African Americans in Tennessee

Davidson County, whose principal city is the state capital of Nashville, was home to the largest share of African Americans from 1800 to 1850. Since 1860, Memphis' Shelby County has had the largest population of African Americans.[5]

Early African Americans came to Tennessee from the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. They, or their parents and grandparents, arrived in North America via the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from West Africa.[8] Early African American arrivals included those purchased as slaves by Cherokee Indians and brought by European traders living in native villages.[9] Wealthy white families from Culpepper, Virginia, brought enslaved African Americans with them to the Powell Valley in southwest Virginia in 1769.[9]

Historian Cynthia Cumfer notes that slavery in early Tennessee was an isolating experience, even in comparison with Virginia and North Carolina. According to 1779-80 records, the vast majority of slaveholders held legal title over just one or two persons, "with the largest holding being ten or eleven slaves." Enslaved African Americans sought out one another through taverns, churches, workplaces, and their owners' kitchens.[10]

The territorial government of Tennessee made early moves to restrict the lives of enslaved persons, denying slaves the right to property, to bear arms (unless designated as the huntsman of their plantation), and to sell goods.[11]

In the 1790 Census, there were 361 free persons of color in Tennessee, and 3,417 people living in slavery.[5] Under Tennessee's first constitution, drafted in 1795 and effective with statehood in 1796, free Blacks were not restricted from voting, although there is no evidence they were permitted to do so in practice.[12]

Public sentiment supporting the abolition of slavery swelled in the first three decades of the 1800s. An 1826 law prohibited the bringing slaves into the state for purposes of sale, rather than the direct use of their labor.[13] Freedmen were required "without fail [to] have [their] emancipation records with [them] at any time and place in order to prove [their] freedom.[13] In 1831, however, the state government mandated that emancipated slaves immediately depart the state, and prohibited the migration of free Blacks to Tennessee.

The 1834 State Constitutional Convention in Nashville defeated a proposal to gradually abolish slavery over a twenty-year period.[14][15] Despite wide-ranging debate, the pro-slavery faction was victorious across the board. The new constitution formally forbid Blacks, slave or free, from voting.[14] It also stripped the legislature of any "power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves, without the consent of their owner or owners." The right to bear arms was restricted to "the free white men of this State."[16]

Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy on June 24, 1861. Nashville was an immediate target of Union forces. In February 1862, it became the first state capital to fall to the Union troops. Union forces moving down the Mississippi River captured Memphis from the Confederacy in the Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862. Under Union control, both cities swelled with freed slaves and other refugees. Where around 3,000 African Americans lived in Memphis in 1860, some twenty thousand were there by the war's end.[17] African-American troops in the Union Army became a symbol of new social equality, disrupting longstanding patterns of racial deference, publicly bearing arms, and receiving the respect of white officers.[18]

Freedmen's schoolhouse burned, Memphis riots of 1866, as illustrated in Harper's Weekly.

In the aftermath of the war, Memphis became the scene of tensions between white authorities and African American soldiers. The troops effectively countermanded Freedmen's Bureau superintendent Nathan A. M. Dudley's proposal to arrest jobless blacks and send them into contract labor on rural plantations. Black military police also resisted efforts by local white police to close dance houses patronized by whites and to enforce prewar customs of Black deference. 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. A police-organized posse, which included white laborers, firemen, and small proprietors, began a two-day pillaging of black Memphis, while white Union soldiers did not intervene. These Memphis riots of 1866 resulted in the deaths of 46 blacks and 2 whites, and the destruction by fire of 91 homes, 4 churches and 8 schools.[19]

The first hospital that served African-Americans in Tennessee, the Millie E. Hale Hospital, was established in Nashville by a husband and wife team, Dr. John Henry Hale and Millie E. Hale in July 1916.[20][21]

In 1956, Clinton High School was the first public school to be desegregated by 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 the white supremacists John Kasper and Asa Carter incited cross burnings and violence. The National Guard was deployed to Clinton for two months. On October 5, 1958 Clinton High School was bombed, nobody was injured, and students had to be bussed to Oak Ridge until 1960.[22]

Nashville and Memphis played central roles in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1957, Nashville public schools began to be desegregated using the "stair-step" plan as proposed by Dan May; people protested integration and, at Hattie Cotton Elementary School, a bomb was detonated. No one was killed, and after that the desegregation plan went on without violence.[23] 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 initially met with violence and arrests, the protesters were eventually successful 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), which emerged as one of the most influential organizations of the civil rights movement. The first movement credited to SNCC was the 1961 Nashville Open Theater Movement, directed and strategized by James Bevel, which desegregated the city's theaters. Nashville also became a launching site for Freedom Riders in 1961 after the original riders from Washington, D.C., were stopped in Birmingham, Alabama.[24]

A sanitation workers' strike in Memphis in 1968 was linked to both the Civil Rights Movement and the Poor People's Campaign. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had come to the city in support of the striking workers, 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. The assassin, James Earl Ray, was a racist escaped convict who had no previous connection to the city.[25]