Historic Clayborn Temple ‘a total loss’ after fire

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) — Clayborn Temple, a Memphis church hailed as an epicenter during the civil rights movement, has suffered significant damage after catching fire and burning during the early morning on April 28.

Around 1:30 a.m. the fire broke out at the historic location on Hernando Street near Pontotac Avenue.

Memphis Fire Department says the church has sustained significant damage, and most of the damage was done to the inside of the building.

MFD says the fire is under control, but says that it is a “total loss.”

There were no firefighters injured, according to MFD Chief Gina Sweat.

The National Civil Rights Museum released the following statement on the loss of the building:

Investigators are working with the Memphis Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to determine the cause of the fire.

Long before it became a beacon of Black history, the church on the corner of Hernando Street and East Pontotoc Avenue was originally owned by a white congregation.

Over the next several decades, more African Americans began moving downtown and Sunday services began to change.

With that, in 1949, the church sold the building to Bishop J.M. Clayborn’s African Methodist Episcopal Church and changed its name to Clayborn Temple.

By the 1960s, AME Ministers Henry Logan Starks and Ralph Jackson had become active in the Civil Rights Movement. It was a natural fit when in 1968, Memphis sanitation workers used Clayborn Temple as their headquarters to demand better working conditions, after garbage collectors Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck.

In the spring of 1968, the sanitation workers went on strike and marched from Clayborn Temple to city hall daily. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw what was happening and brought his Poor People’s Campaign to Memphis to help further the strikers’ cause.

The historic I AM A MAN signs were printed inside the church on the pastor’s own printing press.

In the 1980s, with fewer members, the church ran a soup kitchen until it closed in 1999. The building sat vacant until 2015, when Neighborhood Preservation Incorporated reopened the church for services and social justice gatherings.

In 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Clayborn Temple a National Treasure and the following year, on the 50th anniversary of the sanitation strike and Dr. King’s assassination, the city erected the I Am a Man Plaza outside the temple.

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