Civil Rights

This important national organization for civil rights began in 1909 in protest of violent forms of racism, including lynching; of racial segregation; and of disfranchisement of African American voters. Events and people from Tennessee played a major role in its…

Located at the former site of the Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry Street in Memphis, the National Civil Rights Museum is the state's preeminent museum dedicated to the history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States from the…

Theotis Robinson Jr. first gained statewide attention in 1960 when the University of Tennessee refused to admit him due to his race. The previous spring Robinson, who graduated in June from Austin High School, had participated in sit-in demonstrations to…

A well-known, innovative businessperson, Bert M. Roddy founded the first African-American-owned grocery chain in Memphis. He was born in Augusta, Arkansas, on August 19, 1886, to Jerry and Harriette McKenny Roddy. When he was a young boy, Roddy and his…

On February 1, 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered the Woolworth's store in downtown Greensboro, seated themselves at the store's lunch counter, and requested service. As they expected, they were…

In 1958, following the formation of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) by the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith Sr. and others, African American leaders and students launched an attack on Jim Crow segregation. The NCLC utilized the concept of Christian…

Kelly Miller Smith was the influential pastor of Nashville's First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill, from 1951 until his death in 1984. He was also assistant dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School from 1969 to 1984. As president of the Nashville…

Executive secretary of the Memphis NAACP for over forty years, Maxine Smith was born in Memphis on October 31, 1929. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis at the age of fifteen, received her A.B. degree in…

In 1959 African Americans in Fayette and Haywood Counties fought for the right to vote. The concern for voting emerged as a by-product of the absence of black jurors for the trial of Burton Dodson, an African American farmer in…

Founder of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, Mary Church Terrell was one of the leading twentieth-century African American women activists. For more than sixty-six years, she was an ardent champion of racial and gender equality. Born…

Published by Elihu Embree at Jonesborough in 1820, the Emancipator was the first newspaper in the United States solely devoted to the abolition of slavery. Embree had previously published a weekly newspaper, the Manumission Intelligencer, in 1819, and it was…

Although she rarely held elective office, Molly Todd played an important role in fashioning public policy in Nashville and Tennessee in the second half of the twentieth century. She mobilized support for reform in areas as diverse as birth control,…

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist, feminist, and civil rights activist, launched an antilynching campaign in the 1890s that made her one of the most outstanding African American women of the nineteenth century. The eldest of eight children born to James "Jim"…

A powerful advocate for African Americans, Avon N. Williams Jr. became the leading African American lawyer in Tennessee in the protection and advancement of the rights of blacks in education, the workplace, criminal justice, and voting. Born in 1921 in…

Civil rights lawyer and Memphis businessman A. W. Willis Jr. was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 16, 1925. Willis received his B.A. from Talladega College in 1950 and a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1953. He…

Sammye Wynn, educator and children's advocate, was the first black female educator to work in the Educational Opportunities Planning Center founded by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1966. It trained teachers from four southern states in ways to desegregate…

William F. Yardley, an influential and powerful advocate for the legal rights of blacks, was the first African American to run for governor of Tennessee. Yardley was born in 1844, the child of a white mother and a black father…