Trying to renovate Beale Street is like trying to have a second Woodstock, it can be done, but it's destined to end as a caricature.  Beale Street has run the gamut from being a place for white people to live, to a place for black people to party, to a place for black people to live, to a place for white people to party.  Today Beale Street is the most popular attraction in Memphis.  It is a fine place to go have a good time and hear some fine blues and celebrate, but those are just a few of the qualities Beale Street embodied for its citizens in the early twentieth century.

The original Beale Street was a self-contained community with a church, pharmacy, public houses and some stuff you probably would not want to know about.  The good time history of Beale Street was written by people who later waxed nostalgic, but even George W. Lee and Nat D. Williams would tell you that Beale was not just fun, it was also a place where your money and your life could be taken for less than the price of one hot, alcohol-fueled song.

The origin of the name “Beale Street” is obscured.  The “official version“ is that Robertson Topp, the founder of South Memphis named the street after a different war hero in 1840.  By whatever method it was named, it is clear Beale Street was an upscale suburb of Memphis by the 1840s (Memphis was chartered in 1827) claiming such plush residences as the Hunt-Phelan home which still stands today.

During the 1850s Beale Street began to grow a population of free African-Americans.  This was in a addition to a large variety of Irish, German and Italian immigrants.  The coexistence was not uneasy until the Civil War.  During the Civil War blacks were emancipated by President Lincoln and began to immigrate from the plantations to the city.   Memphis had been occupied by Union troops since very early in the war, so it had become a relatively safe haven for emancipated blacks who were viewed in a different light than the freedmen that came before.  By the end of the Civil War Union troops had recruited thousands of black soldiers.  Many of those soldiers were charged with patrolling the streets of Memphis.  At the war's end the Union army decommissioned the black soldiers of Memphis, paid them a bonus and left town.

As the Union troops withdrew racial tensions boiled over and the mostly-Irish police and fire departments attacked the black occupants of the city killing many and burning over a hundred churches and houses to the ground.  From that point many African-Americans began to leave the city, but many more stayed or were not financially able to flee.

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