[11][8] Frankie Pierce attended John G. McKee Freedmen's School, established as a Presbyterian mission[11][12] and located in Nashville.

[7] In Nashville, black women organized church-related and secular clubs in order to pursue their social-justice goals, such as better schools, childcare, and settlement houses.

[12] She was a founder of the Nashville Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and also served on the first Management Committee of the Blue Triangle League of the YWCA.

[7][12] Members of these clubs led by Frankie Pierce marched to the mayor's office to demand public restrooms for black women in downtown Nashville.

[11] Pierce worked with the clubs to lobby for the legislation to establish the school,[11] helped by Fisk University's registrar Minnie Lou Crosthwaite.

Frankie Pierce and Mattie E. Coleman, an African-American physician and leading feminist in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, were among Tennessee's most active black suffragists.

[19] This address of a black woman to several hundred white women in the Tennessee Capitol is called by Elaine Weiss "a taboo-breaking experiment in political cooperation".

[22] Anita Goodstein calls the black women’s offer of cooperation with white suffragists in return for specific benefits a “rare alliance” and observes that it happened only in Nashville.

[6] On August 26, 2016, as part of Women's Equality Day, a monument by Alan LeQuire was unveiled in Centennial Park in Nashville, featuring depictions of Pierce, Carrie Chapman Catt, Anne Dallas Dudley, Abby Crawford Milton, and Sue Shelton White.