The caller was an old friend of Troutman’s who works as a night nurse. While on break, she had opened Facebook on her phone, and immediately saw a live stream filled with flames. “I’m so sorry to tell you this,” she said, “but do you know Clayborn Temple is on fire?”
Anasa Troutman
Troutman is CEO of The Big We, the nonprofit foundation she founded in 2019 to restore the historic Clayborn Temple. Situated on Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue across the street from FedExForum, the church’s history is long and storied. Its cornerstone was laid on May 14, 1891, by the Second Presbyterian Church of Memphis. The first service in the new Romanesque Revival building, at what was then Hernando and Pontotoc, was held on January 1, 1893.
“There was a kiln in this building where they actually cured the bricks,” says Allison Hooks, senior project manager with All World Project Management, who has been overseeing the building’s restoration since 2021. “The interior of the building was mostly red pine.” Other features included vaulted ceilings, wrap-around balconies, many of the original stained-glass windows, ornate plasterwork, a roomy stage, a pipe organ, and a bell tower.
In 1949, as the neighborhood began to change around them and membership declined, the Second Presbyterian congregation moved east, constructing a new campus at Central and Goodlett, and the downtown building was sold to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). The new congregation changed the name to Clayborn Temple, in honor of their pastor, AME Bishop Jim Clayborn. What had been an all-white church evolved into a sanctuary and meeting space for the city’s Black population.
In the 1960s, the church served as the de facto headquarters of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in Memphis. During the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike, the union organized daily marches from Clayborn Temple to City Hall. The Temple’s ministers, Rev. H. Ralph Jackson and Rev. Malcolm Blackburn, opened the doors of the church to the marchers. The famous I AM A MAN signs that the strikers carried were produced here, in the church’s basement print shop.
“I AM A MAN signs have traveled the world,” says Troutman. “People all over the world have used that iconography to express and to declare their own humanity.”
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis in 1968 to support the strikers, he led a march that began at Clayborn Temple. Memphis police violently chased marchers back to the church, and fired tear gas into the sanctuary where wounded protesters were taking shelter. During the citywide chaos that ensued, police killed 16-year-old Larry Payne with a shotgun blast, claiming he had been looting a housing project blocks away. Against the advice of some city leaders, his family held an open-casket funeral at Clayborn Temple, the sanctuary packed with mourners. Later that week, King returned to Memphis, planning to lead a second, non-violent march, but he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel on the evening of April 4, 1968.
“Every single inch of the outside of that building was either renewed, refreshed, or restored,” says Troutman. “We were in pre-development for Phase Three, which was the interior envelope — primarily the sanctuary. We were finishing up the planning. We had removed the organ, and we were fundraising for the interior of the building when the fire happened.” — Anasa Troutman
Troutman first saw Clayborn Temple 50 years later, in 2017. “I started working on this [building] before I moved to Memphis,” she says. “I was initially invited to be part of the Clayborn Temple family for MLK50 because they wanted to tell the story, and my real job was as a producer and a cultural strategist. I was brought in to executive-produce and co-write a musical about Clayborn Temple called Union: The Musical.”
While working on that project, she got involved in researching local history. “I read so many stories about Memphis, so many stories about the sanitation workers, so many stories about the last year of King’s life,” she says. “I came across the story of Robert Church and his family. Instantly, I was able to draw this through-line from the time of Robert Church at the end of enslavement all the way to the sixties, all the way to 2017. It just felt like everything snapped together in my mind, and I got really clear that I wanted to stay in Memphis, and I wanted to be a part of the future of the city.
“I feel like the story of Memphis is quintessentially American, and I think that all of the ups and downs and the joys and the pains and the things that are stupendous about America and the things that are painful about America are literally all in the soil of Memphis,” she continues. “If we want to think about the future and who we’re becoming as a community across the whole nation, if you look at the past of Memphis, the formation of America is in there. So, in my mind, in my imagination, the formation of the future must also be in Memphis.”
Troutman dedicated herself to restoring Clayborn Temple, which had been sitting empty for decades, to resemble what the building looked like in April 1968. “Phase one was acquisition and stabilization. Phase two was the exterior envelope. We had spent about $6 million,” she says.
The biggest improvement to the building was a new set of stained-glass windows, which depicted scenes and figures from the Civil Rights Movement: Maxine Smith, the Rev. James Lawson, Cornelia Crenshaw, and yes, Larry Payne, among others. “When they finished the stained glass,” says Hooks, “it was really beautiful.”
“Every single inch of the outside of that building was either renewed, refreshed, or restored,” says Troutman. “We were in pre-development for Phase Three, which was the interior envelope — primarily the sanctuary. We were finishing up the planning. We had removed the organ, and we were fundraising for the interior of the building when the fire happened.”
photograph by chris mccoy
Bricks used to construct Clayborn Temple were fired in a kiln in the basement. City and state leaders announced the first phase of rebuilding funding one month after the fire.
“A Tremendous Loss”
On that early morning in April, Troutman scrambled to get dressed and rushed to the Temple. “When I got there, I couldn’t even get to the building because there were so many firetrucks,” she says. “At that point, the building was completely engulfed in flames. You could see the aura of the orange, the smoke everywhere. It was so terrible. I wanted to get as close as possible, but all the firemen and police were trying to protect me. ‘You don’t want to see it.’ I’m like, ‘I have to. You don’t understand. I have to.’ I was in front of the building, and I just stood there for probably 15 hours.”
Hooks got the news from a co-worker, who sent her a picture of the building in flames with the message, “Is this really happening?” Then her brother, a fireman, confirmed that it was really happening. “It was … not the thing you wanted to wake up to,” she says.
As the Memphis Fire Department fought the conflagration, a crowd gathered. “While the fire was still burning, people were driving up to Clayborn, parking on the street, and getting out and getting as close as they could to the fire just so they could see it for themselves,” says Troutman. “Many people wept, held each other, screamed, cried, gawked in disbelief because everybody had their own story.
“It’s a tremendous loss. In my mind, in order to deal with the magnitude of the tragedy, I had to shift my focus. Okay, this is a different project now. I mentioned it to Anasa that day. We will rebuild. There’s so many other adaptive-reuse structures around the country. You can still tell the story. It’s just unfortunate that you can’t tell it in the grandeur of the original structure. But it’s a different thing now.” — Allison Hooks
“Clayborn burning was not about me,” she continues. “It was about all the stories that I read in 2017. It was about every sanitation worker, and every sanitation worker’s grandchild that I have met … I have story after story after story in my mind and in my heart, after eight years of living here and being the steward of that building. The stories that I’ve heard were flashing in my mind as the building was burning: The life of Dr. King, the work of Cornelia Crenshaw, the funeral for Larry Payne.
“I’m holding all these stories in my body,” she continues. “I think I know twice as many stories now than I did before the fire. But the thing that binds every single one of those disparate stories and disparate feelings together is, at the end of everybody’s story, the end of everybody’s lamenting, the end of everybody’s anguish, they say, ‘We have to build this building back.’”
“It’s a tremendous loss,” says Hooks. “In my mind, in order to deal with the magnitude of the tragedy, I had to shift my focus. Okay, this is a different project now. I mentioned it to Anasa that day. We will rebuild. There’s so many other adaptive-reuse structures around the country. You can still tell the story. It’s just unfortunate that you can’t tell it in the grandeur of the original structure. But it’s a different thing now.”
New stained-glass windows depicting scenes from the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis were added during the second phase of Clayborn Temple’s renovation. The windows were melted and completely destroyed by the intense blaze.
“It’s Pure Evil.”
Clayborn Temple is sacred ground, not just for Memphis, but for the nation,” says Mayor Paul Young. “It’s where everyday people stood up, spoke out, and helped bend the arc of history toward justice. Even now, ravaged by fire, the spirit of that movement remains strong, and the space holds the soul of our city.”
Even as the embers still smoldered, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrived to begin their investigation. “When the ATF had jurisdiction over this property, we had strict instructions as to how to go in and do the stabilization,” says Hooks. “That included us doing everything from the outside, to make sure their investigation area was as sanitary as possible.”
The red-pine interior of the building was completely destroyed. The roof, which had been supported by 130-year-old, 16x14-inch wooden beams, had collapsed into the basement. The new stained-glass windows melted and shattered; colorful pools of congealed glass littered the ground around the empty frames. Most of the stone walls of the church still stand, although one wall collapsed two days after the fire.
“In my opinion, it’s pure evil. Why would you want to take away the historical fabric of a city? All history, good or bad, if you destroy it, it’s taking away from the next generation’s ability to come up with their understanding of what happened.” — Allison Hooks
The rest of the walls have been stabilized by metal buttresses. “I hope we find the bell,” Hooks says. “Part of the building that was in the bell tower is still intact. They had taken the bell down, so it was just off to the side. But the fire was pretty intense in this tower area, which was the last place that they put the fire out, because they weren’t able to reach all the way up to the top.”
A month after the fire, on May 21st, the story took another tragic turn. “The ATF called me before they went public with the information that it was arson,” says Troutman. “When I got that call, another level of sorrow and grief overtook me. I wanted so badly for it not to be that. I wanted so badly to be, ‘Oh, it was an accident.’”
Hooks says the verdict of arson confirmed many people’s worst fears. “I don’t have any details as to where it started, but whoever did it was, in my opinion, familiar with the interior of the structure, because it was heavily a wood structure. The majority of the fire intensity was in the sanctuary area. The annex portion of the building was not as damaged, but this [the sanctuary] is where the majority of the historic elements were.”
Now, months after the fire, the shock has still not worn off for Troutman. “You can be mad, you can be racist, you can be hateful, you can be all these things,” she says. “But this is too much. You went too far. Why would you do that? It’s 130 years of Memphis history — and it’s not just Black history. That building was built by the Presbyterian church. Half of that building’s life was inhabited, imagined, and populated by very white aesthetic ideals and doctrine. It is one of the two buildings in the city that everybody feels like they belong. FedExForum and Clayborn Temple are where everybody belongs in the same building. It just is such a humongous loss that I can’t imagine that even the most extremely angry person would go to these lengths.”
An ATF representative declined to comment for this article, citing the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation. The Memphis Fire Department did not return this magazine’s inquiries.
“In my opinion, it’s pure evil,” says Hooks. “Why would you want to take away the historical fabric of a city? All history, good or bad, if you destroy it, it’s taking away from the next generation’s ability to come up with their understanding of what happened.”
photograph by chris mccoy
The massive wooden beams that held up the 130-year-old church’s roof collapsed into the basement during the conflagration. Steel beams now keep the remaining walls stable.
“Reclaiming a Symbol”
On May 28th, Troutman, Mayor Young, Congressman Steve Cohen, Martin Luther King III, and others spoke at a press conference outside the ruins of Clayborn Temple. The executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund announced a $1.5 million grant towards rebuilding the historic church.
Before he was mayor, Paul Young worked for the Downtown Memphis Commission. Troutman says his influence was crucial in her decision to spearhead the church’s restoration. “I wouldn’t even be involved with Clayborn if it wasn’t for the mayor,” she says. “My initial conversations about, ‘Should I take this building over? How do I even do this?’ were with the mayor. So he’s been with me since the beginning of my time here.”
“After the fire, our team moved quickly to assess the damage and mobilize support, from historic preservation resources to potential funding and strategic partnerships,” says Young. “I’m deeply grateful to Anasa Troutman and everyone committed to ensuring Clayborn Temple not only rises again but continues to serve as a beacon of resilience, hope, and unity. I’m fully committed to supporting Anasa and the team as they work to rebuild — or even reimagine — something just as monumental and powerful on that site. What happens next at Clayborn should reflect the same courage and vision that shaped its past. We’re not just rebuilding a structure. We’re reclaiming a symbol, one that reminds us who we are, what we’ve overcome, and where we’re going.”
