River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865-1954 by Elizabeth Gritter

With its fortuitous location on the Mississippi River, generally robust economy, and relatively progressive political climate, Memphis, Tennessee, served as a beacon, attracting many black southerners in the century after the end of the American Civil War. African Americans encompassed approximately 40 percent of the city’s population and utilized their numbers to force unprecedented political concessions from the otherwise “solid South” municipality. Elizabeth Gritter’s River of Hope examines the ways in which black Memphians opposed disenfranchisement and gradually secured political, social, and economic rights between 1865 and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Gritter chronicles the careers of Robert Reed Church Sr. and Robert “Bob” Church Jr. These two men’s careers spanned Gritter’s time frame and illuminate African Americans’ struggle to secure the liberties and privileges guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Gritter also documents the activism of others, including George Washington “Lieutenant” Lee, Benjamin Hooks, Roscoe Conkling Simmons, and Dr. Joseph E. Walker. In the process, Gritter reveals the oversights of the study of the Civil Rights movement to date. Historians too often portray the Civil Rights movement as a series of ephemeral episodes divided by generation and entirely disparate of one another. Through the lens of Robert and Bob Church’s activism, Gritter demonstrates that the legal and suffrage gains obtained by the state’s Republican-controlled Reconstruction government provided the foundations upon which African Americans fought for equality over the next century. Gritter maintains that even after a significant rollback in African American rights after the end of Reconstruction, black Memphians never surrendered the voting rights that became essential in their later efforts to reclaim equality. Gritter charts the career of Robert Reed Church Sr. to prove this contention. America’s first African American millionaire, Church Sr. used his position and wealth to mobilize African Americans, as would Robert Church Jr. Among many other contributions to Memphis, Gritter details that in 1899, Robert Church Sr. built Church’s Park and Auditorium, which seated two thousand and hosted several of the most important conferences held by black Memphians before 1954.

A product of his time, Church Sr. remained a lifelong Republican. Gritter explains that he came of age politically when only the Party of Lincoln even nominally opened its doors to African Americans. As a party supporter, Church Sr. fought to ensure that the integrated “black and tans” remained the state’s recognized Republican faction rather than the segregated “lily-whites,” a fight that Bob Church inherited. Gritter’s volume details Church Jr.’s allegiance to the Republican Party throughout his life, even as many fellow black Memphians migrated to the Democrats in the years after 1930. Gritter traces this political shift’s origin to African Americans’ experience of economic recovery during the New Deal and their embrace of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. In contrast, Church Jr. questioned the New Deal and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and viewed Roosevelt as oblivious to African Americans’ second-class status.

Church Jr.’s loyalty to the Republicans enables Gritter to highlight the second major theme of her monograph: throughout the century after the American Civil War, African Americans deftly utilized local political structures to gain what civil rights they could. Far from voting as a monolithic mass controlled by infamous political bosses, registered African Americans debated furiously among themselves whether to push for more equal amenities within the segregated infrastructure or to oppose segregation altogether, whether to accept what black Republicans called Depression-era token gifts from Democrats or to continue fighting for equality, and the necessity of accommodating whites. Gritter chronicles these debates, waged vociferously between Church Jr. and his followers and opponents such as Reverend T. O. Fuller, an accommodationist who once accused Church’s followers of laying the foundation for a race riot, as well as Church’s occasionally strained relationship with former protégés after some defected to the...