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183 The civil rights movement carried out in Tennessee by black women and men has a complex and an expansive history, but it has always has been about gaining socioeconomic equality and human and civil rights for African Americans. The movement, which reached its acme following World War II, had its beginnings in antebellum times. In 1780, most black residents of Tennessee were slaves who had arrived with white Tennessee settlers. When Tennessee became a state, in 1796, nearly 20 percent of its residents were African Americans. Each was counted as a person for the purpose of state representation in Congress, and the state constitution made no mention of the fact that slaves were property or, indeed, of slavery. Tennessee’s free black citizens had civil rights and could vote until they were disfranchised in the state constitution of 1835.1 As a consequence , some free blacks relocated to Ohio and Canada. For example, Sally Thomas, a quasi-independent slave laundress and operator of a Nashville boarding house, helped one of her three boys escape to the North and bought the freedom of her youngest. After 1838, because numerous escaped slaves also were fleeing the state, Tennessee newspapers carried hundreds of announcements offering rewards for their return.2 The modern civil rights movement in Tennessee had its origins in the Civil War,when26percentof Tennesseanswereblack.Andfromthebeginning,many black Tennessee activists were women. In 1881, for example, Julia B. Hooks, a teacher, suffered arrest and a $5 fine for disorderly conduct for defiantly sitting in a whites-only section of a downtown Memphis theater.3 In December 1884, Ida B. Wells, another Memphis schoolteacher, sued a local railroad for forcing her into Jim Crow seating. (A lower court ruled in her favor, but the decision African American Women in the Tennessee Civil Rights Movement Bobby L. Lovett 11 184 BOBBY L. LOVETT was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court.4 ) When three black grocers accused of rape were taken from a Memphis jail and shot to death by a mob, Wells used the newspaper she edited, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, to condemn the accusation of rape and to assert that the men had been killed because they were competing too successfully against nearby white businesses. While Wells was out of town, her newspaper office was destroyed. Warned not to return, she relocated to Chicago and in 1892 published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Frederick Douglass joined Wells in a national antilynching campaign, and in 1909 she became a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.5 Native Memphian Mary Eliza Church-Terrell was prominent among black women who used social and civic clubs, benevolent societies, church auxiliaries, and professional training to promote black uplift and racial equality and to gain woman’s suffrage. A founding member of NAACP, she also became president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs of America, which held its first convention in Nashville in 1897. The NACWCA challenged “racism, discrimination, and segregation” and fostered racial advancement.6 Black women in Tennessee pooled their financial resources to support the struggle for civil rights. When Tennessee implemented a Jim Crow streetcar law in 1905, for example, black citizens boycotted the cars in the major cities. Nashville blacks formed the Union Transportation Company to establish their own streetcar lines, and women were major stockholders. But even when those resources were not available, courageous women strove to meet the needs of victims of civil injustice. At this time, Tennessee paid pensions to former Confederate soldiers and their widows but left former slaves destitute. In an effort to meet this need, Callie House, a former slave from Rutherford County, organized and gave thirty years of her life to the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, whose purpose was to enlist support for a federal slave-pension bill.7 Meharry Medical College graduates Francis M. Kneeland, Josie Wells, and Emma R. Wheeler helped bring better health care, nutrition, and medicine into Tennessee’s urban black communities at a time when the state and white professionals refused to treat black citizens.8 J. Frankie Pierce became a leader in juvenile delinquency reform for young black girls, and the state reform-school campus that she convinced state officials to establish a for black girls endured from 1923 to 1979.9 In 1919 and 1920, Mattie E. Coleman, Nettie LangstonNapier , and J. Frankie Pierce led the effort to organize the black woman...

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