page_title: African Americans in Tennessee
section_title: Civil War and Reconstruction
hierarchical_section_title: African Americans in Tennessee / History / Civil War and Reconstruction
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration in Harper's Weekly of the Memphis Riot of 1866
context_page_description: African Americans are among the largest ethnic groups in the state of Tennessee, making up 17% of the state's population in 2010. African Americans arrived in the region prior to statehood. They lived both as slaves and as free citizens with restricted rights up to the Civil War. The state, and particularly the major cities of Memphis and Nashville have played important roles in African-American culture and the Civil Rights Movement.
context_section_description: Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy on June 24, 1861. Nashville was an immediate target of Union forces. In February 1862, it became the first state capital to fall to the Union troops. Union forces moving down the Mississippi River captured Memphis from the Confederacy in the Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862. Under Union control, both cities swelled with freed slaves and other refugees. Where around 3,000 African Americans lived in Memphis in 1860, some twenty thousand were there by the war's end. African-American troops in the Union Army became a symbol of new social equality, disrupting longstanding patterns of racial deference, publicly bearing arms, and receiving the respect of white officers.
  In the aftermath of the war, Memphis became the scene of tensions between white authorities and African American soldiers. The troops effectively countermanded Freedmen's Bureau superintendent Nathan A. M. Dudley's proposal to arrest jobless blacks and send them into contract labor on rural plantations. Black military police also resisted efforts by local white police to close dance houses patronized by whites and to enforce prewar customs of Black deference. After the last Black soldiers at Fort Pickering were discharged on April 30, 1866, confrontation arose. Newly in the status of veterans, armed Blacks confronted police who attempted to arrest one of them. Both sides exchanged gunfire, and a police officer was killed. The veterans retreated to Fort Pickering, where they were disarmed by Union officials. A police-organized posse, which included white laborers, firemen, and small proprietors, began a two-day pillaging of black Memphis, while white Union soldiers did not intervene. These Memphis riots of 1866 resulted in the deaths of 46 blacks and 2 whites, and the destruction by fire of 91 homes, 4 churches and 8 schools.
caption: Freedmen's schoolhouse burned, Memphis riots of 1866, as illustrated in Harper's Weekly.
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