Auction Square, this quiet block, was once one of the largest and most active slave markets in the antebellum South. In the decades before the Civil War, Memphis was a major hub in the domestic slave trade, and this square was where human beings were publicly bought and sold. Enslaved people were brought here by slave traders, displayed, inspected, and auctioned — often separated from their families in the process.
Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of people passed through the slave markets of Memphis between the city's founding in 1819 and the end of the Civil War in 1865. The buyers were planters from across the Mid-South purchasing labor for cotton, sugar, and rice fields. For the people being sold, the experience was one of absolute terror and humiliation.
Today the square is a quiet block with no marker, no monument, no acknowledgment of what happened here. That absence is itself a historical statement. Memphis has been slowly reckoning with this history in recent years — the question of how to memorialize this ground remains open.
The cotton wealth you saw on Front Street was inseparable from what happened in this square.