Imagine walking through Downtown Memphis on a Monday morning, in the summer of 1876. The Civil War’s shadow still touches everything in sight. In a few months, a presidential election will bring the end of Reconstruction, that brief moment when many former slaves thought they might enter U.S. society on more equal terms.
You’re walking south on Fourth Street, not far from where FedExForum will be built a century from now. There’s a crowd around you — hundreds of people of all ages, jostling each other, pointing and murmuring. You’re all here for the same reason: to see the chain gang pass by.
Many cities in the modern South were built by these processions of (mostly Black) prisoners — who worked off municipal fines by cleaning roads, alleys and markets or filling in on construction projects. The Memphis chain gang is the largest it’s ever been, but many citizens want it replaced with a proper workhouse. Even the Memphis Police Department says the chain gang “is only an expense” and officers frequently release potential inmates to spare them from “the humiliating disgrace.”
The prisoners are sweeping the street together, a ball and chain dragging loosely behind each person’s feet. But only one has the crowd’s attention: a Black woman dressed in jeans, a blue cotton shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, leaning on her broom as she hobbles forward. Your eyes meet hers, and instantly, you know who she is.
Her name is Frances Thompson. She’s a seamstress, washerwoman and Hoodoo practitioner in her mid 30s. To newspapers across the country, she is a “notorious criminal,” a “villain,” a “wonderfully vile creature.” They wonder aloud if they should call her “she,” “he,” or “it.” To the crowd, she is a curiosity: Some people have traveled from rural Tennessee and Mississippi just to see her. But she rejects all these versions of her imposed from the outside. She turns her face away — as the city she calls home takes her life apart, piece by piece.
Up from slavery
Thompson was born into slavery around 1840. Historical records about her life are scattered and contradictory, but according to Thompson, she was born and raised in Maryland. Enslaved by a Virginia-born man named Robert Walker (or Wallace), Thompson traveled with his family to Memphis when she was a child.
Although she was assigned male at birth, the Walkers recognized her as a girl and allowed her to dress in traditionally feminine clothing. According to a Beale Street hairdresser who styled her sometimes, Thompson said that she “used to copy massa’s shaving” with his razors. She also used mobility aids from a young age because of cancer in her foot. One account claimed that her legs “were as crooked as a young dogwood tree or a ram’s horn,” and newspapers frequently called her “Crutchy.”
During the Civil War, slaves and free Black migrants flooded into Memphis. By 1865, the city was 40% Black, “almost three times the antebellum Black population.” According to Thompson, almost all of her owner’s family “got killed in the rebel army,” allowing her to begin living as a free woman.
Thompson then rented a home on Gayoso Street, in a majority-Black neighborhood known as “Hell’s Half-Acre.” Like many Black women in Memphis, she made a living by sewing, washing and ironing clothes — assisted by a 16-year-old housemate named Lucy Smith. But a year after slavery formally ended in Tennessee, the two would become national names.
On May 1, 1866, city police sparked a fight with Black federal soldiers that quickly turned into a massacre. Over the following days, “every African American church and schoolhouse was destroyed” and “hundreds of homes and businesses were burglarized and burned.” Seven men (including two police officers) broke into Thompson’s home. After forcing her to cook for them, the men proceeded to beat, rape and rob Thompson and Smith. Over a harrowing four hours, the men told Thompson that they hoped to “drive all the Yankees out of the town” and “burn up the last God damned nigger.”
A month after the massacre, Thompson and Smith testified to a Congressional panel about their experience, bringing panel members to tears. When the panel released its findings, it used these testimonies to argue that Emancipation had not resolved the deep racial hatred propping up Southern society. According to historian Hannah Rosen, Thompson’s appeal to the federal government “asserted a claim to the status of woman and citizen” when Black women had few legal recourses as rape victims.
Although no rioters were ever arrested for their crimes, Thompson helped shift public opinion about the Memphis Massacre — which sparked energy for new social reforms, locally and nationally. In the aftermath of that Congressional panel, Tennessee’s state government briefly took control of MPD and dismissed the entire force. Back in Washington, Radical Republicans cited the horrors of Memphis as they passed the Reconstruction Acts.
‘The city’s most distinguished prisoner’
Thompson soon went back to her normal life, sewing, doing laundry and taking contract work as a house servant. In the late 1860s, she moved to a small home on Madison Avenue and took a new roommate, a young, chronically ill woman named Sallie Jordan. A few years later, she moved again to the northeast corner of Front Street and A.W. Willis Avenue, across from the old Shelby County Jail. She hung a sign above her door that read, “Madame Thompson, Fortune Teller” in red, green and yellow lettering.
Spiritualists were a common part of enslaved communities and Memphis developed a thriving Hoodoo tradition after Emancipation. Several descriptions of Thompson claim she made and sold “mojo bags,” small charms often “carried for protection, for blessings and for luck.” In 1873, a man named John Randolph accused her of disturbing the peace by placing a curse on a sick Black woman — though the case was dismissed in court.
Thompson had a prolific arrest record, repeatedly appearing in court for fighting, disorderly conduct and running a brothel (a dubious charge often used to target single Black women). Each time, she paid her fines — usually between $5 and $15 — and returned home. That all changed on the night of July 10, 1876.
A neighbor told MPD that Thompson was not a woman at all but a man in disguise. Officers treated the claim like a smoking gun. Joseph Nuttall, a prominent physician who contracted with the city, told MPD that he could verify Thompson’s biological sex. A police sergeant named Pat McElroy arrested her and took her to MPD’s central station on Adams Street. There, Dr. Nuttall visited her cell with three other physicians and forced her to undergo a medical examination.
Shortly before the Civil War, Memphis City Council had amended its public indecency law to make what they then called “cross-dressing” illegal. Around the same time, the council also banned vagrancy, gambling and Black social gatherings known as “negro balls.” Collectively, these laws were early versions of the “Black Codes” that criminalized Black public life. In Thompson’s case, she was fined the maximum amount of $50 (around $1,400 today). When she couldn’t pay, she was sentenced to one hundred days in the chain gang, where she would receive 50 cents per day as she cleaned the streets.
On July 14, officers escorted her to a photography studio, where she was made to pose for two mugshots. The first shows Thompson as she dressed for the chain gang. In the second, she holds an umbrella and handkerchief, draped in a flowing dress and scarf; the outfit wasn’t hers but was “improvised” from clothes in the studio. These pictures were then hung in the office of police chief Phil Athy, where MPD kept a so-called “rogue’s gallery” of infamous local criminals. They were also reproduced as woodcuts for a New York tabloid — and these woodcuts are the only real images of Thompson that remain. In them, she has an expression so solemn, it seems you can feel her hurt. She looks out at an audience she wishes was not there.
“When she announced plans to leave Memphis as soon as she was free, the police responded by photographing her in both men’s and women’s attire,” wrote Susan Stryker in her essay about these images. “[This was done] so that the images could be sent to police departments in other cities to prevent, in their words, ‘this hideous criminal from playing the same role again.’”
While Thompson served her sentence, her landlord filed a civil suit, claiming that Thompson was behind on rent at her Front Street home. The court agreed to seize and sell off Thompson’s assets to make up the difference. Police raided her home a day after photographing her: They took her furniture to the auction house, along with her and her customers’ linens. They also took the sign from her door and hung it in the police station as a trophy.
Crowds flocked to the chain gang on its daily routes, hoping to get a look at Thompson, ask her questions or make snide comments. Some of her fellow prisoners used the chaos to escape. It wasn’t long before she was taken off the chain gang entirely, working out the rest of her sentence at the police station. Inmates, reporters and ordinary citizens kept harassing her there — while Southern politicians used her arrest to dismiss her experience in the Memphis Massacre. Eventually, she stopped speaking to the public and kept her head down. She wondered about leaving the city for good.
The Frances Thompson effect
After finishing her sentence, Thompson moved to a cabin in North Memphis, where she grew sick over the following weeks. On Nov. 1, 1876, she died of dysentery in the city hospital.
Thompson’s bravery, fierceness and resilience helped shape the path of Reconstruction. But she didn’t necessarily see herself as a hero or icon. Thompson lived under an anti-Black government and police force that drew violent lines between races and genders — forcing her into the public eye because she insisted on her right to live safely and authentically.
It’s hard to say how many trans people were arrested under Memphis’ indecency laws. Police statistics often combined these arrests with other misdemeanors, and newspapers didn’t always record them. But Thompson was in no way unique.
A month into Thompson’s sentence, national news covered the story of a 35-year-old Black trans woman named Anne Casey (or “French Mag” Porter). Casey was born enslaved by a New Orleans sea captain; she spoke French, worked as a nurse and servant and was meticulous about her hair and makeup. Before living in Memphis, she’d traveled across the Midwest and South, working as a chambermaid on riverboats and doing repeated jail stints in other cities.
After getting convicted for vagrancy, Casey was sentenced to a year on President’s Island — where former slave trader and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest ran a prison work farm. She faked a pregnancy by stuffing rags under her dress, and doctors released her to get medical care. Instead, she went home to the corner of Fourth Street and Jefferson Avenue, where a neighbor turned her into police.
Eighteen months later, MPD stopped a house servant named Jenny Smith near the corner of Main Street and Union Avenue. Less information remains about her, but she was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, had a “fine falsetto voice” and “wore both men and women’s clothing when agreeable.” After her arrest, a reporter urged officers to examine her and she was charged with “cross-dressing” soon after.
Like Thompson, these women were jailed for living as openly trans, subjected to invasive medical examinations and fined as much as the law allowed. Sensationalist newspapers called them Thompson copycats, warning of a possible “epidemic” of Black “cross-dressers.”
How can we offer real solidarity to the Thompsons, Caseys and Smiths of Memphis today? Trans people across the Mid-South continue to face discrimination in housing, healthcare, employment and the carceral system. Nationally, almost half of all trans people have been sexually assaulted. As nonprofits like OUTMemphis and My Sistah’s House are hard at work building community-driven support systems for trans Memphians, we should see Thompson as more than an outlier in local history.
In her time, over 30,000 Memphians crisscrossed the streets with Thompson each day. We should remember her as she might have hoped we would: as one of us.
This article first appeared on The Emancipator and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.