Torrance T Stephens

Free in Name Only Torrance T Stephens

"On May 3, 1866 46 blacks were killed in Memphis, Tennessee by white mobs made up largely of Irish residents on the city's south side. Some historians have reduced this blood bath to a "race riot" and suggested that a black soldier's gun fire provoked the attack. With verve, candor, and a steely eye for detail, Memphis native son Torrance Stephens provides a nuanced revision that grounds these sordid events in a much larger history of the South's defeat during the Civil War, the persistence of white supremacy and the problem of the Negro in the post-bellum United States." Dr. Fanon Che Wilkins, Associate Professor of American Studies and History Doshisha University Kyoto, Japan