African American

Bobby Jones, an influential late-twentieth-century gospel music artist and television producer, has played a key role in Nashville's evolution as one of the most important gospel music centers in the United States. He taped his television show, "Bobby Jones Gospel," in Nashville for twenty-five…

In 1871, only four years after the incorporation of Fisk Free School as Fisk University in Nashville, the school for emancipated African Americans faced impending closure. Classrooms and living quarters continued to be housed in the decaying barracks of the…

Sears, Roebuck and Company magnate Julius Rosenwald created the Julius Rosenwald Fund (JRF) in 1917 to coordinate his contributions for African American education. Guided by Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald supported the expansion of public education for rural southern blacks within…

Marshall Keeble, born in Rutherford County in 1878, became the best-known African American leader in the Churches of Christ of the twentieth century. In May 2000 The Christian Chronicle named Keeble as its person for the decade 1940 to 1950…

This Nashville barber, businessman, and politician became the first African American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly. Keeble was born circa 1832 in Rutherford County to slave parents, Sampson W. and Nancy Keeble. From the age of nineteen until 1863…

William Key, nineteenth-century veterinarian and horse trainer, was born a slave in Winchester and took the name of his owner, William Key, a Shelbyville planter and entrepreneur. As a child he demonstrated a remarkable talent for working with horses and…

Internationally acclaimed spokesman of the Civil Rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. King was in Memphis in an attempt to raise awareness of and support for a strike…

Immediately after the Civil War, scores of northern missionaries traveled south to educate the newly freed slaves. These missionary efforts resulted in the establishment of a number of black colleges and universities. One of these schools was Knoxville College, a…

In 1882 Lane College, then the "C.M.E. High School," was founded by the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (now Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, CME) in America. Initially Bishop William Henry Miles, the first bishop of the CME Church, presided over the…

Fourth bishop of the Colored (Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church, Isaac Lane was born March 4, 1834, in Madison County. Lane grew to manhood as a slave on the plantation of Cullen Lane. At age nineteen Isaac Lane married Frances Ann…

James E. Lawson Jr. made a significant mark on the history of the Civil Rights movement in Tennessee and in the South. He is best known in Tennessee history as the Vanderbilt Divinity School student who was expelled in 1960…

Known on the streets of early twentieth-century Memphis as "Lieutenant Lee," both for his army service as a lieutenant in World War I and as the lieutenant for the powerful African American capitalist and Republican Party leader Robert Church Sr.,…

Memphis's Lemoyne Owen College opened its doors in 1871 as LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School, but it traces its ancestry to the schools for ex-slaves organized by members of the American Missionary Association (AMA) during and after the Civil War.…

John R. Lewis, now a congressman from Atlanta, was one of the early student leaders in the Civil Rights movement in Tennessee. Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Troy, Alabama, to Eddie and Willie Mae Carter Lewis. One…

Nashville councilman, judge, and civil rights activist, Robert E. Lillard was born March 23, 1907, in Nashville, to John W. and Virginia Allen Lillard. He received his education at Immaculate Mother's Academy and in local public schools before attending Beggins…

The Lincoln League was a Republican Party organization founded by Robert R. Church Jr. on February 12, 1916, in Memphis and named for Republican President Abraham Lincoln. Church, whose father had been one of the first black millionaires in the…

Attorney and civil rights activist Z. Alexander Looby was born in Antigua, British West Indies, on April 8, 1899, the son of John Alexander and Grace Elizabeth Joseph Looby. After the death of his father, young Looby departed for the…

Physician, journalist, and educator Myles Lynk was born in Brownsville on June 3, 1871, the son of former slaves. His father was killed when Lynk was only six years old, and he was running the farm by the time he…

Charles Harrison Mason founded the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). In doing so he preserved and cultivated the religious culture of his ancestors as well as fighting for religious freedom of expression and an integrated church. He was the…

One of the state's most influential African American men of the 1880s, Samuel A. McElwee had to struggle to achieve a college education and law degree, but nonetheless served his race for three terms in the Tennessee General Assembly (1882-88),…