"This project is designed to call public attention to an event that rattled Reconstruction-era Memphis in May 1866. The first large-scale racial massacre to erupt in the post-Civil War South, the massacre in Memphis played a key role in prompting Congress to enact sweeping changes to federal policies and to constitutional law. It also lent a new urgency to an ongoing national debate about the meaning of freedom and the rights of citizens. It was a massacre of historic proportions, one that helped lay the ground for who we are today as a nation....