African Americans in Tennessee
[5] The state, and particularly the major cities of Memphis and Nashville, have been important sites in African-American culture and the Civil Rights Movement.
[6] The majority of African Americans in Tennessee reside in the western part of the state, which had a concentration of large cotton plantations in the antebellum period.
[8] In 19 of the state's 95 counties, African Americans make up more than 10% of the population: Shelby (52.1%), Haywood (50.4%), Hardeman (41.4%), Madison (36.3%), Lauderdale (34.9%), Fayette (28.1%), Davidson (27.7%), Lake (27.7%), Hamilton (20.2%), Montgomery (19.1%), Gibson (18.8%), Tipton (18.7%), Dyer (14.3%), Crockett (12.6%), Rutherford (12.5%), Obion (10.6%), Giles (10.2%), and Carroll (10.1%).
[9] Now majority-black, the city of Memphis is home to more than four hundred thousand African Americans, making it one of the largest population centers of this ethnic group.
[10] At least eight other municipalities have African-American majorities: Bolivar, Brownsville, Gallaway, Gates, Henning,Humboldt, Mason, Stanton, Whiteville.
The legislature also passed laws that required newly emancipated Blacks to leave the state, and encouraged European immigration.
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.
[15] Early African-American arrivals included those purchased as slaves by Cherokee Indians and brought by European traders living in native villages.
[16] Historian Cynthia Cumfer notes that slavery in early Tennessee was an isolating experience for African Americans, 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."
[11] 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.
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.
"[23] In 1855 the state repealed its 30-year-ban prohibiting interstate slave trading,[24] reflecting that Memphis slave-traders like Bolton, Dickens, & Co., Byrd Hill, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, had openly flouted this law for many years.
Union forces identified Nashville as an immediate target, because it had a strategic location on the Cumberland River and railroad lines.
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.
They disrupted longstanding patterns of racial deference, publicly bore arms, and were seen to receive respect of white officers.
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.
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).
The first action credited to SNCC was the 1961 Nashville Open Theater Movement, which James Bevel developed the strategy for and directed tactics.
Numerous college students joined the movement to ride interstate buses into the Deep South, challenging state segregation rules.
After the American Civil War, the state's ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments resulted in African-American men being granted the right to vote in 1866.
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).
The Tennessee State Library and Archives notes, "According to several newspaper reports, the General Assembly soon [after] passed a bill blocking the election of black candidates.
Archie Walter Willis Jr. became the first Black legislator in Tennessee in over seven decades in 1964, after passage of the federal Civil Rights Act that year.
Today in the early 21st century, African Americans make up 13% of the legislature; they are all registered Democrats, having aligned with the party that supported the civil rights movement.
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.
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.
