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Robert Reed Church (June 18, 1839 – August 29, 1912) was an African-American entrepreneur, businessman and landowner in Memphis, Tennessee who began his rise during the American Civil War. Multiple sources have noted him as the first African-American millionaire in the South, but by the end of the 20th century, historians concluded his total wealth reached $700,000, not a round million.〔 Church built a reputation for great wealth and influence in the business community. He founded Solvent Savings Bank, the first black-owned bank in the city, which extended credit to blacks so they could buy homes and develop businesses. As a philanthropist, Church used his wealth to develop a park, playground, auditorium and other facilities for the black community, who were excluded by state-enacted racial segregation from most such amenities in the city. The son of a mixed-race mother and white father, Church began working as a steward when his father, a steamboat owner, took him along on his route between Memphis and New Orleans, Louisiana. Robert Church bought his first property in Memphis in 1862. He was well established by 1878-79, the years of devastating yellow fever epidemics which resulted in dramatic depopulation in the city. With property devalued, Church bought numerous businesses as well as undeveloped land, with the long-term view of their appreciation as the city recovered. He built his great wealth on this real estate. A popular account holds that he bought the first $1000 bond to help the city reduce its debt after its failure in 1878-79; this reflects his influence but has been disproved by historians.〔 == Early life == Robert Reed Church was born in 1839 in either Holly Springs, Mississippi or Memphis, Tennessee, as the son of Emmeline, a mixed-race woman from Virginia. Sources do not agree on whether or not his mother was a slave; if so, Robert would have been born into slavery, under the principle in slave law of ''partus sequitur ventrem''. His father was Captain Charles B. Church, a white steamship owner from Virginia who operated along the Mississippi River. According to family accounts, Emmeline was the daughter of an enslaved "Malay" Malagasy princess and of a white planter from Lynchburg.〔Feldman, Ingham (1994), p. 135〕 Robert's mother Emmeline died in 1851, when he was 12. His father Captain Church began taking Robert along on his river journeys to and from New Orleans. The youth worked as the steward of the steamship's mess hall, picking up business acumen and contacts, and saving money earned. In 1862 Robert Church bought a bar in Memphis, which he eventually traded for a saloon and billiard room. (He must have been free by then to buy property, and his father may have vouched for him.) In 1860, the black population of the city was 3,000, but it rapidly increased as fugitive slaves fled from rural plantations to Union lines in the occupied city. Church had many customers for his businesses and became influential in the developing black community, which reached 20,000 by 1865.〔(Ryan, James G. (1977). "The Memphis Riots of 1866: Terror in a black community during Reconstruction" ), ''The Journal of Negro History'' 62 (3): 243-257, at JSTOR.〕 The next year, postwar tensions in the city erupted in the Memphis Riots of 1866, when a white ethnic Irish mob attacked South Memphis, killing 45 blacks and injuring many more, and destroying houses, churches and businesses.〔 The dramatic demographic changes had resulted in competition among ethnic Irish, who dominated the city's police and fire departments; decommissioned black Union soldiers who had been stationed nearby, and other African Americans.〔(Art Carden and Christopher J. Coyne, "An Unrighteous Piece of Business: A New Institutional Analysis of the Memphis Riot of 1866" ), Mercatus Center, George Mason University, July 2010, accessed 1 February 2014〕 Church was shot and wounded in his saloon during the riot. A total of two whites died. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert Reed Church」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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