(June 9, 1845 – April 21, 1940)
from The Greenwood Project
When James Napier was three, his family was manumitted by the terms of their Tennessee slave-owner’s will. They moved to Ohio briefly but returned to Nashville in 1849. During the Civil War Napier attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin College in Ohio. He resigned a Freedmen’s Bureau position in 1870 in order to attend Howard University Law School. After graduation Napier opened a Nashville real estate business and served three terms on the city council (1878-1885). Active in Republican Party affairs, he sat 35 years on the state executive committee. He was a founder of the One-Cent Savings Bank (now Citizens Bank) and the TN Agricultural & Industrial School (now TSU) and served on the board of the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation. In 1911 he was named Register of the U.S. Treasury under President W.H. Taft, the highest federal post then available to an African American. In his final years he served on the Nashville Housing Authority and Board of Trade.
From An Era of Progress and Promise, 1863-1910, W. N. Hartshorn & George W. Penniman, eds., p. 415; image is in the public domain.
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The Greenwood Project is a series of 160-word biographies of individuals who lie at rest in Mt. Ararat and Greenwood cemeteries, two historic African American burial grounds in Nashville, Tennessee. The project, which began in September 2014 (and is still available on Facebook, at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064806156276), shares the stories of more than 300 consequential individuals, primarily African American, who changed the course of city, state, and national history through their words and deeds. (All biographies were written by Kathy Lauder unless otherwise noted.)
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