Grant helps Tennessee church honor enslaved people at site of former slave market

[Episcopal News Service] A $996,000 grant to Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee, from the Mellon Foundation will help fund next steps in the church’s “Legacy of 87 Adams” project, which will create a memorial honoring enslaved people who were bought and sold at a site just steps away from the church.

87 Adams was the street address of that site.

The two-year grant will support design, research and community engagement for a memorial to be located in the church’s parking lot.

“I am thrilled at the news that Calvary and our dedicated team of community partners will be able to build on the work we’ve done over the past nine years,” the Rev. Scott Walters, Calvary’s rector, said in a press release. “We want the history of 87 Adams to be treated truthfully, in ways that foster healing and change in Memphis for decades to come.”

A 1955 historical marker near the church had mentioned former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and how he had become wealthy from his businesses in the area. It failed to say that Forrest’s business was the buying and selling of human beings to enslave them, according to the release announcing the grant.

Starting in 2016, Calvary Church began to confront its proximity to this legacy. Church member and local history professor Tim Huebner engaged his students at Memphis’ Rhodes College in researching the names and stories of about 3,800 enslaved people sold there.

Huebner’s research, along with the scholarship of University of Memphis professor Earnestine Jenkins, uncovered Memphis’s central role as a regional hub in the domestic slave trade. Adams Avenue, with proximity to the Mississippi River and a rail line extending to Charleston, was home to at least four markets of enslavement, all in operation alongside some of the city’s oldest places of worship.

In 2018, Calvary Church members and community partners, including leaders of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, installed a new historical marker to replace the old one honoring Forrest and held a healing service at the site outside Calvary Church, laying the groundwork for a permanent memorial.

A coalition of community members will oversee a memorial design selection process, engage in relationship building with regional public artists and develop community programming around the project.