings. “The T. H. Hayes Funeral Home was in this palatial redbrick Victorian building on South Lauderdale Street with a goldfish pool in the front. And all the prominent blacks were funeralized by Hayes.”
“Everybody who’s anybody was buried by T. H. Hayes,” agrees the retired wife of a physician who notes that the prestige of the Hayes family approaches that of the Churches. “A lot of people talk about the fact that the Hayes family burial plots over at the Elmwood Cemetery are right next to the Church family’s mausoleum. Two important families—right next to each other,” says the woman with reverence in her voice. “Being buried by Hayes was like getting an extra social credential. The next best thing you could get from that family was getting to join Frances Hayes’s dinner club. And that’s something I never got invited to do.”
The modesty of Mrs. Frances Hayes, the current owner of the business, belies the family’s stature. “My father-in-law, Thomas H. Hayes, started this business in 1902 because his friend Robert Church Sr. encouraged him. High society was never important to him—he simply worked hard to maintain a good reputation.”
“Mr. Hayes had two sons, Thomas junior and Taylor,” says Frances while standing in one of the large rooms inside the redbrick mansion on South Lauderdale. I had first met her when I was a child and my cousin, Addie Owen, had joined Frances’s famous dinner club—an elite group of black women who shared recipes and dinner menus with many Memphis socialites, in addition to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the city’s primary newspaper. Since that time, Frances has talked me through the illnesses and deaths of many close Memphis relatives. “My husband, Taylor, became funeral director in 1940 and I took over when he died in 1968,” she says, explaining how she got into the business. “My husband’s brother, Thomas junior, was involved in other activities, and he made a great deal of money by owning the Birmingham Black Barons. It was that Negro League baseball team which had Willie Mays, back when black folks couldn’t play in the major league.”
“Not only did Hayes bury most of the Church family,” adds a widow whose family always used the funeral parlor, “but they also buried the rest of the A-list—people like Dr. James Byas, Dr. Speight, Dr. Fred Rivers, Charles Hooks, Fred Hutchins, G. P. Hamilton, Blair Hunt, Dr. Hollis Price, virtually everyone who ever worked for Universal Life, and of course the Walkers.” The woman paused while flipping through an old personal phone diary. “You know, the only big people they missed out on were Lily Pat Walker and Dr. Martin Luther King when he got killed here in 1968. I don’t know what Lily Pat’s husband was thinking, but he was probably so devastated when she died so young from cancer. And, as for Dr. King, he wasn’t from Memphis—so his people just didn’t know any better.”
Frances Hayes acknowledges having buried many of the old families, but she believes they came to her out of friendship. “We belonged to Second Congregational Church with a lot of these families and we lived on the same streets and belonged to the same clubs. For example, my brother-in-law Thomas lived on South Parkway near the Walkers, the Riverses, the Byases, and the Speights.”
While Frances and Taylor had no children to pass the business to, Thomas and his wife, Helen, had two daughters, Helen Ann and Tommie Kay, who both grew up in Jack and Jill and attended Fisk. “At one point,” Frances adds with some sadness in her voice, “I thought Tommie Kay would want to come back to run the business.” Today, Helen Hayes Groves is a well-to-do socialite in Los Angeles, where she has been active in Jack and Jill and the Links. Her husband, Wesley, is a physician from a prominent family in Idaho. Tommie Kay Hayes Armstrong, also a member of the Links, lives in northern California with her husband.
Prominent among the Memphis doctor crowd was the Byas family. Four brothers—Andrew, Arthur, John, and Thomas—all became physicians after graduating from Meharry Medical College in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Although Andrew was a well-known physician in Memphis, he invested much of his time in politics and buying real estate, ultimately owning a drugstore in the city. His brother John had a son named James, who also practiced medicine in Memphis after graduating from Meharry. Dr. James Byas was a trustee of LeMoyne-Owen College, and he and his wife, Orphelia, were active in the Memphis Boulé and Memphis Links. Their two children, James junior and Maye, later became the third generation of Byas doctors to graduate from Meharry.
But there is no Memphis family that elicits more mixed emotions than the family of Dr. J. E. Walker, founder of Universal Life Insurance Company, a business that has survived four generations. “That family has every story imaginable,” says a former neighbor who lived near the Walkers on South Parkway East, “Money, glamour, murder, social status, drugs, tragic deaths—you name it, they had it.”
As a child, I remember my grandfather pointing out that some members of our family lived next door to the Walker family on Mississippi Boulevard and then again on South Parkway, one of the most desirable streets for blacks beginning in the early 1940s. “Parkway,” as it is known,
snakes through the city going west to east, and you can trace the desegregation of Memphis by noting the years when upper-class blacks were allowed to move progressively east along the fashionable street. Although Dr. J. E. Walker, a physician who graduated from Meharry in 1906, founded the company, it was his son, A. Maceo Walker, who turned Universal Life and the family’s Tri-State Bank into financial successes. In fact, by hiring members of the Olive, Willis, and Gilliam families, he gave them all additional status in Memphis society.
Born in 1909, Maceo Walker graduated from Fisk and received an MBA from New York University in 1932. His own status was later enhanced when he married into the prominent and well-to-do Ish family of Little Rock, Arkansas.
“I’m the one who introduced Maceo Walker to Harriett Ish,” says Alma Roulhac Booth. “My father was a doctor who belonged to the Memphis Boulé and Harriett’s father was a doctor who belonged to the Little Rock Boulé, so we knew each other fairly well. I introduced the two of them and they eventually married and lived next door to me on McLemore.”
A graduate of Talladega College, Harriett Ish was far more than just a doctor’s daughter, though. Her uncle was a graduate of Yale’s class of 1909 and her family had ties to Supreme Life Insurance Company in Chicago. The stylish couple quickly climbed the social ladder, moving from one more prestigious street to the next—from Mississippi to McLemore to South Parkway East. They had three children, Lily Patricia, Lucille “Candy,” and Antonio. And with the goal of keeping the business in the family, Maceo’s sister’s husband, Julian Kelso, was employed as Universal Life’s medical director.
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