Thompson said she was assaulted and beaten so badly she remained in bed for days and was sick for two weeks. Lucy Smith, who was also attacked and assaulted, testified that she “thought they had killed me.”
Newspapers published excerpts from the House report. Rosen said the brutality of the massacre, combined with the testimony of Thompson and the other women who were assaulted, horrified the nation.
Then, later that summer, another White mob descended on a Black political rally in New Orleans, killing 34 Black residents and injuring more than 100 people.
At the time, states were weighing whether to ratify the 14th Amendment, and the combined horrors of the back-to-back race massacres underscored the need for constitutional protections to ensure Black Americans had equal rights.
The text of the 14th Amendment borrowed heavily from the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared all people born in the United States, except for Native Americans who did not pay taxes, to be US citizens, regardless of their race or “previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.”
The law’s language around “full and equal benefit of the law” was also adapted into the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Rosen credits the bravery of Thompson and the other women who testified with helping to shift the national sentiment around the 14th Amendment.
“Her impact isn’t direct, but she was part of the large numbers of people in Memphis … who showed enormous courage showing up to tell their story to congressional leaders who were not necessarily sympathetic,” Rosen said.
“We can only assume she did that because they hoped it would have an impact, and they wanted their stories recorded, and they wanted the world to change.”
Despite her bravery, Thompson was later forcibly outed as a transgender woman – and her life would ultimately end in tragedy.
A decade later, Thompson is outed and forced to work in chains
Not much is known about Thompson’s life until a decade after the massacre, when her name once again began to appear in newspapers.
A decade after the end of the Civil War, the gains made during Reconstruction had already started to wane. Many Black residents had fled Memphis after the massacre, and the state took over the Memphis police department, Rosen said, because the officers “were seen as out-of-control ruffians … who had obviously been a key source of the violence.”
In 1876, Thompson was still living in South Memphis when rumors began circulating that she was “cross-dressing,” a violation of a local ordinance.