Most of Tennessee's African Americans
were enslaved from the colonial era until the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865 and abolition of slavery. Although activists in the state played a significant role in early U.S. 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. 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. In 1875, Randall Brown served on Nashville's city commission, and blacks comprised almost one-third of the municipal government personnel."
Prior to statehood Early African Americans came to Tennessee primarily 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. Early African-American arrivals included those purchased as slaves by Cherokee Indians and brought by European traders living in native villages. Wealthy white families from
Culpeper, Virginia, brought enslaved African Americans with them to the
Powell Valley in southwest Virginia in 1769. The territorial government of Tennessee rapidly passed laws similar to those in slave states 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.
Early statehood In the 1790 Census, there were 361
free persons of color in Tennessee, and 3,417 people living in slavery. 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." Despite wide-ranging debate, the pro-slavery faction was victorious across the board. The new constitution formally forbade Blacks from voting, whether slave or free. In 1855 the state repealed its 30-year-ban prohibiting interstate slave trading, reflecting that Memphis slave-traders like
Bolton, Dickens, & Co.,
Byrd Hill, and
Nathan Bedford Forrest, had openly flouted this law for many years.
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. In 1860 around 3,000 African Americans lived in Memphis, but by war's end, some twenty thousand had congregated in the area, many south of the city. After the United States Colored Troops were established in 1863, African-American troops in the Union Army became a symbol of new social equality. They disrupted longstanding patterns of racial deference, publicly bore arms, and were seen to receive respect of white officers. Many Southern whites in Memphis and Nashville resented these changes. , 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 the proposal by
Freedmen's Bureau superintendent Nathan A. M. Dudley to arrest jobless blacks and send them into contract labor on rural plantations. Black military police also resisted efforts by local white police (who were predominately ethnic Irish immigrants and their descendants) 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. 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. The Army had only recently ended
martial law in the city, which restored civilian control in Memphis. 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). Some white missionaries who were known to be teachers of or sympathetic to blacks were also beaten or threatened, after which some fled Memphis.
Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow 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. Hale, who were husband and wife.
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. The city bussed students to
Oak Ridge until 1960. Activists in 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. Some whites protested integration and
a bomb was detonated at Hattie Cotton Elementary School. No one was killed, and after that, the desegregation plan proceeded without violence. 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. 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. Numerous college students joined the movement to ride interstate buses into the Deep South, challenging state segregation rules. 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. The white assassin,
James Earl Ray, was a racist escaped convict who had no previous connection to the city. == Political power ==