Memphis Riots, May 1866 On May 1, 1866, two carriages, one driven by a white man and the other by a black man, collided on a busy street in Memphis, Tennessee. This minor incident led to three days of bloody racial violence in which dozens of blacks and two whites died. South Memphis, pictured in this lithograph from Harper’s Weekly, was a shantytown where the families of black soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Pickering lived. The army commander refused to send troops to protect soldiers’ families and property, and white mobs ran wild.
The Granger Collection, NYC.