#MemphisMassacre1866: R3 to Serve as Host Blog for Project and Symposium

We here at R3 are pleased to be a part of Memories of a Massacre: Memphis in 1866. Our role is to serve as the host blog of the project. In that role we will provide updates, blog posts, links, articles and any other material associated with the project. In addition, during the panel discussions and the symposium, we will also be there live tweeting the events.

The project is a semester-long series of activities culminating with an academic symposium which is designed to bring to public attention the massacre that rattled Reconstruction-era Memphis in May 1866.  The massacre was the first of a series of bloody confrontations that erupted between black and white residents throughout the former Confederate states.  As the first and one of the largest of these violent confrontations, the Memphis Massacre (or “riot” as earlier generations of historians defined it) played a significant role in prompting Congress to enact sweeping changes to federal policies and constitutional law, and it lent urgency to an ongoing national debate about the meaning of freedom and the rights of citizens.

In partnership with the National Park Service, the University of Memphis, and community and academic partners, the goal of the project is to bring this foundational episode to light by situating Memphis and its tragic fault lines in what was a much larger and more tumultuous transition from slavery to freedom. Scholars have long viewed this period as a critical national turning point.  Project directors Dr. Beverly Bond and Dr. Susan O’Donavan see this symposium and the public events leading up to it as “the starting point for an enduring conversation, one that will serve as a model for how other communities might launch their own public discussions about Reconstruction and its legacies.”

They further argue

[T]o understand Reconstruction requires a close examination of the often brutal struggles that marked the transition from slavery to freedom.  Until now, most of these examinations have taken place within the academy.  Unlike the Civil War, which has enjoyed large and sustained public attention for well over a century, Reconstruction has been the untold story.  No statutes, no city or national parks, no markers or plaques or museums have ever been built to narrate the story of what Abraham Lincoln once called our new birth of freedom.  Reconstruction is a cypher: an untold chapter in this nation’s history.  Our goal is to break the silence and to make public the story of freedom’s unruly rebirth.  In doing this, we will not only be teaching history, we will be making history.

We are honored and pleased to serve on this project.

To see a tentative schedule of event and the list of sponsors, click here.