African American

Robert R. Church Jr., a prominent Republican, civil rights leader, and businessman, was born in Memphis on October 26, 1885. He was the son of millionaire Robert R. Church Sr. and his wife Anna Wright Church. Robert Church Jr. married…

Robert R. Church Sr., noted Memphis businessman, philanthropist, community activist, and political leader, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1839, the son of Charles B. Church of Memphis, who owned several Mississippi River steamboats. His mother, Emmeline, lived with…

In business since 1904, Citizens Bank is the oldest continuously operated African American bank in the United States. In 1902 Richard H. Boyd, James C. Napier, and other Nashville African American leaders formed a chapter of the National Negro Business…

Robert E. Clay, a pioneer of rural education for African Americans in Tennessee, helped to build hundreds of rural, county, and city schools. Clay was born on June 25, 1875, in Bristol, Virginia, to Harry and Frances Clay. He married…

A series of events from 1947 to 1958 placed the Civil Rights story of Clinton, the seat of Anderson County, on the national stage as one of the starting points in the modern Civil Rights movement. With the end of…

Isaac Dockery, an African American brickmason and builder, was born a freeman in the Jones Cove community of Sevier County. Dockery moved to Sevierville before the Civil War, where he worked as a merchant clerk in the home of Henry…

Aaron Douglas, African American artist and professor at Fisk University, was born in small-town eastern Kansas and displayed an early aptitude for drawing. His mother recognized his talent and supported his pursuit of an art career. Douglas attended high school…

W. E. B. Du Bois was a prolific writer and profoundly original thinker who was influenced by his years in Tennessee as a student at Fisk University and by his public school teaching in rural Tennessee communities. Du Bois in…

Few folk artists can claim the widespread recognition by the world of fine art that William Edmondson achieved during his lifetime. The first African American artist to have a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Edmondson continues to…

Nashville’s Afro-Baptists began their religious journey of faith within a spectacular local history. Negroes were among 200 residents in the settlement of Fort Nashborough in 1780. By 1787, they represented 22 percent of 477 settlers; by 1820, their number grew…

Fisk Free Colored School, predecessor of Fisk University, was established on January 9, 1866, in Nashville to offer education--as a means of building better lives--to formerly enslaved African Americans. African Americans, both slave and free, exhibited two related overriding concerns…

Harold E. Ford, U.S. congressman, was born May 20, 1945, in Memphis, the son of Vera Davis Ford and Newton Jackson Ford. He received his A.A. degree from John Gupton College, a B.S. degree from Tennessee State, and his M.B.A.…

State Senator John N. Ford was born on May 3, 1942, in Memphis, the son of Vera Davis Ford and Newton Jackson Ford. Ford received a B.A. from Tennessee State in 1964 and an M.A. from Memphis State in 1978.…

The 1927 merger of two black-owned and -operated Memphis banks which had been instrumental in launching and supporting African American businesses in the 1910s and 1920s created the Fraternal and Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Company. The bank's eventual failure,…

Free Hill (sometimes called Free Hills) is an African American community established in the upper Cumberland before the Civil War. It is located northeast of Celina in a remote section of Clay County near the Kentucky border. The original inhabitants…

Even before the Civil War ended, President Abraham Lincoln and Congress realized that the government must offer assistance to newly emancipated slaves. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau, attempted this task and…

A financial institution chartered by Congress in 1865 for the newly freed black population of former slave states, the Freedmen's Savings Bank was a key component of the African American struggle for equality and independence during Reconstruction. A total of…

Thomas O. Fuller, prominent African American church and civic leader and author in early twentieth-century Memphis, was born in Franklinton, North Carolina, on October 25, 1867. His father, J. Henderson Fuller, was a carpenter who bought his freedom from slavery…

Bud Garrett, traditional blues musician and marble maker, was born January 28, 1916, to John Tom Garrett and Adeline Hamilton Garrett in Free Hill, a small African American settlement in Clay County established by freed slaves prior to the Civil…

Writer Nikki Giovanni expresses her version of the late twentieth-century African American experience through poetry and essays. Though her parents left Knoxville after her birth, Giovanni returned for summers with her grandparents and graduated from Knoxville's Austin High School before…