People

Tennessee's first state historian, Dr. Robert H. White was born in Crockett County in 1883. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1910 and completed his graduate work at George Peabody College and the University of Chicago. From 1911 until 1919…

Sue Shelton White, suffragist, equal rights advocate, attorney, and writer, was born and reared in Henderson, the sixth of seven children born to James Shelton White and Mary Calista Swain White. As teachers and liberal thinkers, White's parents stressed the…

Chattanooga attorney and businessman Joseph B. Whitehead, along with Benjamin F. Thomas and J. T. Lupton, pioneered the Coca-Cola bottling industry. Born in Oxford, Mississippi, he received a law degree from the University of Mississippi. In the late 1880s he…

Chattanooga businesswoman Harriet Whiteside was born May 3, 1824, in Wytheville, Virginia, and educated at the Moravian School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to be a teacher. At the age of nineteen she arrived in Chattanooga to teach music to one…

Songwriter Beth Slater Whitson was born in Goodrich, Hickman County, in 1879. Her parents were John H. Whitson and Anna Slater Whitson; her father was coeditor of the Hickman Pioneer newspaper. Beth Whitson began her extensive songwriting career in Hickman…

Enoch Tanner Wickham left an artistic legacy in the form of a permanent concrete sculpture park by the side of the road near Palmyra, Tennessee, across the Cumberland River from Clarksville. Wickham, a descendant of early settlers of Montgomery County,…

Speaker of the Senate and Lieutenant Governor John S. Wilder was born in Fayette County in 1921. He attended the public schools of Fayette County, then went to college, majoring in agriculture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His law…

Union general and postwar industrialist John T. Wilder was born in Hunter County, New York, to Reuben and Mary Merritt Wilder. As a young man, ca. 1848, he moved to Ohio and worked as an apprentice engineer. In the late…

Michael K. Wilkinson, a solid state physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was born at Palatka, Florida, in 1921 and attended The Citadel and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1950. Wilkinson joined Oak Ridge…

A. N. C. Williams, prominent African American merchant and community leader in Williamson County, was born into slavery in Spring Hill, Tennessee, in 1844. At age six, he was sold to D. R. Crutcher and moved to Franklin, Tennessee, where…

Educator, suffragist, and Democratic Party worker Charl Ormond Williams was born in Arlington, Tennessee, the third of six children of Crittenden and Minnie Williams. She graduated from Arlington's "high school on the hill" in 1903 and began teaching at Millington…

Few entertainers have conveyed the sincerity and realism reflected in Hank Williams's southern working class lyrics and singing style. Even fewer have enjoyed the lanky Alabaman's phenomenal degree of success. His songs permanently etched the nation's consciousness in the brief…

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…

Jurist and historian Samuel Cole Williams was born in Gibson County in 1864 and educated in the schools of Humboldt. Encouraged by Judge Horace Lurton--a family friend and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice--he enrolled in the Vanderbilt University law…

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…

In 1951 Kemmons Wilson, his wife, and five children drove from Memphis to Washington, D.C., for a vacation. Appalled by the uncomfortable and cramped rooms with no air conditioning in the motels in which they were forced to stay, as…

James Winchester, pioneer, entrepreneur, military commander, and founder of Memphis, was born in Westminster, Maryland, and served in Maryland regiments during the American Revolution. He was wounded and captured in a raid on Staten Island in mid-1777 and imprisoned until…

Marcus B. Winchester, land developer and first mayor of Memphis, was born on May 28, 1796, at Cragfont, the eldest son of James Winchester and Susan Black. Winchester was educated in Baltimore but left school at age sixteen to serve…

Oprah Winfrey, one of the nation's most popular female entertainers, was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, on January 29, 1954, to Vernita Lee and Vernon Winfrey. The racially segregated town offered few opportunities for African Americans, and the Winfreys migrated north,…

Werner and Emmy Land Wolff played significant roles in the creation of the Chattanooga Opera and enhancing the popularity of opera in Chattanooga. Werner Wolff was born in Berlin on October 7, 1883. His father, Hermann Wolff, founded the Berlin…