Just A Half-A-Mile From The Mississippi Bridge

Memphis, Tennessee, Home of the Blues, Beale Street, Elvis Presley, Sun Records, and The Peabody Hotel, to name a few.

This song is available on:

After the Battle of Memphis, early in the Civil War, Federal troops occupied Memphis after a Union fleet defeated Confederate naval forces.

About a year after the close of the Civil War, an altercation between white policemen and a group of discharged black soldiers erupted into the Memphis Riot of 1866. Without going into details, suffice it to say that the entire sequence of events is disgraceful and left 48 dead (only 2 whites) and hundreds of black homes, schools and churches destroyed.

Memphis suffered little damage during the war, but a 1878 epidemic of yellow-fever further hindered recovery efforts and probably added more tension to already shaky race relations.

The yellow-fever killed more than 5000. A disproportionate number of those killed were whites and has been attributed to genetic predisposition. The surviving white population virtually abandonded Memphis.

In 1968, as sanitation workers walked out on strike and a riotous climate again loomed, Martin Luther King, Jr. came to lend his support. He was assassinated in Memphis on April 4.