African Americans have played a significant role in the history and culture of Tennessee, arriving in the region even before it achieved statehood. They are the second-largest census "race" category in the state after whites, comprising 17% of Tennessee's population in 2010. The state, particularly its major cities like Memphis and Nashville, has been a crucial ground for African-American culture and the Civil Rights Movement.
Map of Tennessee highlighting Shelby County, where African Americans constitute a majority of the population.
Early Presence and Enslavement
Early African Americans came to Tennessee primarily from the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. The majority of Tennessee's African Americans were enslaved from the colonial era until the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865 and the subsequent abolition of slavery.
Historian Cynthia Cumfer notes that slavery in early Tennessee was an isolating experience for African Americans, even in comparison with Virginia and North Carolina. As in several other states following the American Revolution, in the first three decades of the 1800s, public sentiment supporting the abolition of slavery swelled in Tennessee.
The legislature passed an 1826 law that prohibited bringing slaves into the state for purposes of sale, rather than the direct use of their labor. Freedmen were required "without fail [to] have [their] emancipation records with [them] at any time and place in order to prove [their] freedom."
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In 1831, following Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia, however, the state government mandated that emancipated slaves must immediately depart the state, and prohibited the migration of free Blacks to Tennessee. By the 1834 State Constitutional Convention in Nashville, delegates defeated a proposal for gradual abolition of slavery, to take place over a twenty-year period. Despite wide-ranging debate, the pro-slavery faction was victorious across the board. Additionally, abolitionism, the state government backed slavery in the 1834 constitution, when it was dominated by elite whites of the planter class. The legislature also passed laws that required newly emancipated Blacks to leave the state, and encouraged European immigration. But a small population of free Blacks remained, resisting violence and other attempts to push them out.
Civil War and Reconstruction
Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy, on June 24, 1861. Union forces identified Nashville as an immediate target, because it had a strategic location on the Cumberland River and railroad lines. It fell to Union troops in February 1862. Union forces moving down the Mississippi River captured Memphis, Tennessee from the Confederacy in the First Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862. While under Union control, both cities swelled with freed slaves and other refugees.
After the United States Colored Troops were established in 1863, African-American troops in the Union Army became a symbol of new social equality. In the aftermath of the war, Memphis became the scene of tensions between white authorities and African American soldiers.
Fort Negley in Nashville, Tennessee, during the Civil War.
After the last Black soldiers at Fort Pickering were discharged on April 30, 1866, confrontation arose. Newly in the status of veterans, armed Blacks confronted police who attempted to arrest one of them. Both sides exchanged gunfire, and a police officer was killed. The veterans retreated to Fort Pickering, where they were disarmed by Union officials.
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An uncontrolled, police-organized posse, which included white laborers, firemen, and small proprietors, began a two-day pillage and massacre of black neighborhoods of Memphis, while white Union soldiers led by Union General Stoneman did not intervene until the second day. These Memphis riots of 1866 resulted in the deaths of 46 blacks and 2 whites, over 100 beatings and robberies of blacks, 5 reported rapes, and the destruction by fire of 91 homes, 4 churches and 12 schools (all black).
Following the 1865 end of slavery and the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment that allowed Black men to hold political office, Black Tennesseans played a prominent role in politics. During Reconstruction, they joined the Republican Party and elected a number to the state legislature, which was biracial during these years. Samuel McElwee held office in the 1880s and was nominated for Speaker of the House.
Sekou Franklin and Ray Block Jr. write:"Blacks ran for state and local offices from the 1870s through the 1890s: in Chattanooga, George Sewall, Robert Marsha, David Medlow, and W. B. Kennedy were elected to local offices; in Knoxville, J. B. Young made a failed attempt at the mayor's office in 1872; William Yardley served on the Knoxville City Council in the 1870s and ran for governor in 1876. From 1871 to 1890, nine blacks were elected to the Knoxville City Council, and several blacks served on the Knox County court, including Yardley, Melvin Gentry, William Brooks Sr., and Sam Maples.
Disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow Era
From 1873 to 1888, thirteen African Americans were elected as Republicans to the Tennessee House of Representatives, mostly in the post-Reconstruction era. Among them, David Foote Rivers was elected twice to represent Fayette County as a Republican in 1882 and 1884; however, he was driven out of the county by racial violence and was unable to serve his second term. Jesse M. H. Graham was elected to represent Montgomery County in 1896. By then the sole Black member of the legislature, he was stripped of his seat due to a residency requirement (he had lived in Louisville, Kentucky until October 1895).
Discriminatory ballot restrictions designed to disenfranchise Black voters were enacted via the Dortch Law of 1889. No African American was elected to the Tennessee legislature from 1888 through 1962.
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No hospital in Tennessee served African Americans until the Millie E. Hale Hospital was established in Nashville in July 1916 by Dr. John Henry Hale and Millie E.
Civil Rights Movement
Activists in Nashville and Memphis played central roles in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1956, Clinton High School was the first public school in the state to be desegregated by federal court order. On August 26, 1956, the Clinton 12: Jo Ann Allen, Bobby Cain, Anna Theresser Caswell, Minnie Ann Dickey, Gail Ann Epps, Ronald Hayden, William Latham, Alvah J. McSwain, Maurice Soles, Robert Thacker, Regina Turner, and Alfred Williams, walked from the Green McAdoo School to the high school. On September 1 white supremacists John Kasper and Asa Carter incited cross burnings and violence. The National Guard was deployed to Clinton for two months to suppress the violence. On October 5, 1958, Clinton High School was bombed, but no one was injured.
In 1957, Nashville public schools began to be desegregated using the "stair-step" plan as proposed by Dan May. Some whites protested integration and a bomb was detonated at Hattie Cotton Elementary School.
On February 13, 1960, hundreds of college students involved in the Nashville Student Movement launched a sit-in campaign to desegregate lunch counters throughout the city. Although their efforts were initially met with violence and arrests, the protesters eventually succeeded in pressuring local businesses to end the practice of racial segregation. Many of the activists involved in the Nashville sit-ins-including James Bevel, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis and others-went on to organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This emerged as one of the most influential organizations of the civil rights movement.
Nashville sit-ins.
The first action credited to SNCC was the 1961 Nashville Open Theater Movement, which James Bevel developed the strategy for and directed tactics. It succeeded in desegregating the city's theaters. Nashville also became the site for revival of the Freedom Riders journey by bus in 1961 after the original riders from Washington, D.C., were stopped in Birmingham, Alabama by extreme violence.
In 1968 a sanitation workers' strike in Memphis was linked to both the Civil Rights Movement and the Poor People's Campaign. Prominent minister and activist Martin Luther King Jr. went to the city in support of the striking workers. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel, the day after giving his prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech at the Mason Temple.
Experience the legacy of the people, places and events that defined the Civil Rights Movement in the state by exploring historic sites such as Clark Memorial United Methodist Church in Nashville, the Green McAdoo Cultural Center and Clinton 12 statues in Clinton, and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis featuring the Lorraine Motel, the site of Dr. King's assassination.
Education
Racial integration in higher education was prohibited by the 1870 state constitution, passed during the Reconstruction era and a compromise in order to gain support for public education in the lower grades. In 1937 and 1939 the University of Tennessee denied admission to seven African Americans. It admitted its first African-American student, Gene Gray, in 1952 under a court ruling the prior year that ended the integration ban for graduate and professional students. Following Brown v. In 2014-15, 1,802 of the university's 27,410 students were African American.
Memphis State University was integrated in 1959 with the admission of the Memphis State Eight, eight African-American students. These students were initially required to remain on campus only for the duration of their classes.
Tennessee is the site of seven historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The racially integrated and abolitionist American Missionary Association established eleven universities in the aftermath of the Civil War, including two in Tennessee, LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School at Camp Shiloh in 1862, and Fisk Free Colored School in Nashville in 1866. LeMoyne moved to Memphis in 1863 and is now incorporated in LeMoyne-Owen College; Fisk developed as the prestigious Fisk University.
The Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School, the only publicly funded HBCU in the state, began serving students in 1912. Renamed several times, having developed its curriculum and merged with the predominantly white University of Tennessee at Nashville in 1979, it is now known as Tennessee State University.
Fisk University is amongst the highly ranked Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The Fisk Jubilee Singers are an acapella ensemble that made history as the first collegiate music group to win a Grammy. Fisk’s rich history doesn’t stop there as it became the first HBCU to establish an NCAA gymnastics team.
Contemporary Tennessee
As of 2012, African Americans make up a larger share of the public school system than of the population as a whole. Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, schooling in Tennessee continues to be substantially segregated by race, while influenced strongly by suburbanization and changes to housing patterns, as well as changes to demographics in many areas. During the 2011-12 school year, 44.8% of African-American students in Tennessee public schools attended schools that had more than 90% minority students (this is the 9th highest percentage in the nation).
In the early 20th century, many cities adopted a city commissioner form of government. At the time, it was considered progressive, in an effort to supersede what was known as machine politics in cities. It called for all city commissioner positions to be elected at-large. In practice, that meant that only candidates who could each attract a majority of voters could be elected. In majority-white cities, this form of government generally resulted in even substantial minority groups of voters being unable to elect candidates of their choice. Such was the case in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was majority white and affiliated with the Republican Party.
Twelve Black residents filed a federal civil rights suit against the city, Brown v. Board of Commissioners of the City of Chattanooga (1987). The court ruled in favor of the African-American plaintiffs. In 1989 the city's governing body was changed to a 9-member council with members elected from 9 single-member districts, defined by census tract and racial demographics. Three districts had a majority of African-American residents, and they comprised the majority of the city's 36% African-American population, most of whose voters were members of the Democratic Party.
Willie Wilbert Herenton was the first African American elected as Mayor of Memphis, Tennessee. He served five terms from 1991 to 2009.
New black-owned businesses in Tennessee are on the rise each day especially because of organizations like Corner to Corner and the Nashville Black Market.
The work of African Americans in the Tennessee community is monumental, influential, and ever-growing.
| County | Percentage of African American Population (2010) |
|---|---|
| Shelby | 52.1% |
| Haywood | 50.4% |
| Hardeman | 41.4% |
| Madison | 36.3% |
| Lauderdale | 34.9% |
Counties in Tennessee with the Highest Percentage of African American Population (2010).
