Robert R. Church Sr.

Robert Reed Church was born on the eighteenth of June 1839 at Holly Springs, Mississippi, the son of Captain Charles B. Church — a white riverboat captain of the Memphis-to-New Orleans cotton-and-passenger packet trade — and Emmeline, an enslaved woman of the Holly Springs plantation of Charles B. Church’s mistress. He was raised on his father’s Memphis-to-New Orleans riverboat as a steamboat cabin boy from approximately age eleven.

He was emancipated at the surrender of New Orleans to Union Admiral David Farragut on the twenty-fifth of April 1862 — Church was at the time of the surrender twenty-two and was working as the steward of the Captain Charles B. Church riverboat the Bulletin No. 2 at the Customs House Wharf of New Orleans at the moment of the surrender.

He returned to Memphis in late 1862 and opened a saloon at the corner of Second and Gayoso Streets. He survived the Memphis Race Riot of the first three days of May 1866 — the lynch riot in which forty-six Memphis Black residents were killed — by sustaining a gunshot wound to the back of the head from which the bullet was never extracted. He bought the saloon outright at the riot’s conclusion and operated it for the following twenty-three years.

He began the systematic accumulation of Memphis real estate at the close of the 1873 Memphis yellow-fever epidemic — the second of the three great Memphis yellow-fever outbreaks of the 1870s — and again in greater quantity at the close of the 1878 epidemic, when over half the city’s white population fled and Memphis real-estate values collapsed to under thirty cents to the pre-epidemic dollar.

He was the only Memphis citizen of any race to purchase the first thousand-dollar Memphis municipal bond at the post-epidemic 1879 municipal bond issue under which Memphis recovered its charter — a single-handed civic act that secured the city’s municipal solvency through the post-epidemic rebuilding.

He accumulated by 1900 a Memphis real-estate portfolio in excess of seven hundred thousand dollars — the rough equivalent of twenty-five million dollars in the dollars of the current period — and was at the time the wealthiest Black citizen of the American South and the first Black Southern millionaire.

He opened in 1906 the Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Company at the corner of Beale Street and Hernando Street — the first Black-owned bank of the city of Memphis. He was the principal landlord of Beale Street across the closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth.

He died at Memphis on the twenty-ninth of August 1912 of complications of nephritis, at seventy-three.

He is honored here as the first Black millionaire of the American South.