photograph courtesy clayborn reborn
Frank Smith (left) and Rob Thompson survey the renovation work being done at Clayborn Temple in 2017.
Since its opening in 2004, FedExForum has drawn millions of people to Downtown Memphis. As a goodly portion of those people waited on Linden (now Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue) to park in the Grizzlies garage, they couldn’t help but notice the huge, boarded-up stone church across from the entrance, just south of bustling Beale Street. In a city beset by blight, Clayborn Temple seemed like something of a talisman.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. For most of its existence, this historic church — first serving a white congregation, then an African-American one — was a symbol of the community it served. “This was the largest church building south of the Ohio River when it opened in 1892,” explains Rob Thompson, president of Clayborn Reborn, the nonprofit group charged with Clayborn Temple’s restoration as a major community institution.
When the thriving Second Presbyterian Church of Memphis that year completed the $100,000 Romanesque Revival structure on the corner of Hernando and Pontotoc, it became the crown jewel of a downtown district filled with houses of worship. Next door to the temple, where now there are only two rows of trees bordering an empty lot, was a large Episcopal Church. A Methodist church once stood where the Forum’s parking lot is now located. On Sunday mornings, the three blocks north of Linden were crowded with worshippers.
“People rode their horses, or walked, to church,” explains Thompson. “Memphis was very dense and urban. The city’s eastern boundaries in the 1890s would have been no further than Manassas, if even that far. In the 1870 census, the population between Pontotoc and the Mississippi was 50-50 black and white. People were living together, on top of each other. I think it was interesting to think about how it was back then. A wealthy congregation built an opulent, beautiful place, a block and a half from Beale Street. This church’s organ was waking people up on Beale Street after a hard Saturday night.”
That Temple’s organ was the first one in the city powered by electricity, and with at least 5,000 pipes, it remains the city’s largest. For more than five decades, this landmark building was the spiritual and physical home of Second Presbyterian Church. But by the end of the 1940s, the congregation wasn’t what it used to be. As the city expanded eastward, many of its wealthier members bought homes in the newly created suburbs. By then, the automobile had transformed the country, and the city of Memphis along with it — a transformation that proved to be a double-edged sword for Second Presbyterian.
“A lot of the congregation was lost during World War II, because of gas rationing,” explains Thompson. In 1949, Second Presbyterian recorded only a single baptism. “It was an older congregation,” Thompson says. “There were no young people having babies.”
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Dance and musical performances, such as a concert by Kirk Whalum (right) have drawn people to the old church while it is being restored.
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Jamie Harmon
Dance and musical performances, such as a concert by Kirk Whalum (right) have drawn people to the old church while it is being restored.
That year, the Second Presbyterian congregation decided to sell the building on Linden, and move to a new home at Goodlett and Central, which was then the eastern boundary of the expanding city. At the time, postwar suburbanization was in full effect, and the building’s buyers reflected Downtown’s changing demographics. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church had been founded in Philadelphia in 1816, making it the oldest independent Protestant church denomination in the world founded by African Americans. The AME church paid $100,000 for the building and grounds — the same amount of money in absolute terms it was built for, but the equivalent of $270,000 in 1891 dollars.
The AME renamed the building “Clayborn Temple” after its dynamic pastor, Bishop J.M. Clayborn, and once again, it became the home to a large, thriving congregation with deep roots in the community. “[The AME] has had, since its founding, a long tradition of what we would call social activism,” says Thompson. “It was just natural that, once the group moved into this building, they would rename it Clayborn Temple, after the bishop of this district. This was a socially motivated, socially active congregation.”
Clayborn Temple’s location next to Beale Street, the historic economic and social hub of black life in the Mid-South, made it the most prominent African-American church in the city. When the first rumblings of the civil rights movement were heard in the 1950s, the church naturally became a local hub for activism, setting the church on the course to its date with destiny.
photograph courtesy Clayborn Reborn
An artists’ roundtable event in the sanctuary.
By the late 1960s, the Jim Crow South was crumbling under the assault of the national civil rights movement. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave African-Americans unfettered access to the ballot box for the first time since Reconstruction. But the racist power structure was not giving up without a fight. Working conditions for white and black Memphis Sanitation Department workers showed a vast disparity, with black workers not even being allowed to use the showers, and thus having to ride the bus home while stinking of garbage.
During the 1960s, tensions rose in the department until, on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death while seeking shelter from the freezing rain in the back of a garbage truck. Ten days later, more than half of Memphis’ 1,200 African-American sanitation workers walked off the job.
“It was a truly grassroots deal,” explains Thompson. “That’s what makes it so Memphis to me. … The national union [ASCME] was frustrated. You don’t start a strike in February. You start a strike in July or August, when the garbage is really going to stink. … These guys risked everything for their dignity.”
Clayborn Temple became the rallying point for the strikers, who would gather daily at the Temple and march en mass to the courthouse. “This particular African-American congregation had a white minister from Canada named Malcolm Blackburn,” Thompson says. “He was what today we could call a bi-vocational pastor — he had two jobs. He was a journeyman printer. He had a printing press in the basement. The original signs that the strikers used were printed on that press. They opened up the church and said, ‘You guys are welcome to come here every day and organize.’ Eventually, they had nightly meetings, and the community began showing up, too.”
By mid February, the marching strikers were regularly being met with force by the police. On February 24th, after a particularly bloody march, Rev. James Lawson addressed the strikers assembled in Clayborn Temple. “For at the heart of racism is the idea that a man is not a man, that a person is not a person. You are human beings. You are men. You deserve dignity.”
Since then, Lawson’s words, printed on placards by Malcolm Blackburn’s printing press, have reverberated across the world. “There were lots of different signs early on,” says Thompson. “In some of the old photos, you can see that. But ‘I Am A Man’ became the hallmark. When the Arab Spring happened six years ago in Egypt, there were people walking around with ‘I Am A Man’ signs in Cairo. During the protests in Ferguson two years ago, it was ‘I Am A Human Being.’”
After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became increasingly vocal about the economic plight of not only African Americans, but all poor people. In the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, saw an opportunity to address the intersection of race and class.
On March 28th, King traveled to Memphis to lead the strikers on their daily march to the courthouse. But as the marchers rounded the corner at Linden and Main, someone broke a window at the Goldsmith’s department store, and police attacked the marchers, who retreated back to the Temple. Police surrounded the building and fired tear gas through the stained-glass windows, flooding the sanctuary filled with women and children with caustic gas. As the strikers dispersed throughout the city, running battles broke out. Larry Page, a 16-year-old boy, was killed by a shotgun-wielding policeman. His open casket funeral, attended by thousands, was held at Clayborn Temple.
King vowed to return to Memphis and hold a peaceful march. On the afternoon of April 4, 1968, he was gunned down while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Four days later, 42,000 people marched from Clayborn Temple to the court house. On April 18th, Mayor Henry Loeb agreed to the strikers’ demands.
"The limestone walls are almost three feet thick,” says Thompson. “This thing is not going anywhere.”
But the survival of the building doesn’t necessarily translate to the survival of the congregation. In the wake of the social chaos of the Sanitation Workers Strike, Downtown Memphis hollowed out. White flight intensified, and the black families who could leave also headed for the suburbs. The congregation dwindled in size throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but its commitment to social activism remained intact. In its final incarnation, the church ran a homeless shelter and soup kitchen, which helped ten of thousands of impoverished citizens. Then, in 1999, Clayborn Temple closed its doors for the last time.
“The fact that it is the way it is, is a metaphor for Memphis in a lot of ways,” says Thompson. “Clayborn Temple is beautiful, it’s rich in history and cultural significance, and it has indelible ties to our community. And yet it was boarded up and forgotten for 18 years.”
Several attempts have been made over the years to resurrect the structure. The city has repeatedly mulled plans to preserve it. The late Judge D’Army Bailey championed the idea of creating a gospel music museum in the space. In 2003-2004, the AME and Second Presbyterian churches worked together on a scheme to create a new congregation in the structure. Each would contribute a pastor, one black and one white, to create a racially integrated, diverse congregation. But the building’s state of disrepair was too great, and the movement floundered. There it would sit until Frank Smith came along.
"It was an easy, innocent beginning,” says Smith, owner of Wiseacre Brewery. “It has to do with my church. About a dozen years ago, I began to be disturbed by the fact that I looked around on Sunday mornings, and everybody looked like me. They vote like me, they process world issues like me. I needed some diversity in my life, some perspective.”
Smith and his family joined the Downtown Church, a congregation dedicated to diversity in both race and class. “For the last three years, we’ve ended up meeting in the train station, which is undergoing redevelopment. So we got kicked out of the train station. There’s no good answer as to where a 350-member congregation goes to worship on Sunday downtown.
“So instead of buying a piece of dirt and building another church building — Memphis doesn’t need another church building — I said, innocently, one day, ‘I wonder what would happen if we got that old church over by the Forum?’ I knew a little bit about it, not much. When I started digging on it, it took 15 months from the time I first had that thought to convince the AME church to part with it.”
One of the reasons urban blight can be such an insoluble problem is that it is, at once, everyone’s problem and yet no one’s problem. Responsibility for abandoned and decaying properties is shared among the owners, the city, and the banks and financial institutions, with none of them having clear incentives to fix the problem.
Neighborhood Preservation, Inc. (NPI) was founded to bridge those incentive gaps. “NPI gets involved when the government can’t, because they have no programs,” explains NPI attorney Steve Barlow. “The private sector won’t, because there’s no money to be made, but we really believe that somebody in our community must. Somebody must care about these properties and do something about it.”
Neighborhood Preservation, Inc. stepped in to act as a go-between to facilitate the sale of Clayborn Temple to Smith and the Downtown Church. “We became a part of a community movement, where we said we would be willing to hold title to the property as long as we have an exit strategy,” Smith explains. “So long as we have some partners who are willing to occupy it, to do the work, to get creative about programming it.”
Smith says the nonprofit structure created by NPI was vital to convincing AME to let go of the historic structure, which they loved but could not afford to maintain. “It was an emotional and painful thing for them to do,” he recollects, “but the Bishop for this district, Bishop Jeffery Leath, in Nashville, had a lot of courage. He spent a lot of relational capital inside his own organization, but finally they allowed us to put it into this nonprofit status.
“It wouldn’t have worked if we had put it in a for-profit framework. … Steve’s group [NPI] is the perfect partner. They provided a financial structure to sort of park the title. We’re in the process now of forming our own not-for-profit.”
“This place is way too important for it just to be a church on Sunday. It needs to be alive and breathe with the same kind of energy it did all of its life.”
— Frank Smith
After years of neglect, the physical state of the building was not good. Much of the original hardwood flooring had rotted away. The giant organ is a long way from being able to make sweet music.
“We’re trying to raise the money for a study to inventory everything that’s in there, to see if it can be restored,” says Thompson. “There are two major chamber rooms that have been vandalized. But the organ is critical; it’s the voice of the building that hasn’t been heard in at least 20 years.”
The restoration is well under way, and once the situation was stabilized enough for the Downtown Church to begin having weekly meetings there, they discovered that many people were eager to hold their events in the hallowed walls. This year’s Juneteenth celebration (Monday, June 19th) will feature a performance by the Prizm Ensemble and Chamber Orchestra.
“It’s an orchestra that is racially diverse in a way that mirrors the demographics of Memphis,” says Lecolion Washington, executive director of Prizm. “We’re bringing that orchestra to this space on that day to perform a work called Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.”
The contemporary classical piece was first performed last year in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Each of its seven movements is a eulogy to victims of police shootings. “It was originally just for a men’s choir and piano,” says Washington. “It’s been adapted and arranged for full orchestra.”
Washington says Prizm is reaching out to choruses from different churches all over the city. “As we know, the most segregated hour in America is on Sunday morning. We’re going to make sure we’re pulling from a diverse group of churches, so that the product is as diverse as the stage, as diverse as the music that is happening.”
And that’s just one of the events shaping up as the space slowly comes back to life. On June 15th, the On Location: Memphis Film Festival will begin a 15-week film series focusing on Memphis history, art, and spatial justice. The films will include the critically acclaimed Fruitvale Station, the Memphis music documentary Verge, the groundbreaking Hallelujah by King Vidor, which was the first-ever sound film musical, filmed in Memphis in 1928, and The Invaders, the made-in-Memphis documentary about the black power group who was intimately involved in the sanitation workers’ strike.
Frank Smith knows the building has a long way to go before it is restored to its former grandeur, but the surge of interest in Clayborn Temple gives him hope for the future.
“Everybody wants this to happen so badly,” he says. “Once they gave us permission to let people in here, you can feel something. It evokes an emotional, spiritual kind of response out of people.
“It also exposes vulnerability in a way that is really necessary for our city,” he continues. “You can’t heal until you first become vulnerable. That’s what we’ve decided now. We’re just going to live in this state of incompleteness. That’s like Memphis right now. We haven’t quite figured it out. Let’s use this place in its incompleteness to work it out. This runway up to the 50th anniversary of the King assassination seems like the kind of urgency we need to force relationships.”
As Smith surveys the fallen grandeur of the Clayborn Temple sanctuary, emotion creeps into his voice.
“This is a place to bring together opposing forces that do not naturally come together, but do it in a place of safety,” he says. “This place is way too important for it just to be a church on Sunday. It needs to be alive and breathe with the same kind of energy it did all of its life.
“What amazing poetry,” he continues. “Both the rich, white, and privileged and the struggling, black, and disadvantaged abandoned the place. Now to come back and be reactivated, redeemed ... it’s sacred. I really feel something exciting in Memphis these days. I feel proud of our city. We could really do something important from here. We could be a model nationally.”
