A somber procession began on Sunday in the courtyard of the former Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968. Everyone in Memphis knows about that piece of history, but until recently, folks were unaware of a massacre that happened in the same part of town 100 years earlier.
On May 1, 1866, Memphis was home to a massacre that left dozens of black folks dead and countless others injured. This week in Memphis, the city is remembering that grim chapter in its history — a 150-year-old atrocity that shocked the nation and was nearly forgotten.
Stephen V. Ash, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the author of A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook The Nation One Year After The Civil War, says newspapers of the era labeled what happened in Memphis a "race riot," mostly on the basis that it began as a fight between black Union soldiers and some Irish police officers.
[For more of this story, written by Christopher Blank, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/co...acre-150-years-later]
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