“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln is Dead and Damned!” - The Memphis Riots of 1866

Date: April 20, 2016
Contact: Kim Coons, 423-752-5213 x139

Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, in partnership with the Bessie Smith Cultural Center, invites the public to participate in a free, 45 minute program at the Bessie Smith Cultural Center, 200 East Martin Luther King Boulevard, Chattanooga, TN 37403, on Saturday, April 30 at 11 am.

By April 1866, across the war-torn landscape of the former Confederacy, tensions still brewed in towns and throughout the countryside.In the city of Memphis, Tennessee, on May 1, 1866, emotions boiled over into three days of turmoil known as the Memphis Riots or the Memphis Massacres.This episode, now largely forgotten, showed the tensions of the Civil War did not end in 1865. Though on paper the formerly enslaved were free, the struggle to maintain that freedom would continue long after the guns of war fell silent.