Fisk University – Nashville Historical Newsletter

Nashvillians Who Stood behind the Sit-ins: C. The Quiet Allies

by Kathy B. Lauder.

We would be remiss if we neglected to mention some of the quiet heroes who provided support to the protests with their time, money, and encouragement. Among the most generous were two Nashville couples – Dr. Charles and Mary Celeste Richardson Walker, and Dr. McDonald and Jamye Coleman Williams.

Georgia native Charles Julian Walker (1912-1997) earned his M.D. from Meharry in 1943 and opened a medical office in Nashville four years later. So devoted was he to his practice, he once agreed to see a patient when he was hospitalized himself! Deeply committed to the civil rights movement, he worked tirelessly behind the scenes, pressuring local leaders to take immediate action after the bombings of Hattie Cotton School (1957) and the Looby home (1960). He and his wife also quietly posted bail for many of the students arrested during the sit-ins. Walker served briefly in the Tennessee House after being appointed to fill a vacancy in his district, and he was a Fisk University trustee during the 1970s, encouraging the university to become more accountable to the community. According to his longtime friend, Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice Adolpho A. Birch, he was “fierce” and relentless in urging politicians and businessmen to invest in struggling low-income communities and to expand and diversify the work force. An outspoken champion of prison reform, he was a tireless advocate for prisoners’ rights. Although Dr. Walker was known for his energy and optimism, the loss of his beloved wife Mary in 1994 sent him into a downward spiral from which he never fully recovered.

*Nashville student protestors crammed into jail cells.* (*Photo courtesy of Civil Rights Movement Archive)*

Mary Celeste Richardson Walker (1910-1994) demonstrated a lifelong concern for social justice. Her parents divorced when she was a toddler, and she grew up in the home of her grandparents, Fire Captain Reuben B. Richardson and his wife. She attended Nashville city schools and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Fisk University. When Dr. C.J. Walker met her in early 1942, he was immediately smitten. The Meharry graduate promptly proposed, and the couple married, as Walker liked to say, “five weeks after I first laid eyes on her.” That fall Mary began a 30-year career teaching English at Pearl High School, where she earned a reputation for being tough but fair, showing particular concern for disadvantaged and at-risk students. She and her husband shared a strong commitment to supporting the young civil rights demonstrators in Nashville, providing generous financial and moral support to the movement. Shortly after Mary retired from teaching, Governor Lamar Alexander appointed her to the state parole board, where her even-handed approach to the situations they faced won the profound respect of both inmates and judicial authorities. A member of Church Women United, educational advisory boards, and other civic organizations, she was a trustee of Scarritt College, as well as a lifetime member of the NAACP.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McDonald Williams (1917-2019) came to Nashville with his wife Jamye Coleman Williams in 1958, he as an English professor specializing in 19^th century English literature, and she as chair of the Tennessee State University Communications Department. When TSU initiated its Honors Program in 1964, Mac Williams was appointed director, serving in that position until his retirement in 1988. Together the couple edited the A.M.E. Church Review and The Negro Speaks: The Rhetoric of Contemporary Black Leaders, and they provided valuable support to Nashville’s civil rights activities. The Williamses received many awards for their service, including the Otis L. Floyd Jr. Award from Saint Bernard Academy, the Joe Kraft Humanitarian Award from the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, and the Human Relations Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In 1995 a room in the newly remodeled Northwest YMCA building was dedicated to Dr. Williams, a longtime board member. He died in Atlanta at age 101.

*Jayme Coleman Williams with husband Mac* (*photo courtesy of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee*)

The daughter of a Kentucky minister, Jayme Coleman (1918-2022) earned a B.A. with honors from Wilberforce University at age 19 and an M.A. from Fisk the following year. She taught English at Wilberforce and three other HBCUs before earning a doctorate in speech communications at Ohio State University. In 1959 she began teaching at Tennessee State University, and she was named department head in 1973. She and her husband, educator McDonald Williams, were valuable organizers and supporters of the Nashville sit-in movement, later playing an active role in the development of the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, where their efforts earned them the Joe Kraft Humanitarian Award of the CFMT in 2002. A lifelong member of the A.M.E. Church, Jamye Williams was a member of the board of the United Council of Churches, president of the 13^th District Lay Organization, and editor of the AME Church Review, the oldest African American literary journal. A member of the NAACP Executive Committee, she received the organization’s Presidential Award in 1999. She lived to be 103 years old.

You might enjoy these two short video clips of an interview with McDonald and Jamye Coleman Williams: A. and B.

Some of this material has been adapted from the Greenwood Project.

Important books about the Civil Rights Movement in Nashville:

John Egerton: Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award)
David Halberstam: The Children
John Lewis: Walking with the Wind
Bobby L. Lovett: The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee

Nashvillians Who Stood behind the Sit-ins: B. The Attorneys

by Kathy B. Lauder and Tara Mielnik.

The Civil Rights Movement in Nashville was led, for the most part, by college students and their instructors in the techniques of nonviolent protest. The Nashville sit-ins became a model for many other successful desegregation efforts across the nation. However, working in the background to support the protestors were some remarkably gifted individuals. Lawyers, journalists, educators, and many other local citizens donated their time and their skills to support the movement.

*Z. A. Looby* (*from Tennessee Portrait Project*)

Attorney Z. Alexander Looby (1899-1972), who became a powerful force behind the protestors, came to the U.S. from Antigua at 15. He earned degrees from Howard (A.B., 1922), Columbia (LL.B., 1925), and NYU (J.D., 1926). Following his move to Nashville, he taught economics at Fisk University, passed the Tennessee bar, and became legal director of the NAACP. In 1946, when Thurgood Marshall came to Columbia, Tennessee, to represent 25 black citizens after an outbreak of racial violence, he requested Looby’s help in mounting their defense. They successfully won acquittals for nearly all of them. After State Senator Ben West, soon to become mayor of Nashville, guided a charter reform bill through the General Assembly, which allowed voters to elect city council members from individual districts, rather than choosing all of them at large. As a result, in 1951 local black residents were able to elect the first two African American council members since 1911 – attorneys Z. A. Looby and Robert Lillard. Five years later Looby and Avon Williams were the plaintiff’s attorneys in Kelley v. Nashville Board of Education, which ultimately ended Nashville school segregation. Looby, Williams, Robert Lillard, Coyness Ennix, and Adolpho Birch led the volunteer legal team for student protesters during the 1960 Nashville sit-ins. When Looby’s house was dynamited in April 1960, nearly 3,000 demonstrators marched to the court house to confront Mayor Ben West, whose unprecedented support soon (May 10 1960) ended lunch counter segregation in Nashville. By October, Looby’s legal team managed to have all the charges “for conspiracy to disrupt trade and commerce” dismissed against 91 student protesters. Looby was a city/Metro councilman for 20 years and a founder of Kent College of Law.

*Avon N. Williams Jr.* (*courtesy of Williams family*)

Looby’s partner in many of his precedent-setting legal events was his former intern, Avon Nyanza Williams Jr. (1921-1994). A native of Knoxville, Williams earned an L.L.B. (1947) and an L.L.M. (1948) from Boston University. After interning with Looby in Nashville, he set up a law practice in Knoxville, often working closely with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Williams filed Tennessee’s first school desegregation case (Anderson County, 1950), and his lawsuit to admit African American students to the UT graduate school (1951) was one of seven discrimination cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1953 he moved to Nashville, partnered with Looby, and took an active (and mostly unpaid) role in civil rights cases ranging from lunch counter and school desegregation to housing discrimination. A founder of the Davidson County Independent Political Council and the Tennessee Voters Council, he was one of Tennessee’s first two African American state senators, serving from 1969-1990. His lawsuit to merge UT Nashville with TSU led to a landmark legal decision and the renaming of the downtown campus after him.

*The attorneys in court: front row from left, Adolpho Birch, Robert Lillard, Coyness Ennix, and Avon Williams (Nashville Banner Archives, Special Collections, Nashville Public Library)*

Alabama teenager Coyness Loyal Ennix Sr. (1901-1984) came to Nashville to attend Roger Williams University. Later, having graduated from Howard University Law School (1931), he returned to Nashville, where he and Z. Alexander Looby founded Kent College of Law to train other African American attorneys. Known for his flamboyant style of dress, Ennix was well known as a civic and political leader in Nashville’s black community. In the late 1940s he founded The Solid Block, a political organization which helped abolish Tennessee’s poll tax and supported African American candidates. Ennix himself ran for City Council (1951) but lost to Looby and Robert Lillard, Nashville’s first black councilmen in 40 years. Ennix was the first African American to serve on the Nashville Housing Authority and the Nashville Auditorium Commission. He was also the first black member of the Board of Education, serving during the arduous school desegregation process. One of thirteen volunteer defense attorneys for students arrested during the February 1960 Nashville Sit-ins, he was an active member of First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill, site of many Civil Rights training sessions.

*Robert E. Lillard (photo courtesy of African American Registry)*

Commercial college graduate Robert E. Lillard (1907-1991) worked as a garage attendant in order to take night classes at Kent College of Law, while also organizing the 15^th Ward Colored Voters and Civic Club. After being admitted to the bar (1936), he opened a law practice and drove a fire truck for Engine Company No. 11. In 1951, ignoring bribes and threats, he ran for city council, joining Alexander Looby as the first black council members since Solomon Harris (1911). During his 20 years of service, Lillard never missed a regular council meeting. He assisted in desegregating the Parthenon and helped make Cameron High School the city’s second African American secondary school, and he joined other black lawyers volunteering their legal services during the 1960 sit-ins. The first African American vice mayor pro tem (1967), he was admitted to plead in the U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit Court, and U.S. Supreme Court, and he served as judge of the First Circuit Court, Tenth Judicial District.

Adolpho A. Birch (1932-2011), the son of an Episcopal priest, grew up in Washington, D.C., and earned both his B.A. and J.D. from Howard University. During his term of service in the U.S. Navy, he studied for and passed the bar exam (1957), a year before his honorable discharge. After moving to Nashville (1958), he opened a private law practice with Robert Lillard, also teaching law courses at Meharry Medical College, Fisk University, and Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State University). He was part of the volunteer legal team who defended student protestors during the Nashville Sit-ins. He was named assistant public (1963); assistant district attorney (1966 – the first black prosecutor in Davidson County); General Sessions Court judge (1969); Criminal Court judge (1978); and first black presiding judge over the Trial Courts of Davidson County (1981, the same year he became an instructor at the Nashville School of Law). The only person, black or white, to serve in every level of the Tennessee judiciary system, he was appointed to the Court of the Judiciary (1983) and the Tennessee Court of Appeals (1987). In 1990 he became only the second African American to sit on the Tennessee Supreme Court. Four years later his fellow justices selected him as Chief Justice (October 1994-May 1996), making him the first African American to hold that position. After being confirmed for another eight-year term, he again served as Chief Justice (July 1997-August 1998 and September 1999-August 2001). He retired at the end of his second term (September 2006). He received many awards during his years of service, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, who called him a “beacon for equality.” He died of cancer on August 25, 2011. The Davidson County Criminal Courts now meet in the A. A. Birch Criminal Justice Building, dedicated in his honor in 2006.

*Robert Churchwell Jr.* (*photo courtesy of Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society*)

It was not only attorneys who assisted the protestors in the Nashville civil rights movement. Newsman Robert Churchwell Sr. (1917-2009) graduated from Pearl High School (1940) before being drafted (1942) and assigned to a WWII engineering unit. Suffering terribly from misdiagnosed PTSD, he graduated from Fisk in three years by attending both Fisk and Tennessee A&I. His earliest publishing attempts were unsuccessful, but they eventually brought his talents to the attention of the Nashville Banner editor, a racial separatist who disdained African Americans but realized he needed to sell papers in the black community for economic reasons. When Churchwell reluctantly took the job writing “Negro news,” he became one of the first black journalists on any white Southern municipal newspaper. He had to carry his stories into the news office from home – he worked there for five years before he had a desk in the newsroom. He authored articles about Nashville school desegregation, interviewing both black and white educators, and he covered the 1960 sit-ins, but the Banner refused to publish stories about the protests. After Churchwell’s 1981 retirement, his pioneering efforts finally won appropriate recognition, including the establishment of Nashville’s Robert Churchwell Museum Magnet Elementary School (2010).

Some of this material has been adapted from the Greenwood Project.

Nashvillians Who Stood behind the Sit-ins: A. The Trainers and the Partners

by Kathy B. Lauder.

A significant number of the participants in the Nashville Sit-ins became nationally known as heroes in the protest movement that would ultimately bring about the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the desegregation of schools, neighborhoods, institutions, sports teams, and businesses across the nation. Many were high school and college students at the time of the protests. Others were leaders in the local community who played significant roles either by assisting in the non-violence training of the young heroes or in volunteering to defend them in court. And still others provided quiet but valuable support behind the scenes.

A key figure in preparing young protesters for the hardships they were likely to face was Kelly Miller Smith Sr. (1920-1984). A Mississippi native, Smith studied at Tennessee A&I before transferring to Morehouse College, where he earned a degree in religion in 1942, followed by a Bachelor of Divinity from Howard University (which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1976, as well). By 1946 he was preaching in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In 1951 he became pastor of Nashville’s First Colored Baptist Church, Capitol Hill. He was president of the local NAACP chapter and joined other local black parents in the 1955 federal lawsuit to desegregate Nashville public schools. A steadfast advocate of nonviolence, Smith founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Council and offered his church as a training center for nonviolent protest in the months leading up to the Nashville sit-ins. In 1969, in a stunning reversal of Vanderbilt University’s earlier policies regarding the desegregation movement, Kelly Miller Smith was chosen to serve as assistant dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School. Widely honored for his leadership, he was a Merrill Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, sat on the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and delivered the 1983-84 Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale University.

*Historic marker from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, James Lawson’s birthplace*

Smith worked closely with other community leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including a brilliant young divinity student, James Lawson, whom Martin Luther King Jr. had called “the leading strategist of non-violence in the world.” A native of southwestern Pennsylvania, Lawson received a Bachelor’s degree from Baldwin-Wallace College (now University) near Cleveland, Ohio; spent a year in prison for resisting the draft; and traveled to India as a Methodist missionary. In India he studied Gandhi’s use of nonviolence as a tool to achieve social and political change. Returning to the U.S. in 1956, he continued his theological studies at Oberlin College. In 1957 he met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who encouraged him to use his nonviolence training to instruct civil rights workers in the South. Lawson transferred his studies to Vanderbilt University and put together a series of workshops on nonviolence for community members. Student leaders at Nashville’s four black colleges used what they learned in these workshops to organize the highly disciplined lunch-counter sit-ins that began on February 13, 1960 and became the model for nonviolent protests across the country. More than 150 student demonstrators were jailed, and in March 1960 James Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt for his involvement in desegregation activities. The Dean of Vanderbilt’s Divinity School, along with a number of other faculty members and students, resigned in protest of Lawson’s expulsion, but the university ignored their objections. Later that same year Lawson received his Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree (STB) from Boston University.

Nashville Mayor Ben West showed a greater willingness than most Southern politicians to listen to the students’ demands for change. In a highly publicized confrontation on the courthouse steps on April 19, 1960, he gave his support to the protesters, and on May 10, 1960, six Nashville stores desegregated their lunch counters.

Lawson joined the Nashville students and others in organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that April. He was co-author of the organization’s Statement of Purpose: “We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian traditions seeks a social order of justice permeated by love” (Lawson, 17 April 1960). He also participated in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the 1961 Freedom Rides. He encouraged Martin Luther King Jr. to travel to Memphis to help bring national attention to the sanitation workers’ strike in that city. Dr. King mentioned Lawson by name in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech (Memphis, 1968): “James Lawson . . . has been in this struggle for many years; he’s been to jail for struggling; but he’s still going on, fighting for the rights of his people.” The following day Dr. King was assassinated.

James Lawson was pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles from 1974-1999 and has continued to be active in his support of the labor movement, as well as programs supporting gay rights and reproductive choice. Not only did Vanderbilt University finally issue a long-overdue apology for his expulsion, but they invited him to return to the campus as a Distinguished University Professor. In the fall of 2021, the university opened the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements, with the stated purpose of hosting “public workshops, seminars, and learning opportunities to train the next generation of community organizers equipped with the skills to make meaningful, sustainable change.”

It would probably be impossible to name all the participants in the Nashville sit-ins and other local civil rights activities. The largest number of them were students at American Baptist College, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, or Tennessee State University (known then as Tennessee A&I), or at local high schools. Active participants in the Nashville Student Movement included Marion Barry, James Bevel, Maxine Walker Giddings, Luther Harris, Bernard Lafayette, James M. Lawson Jr., Paul LePrad, John Lewis (later a U.S. congressman from Georgia), Earl May, Diane Nash, Novella Page, Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, C. T. Vivian, Matthew Walker Jr., and Jim Zwerg.

In 1961, in the face of a Board of Regents policy, fourteen students from Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University were expelled from school for their participation in civil rights activities. At the time of their expulsion, the young Freedom Riders were in jail in Mississippi for riding a bus, which also carried white passengers, across state lines. Forty-seven years later, on September 18, 2008, those fourteen students were awarded honorary doctoral degrees by the school, now known as Tennessee State University. Three of them had died by the time of the ceremony and were granted their degrees posthumously.

*Metro Historical Commission marker for Alfred Z. Kelley, erected 2019*

Another community member who quietly joined the fray was Alfred Z. Kelley (1913-1994). He returned to Nashville after service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, opened Kelley’s Barber Shop, taught a few classes at Bowman’s Barber College, sang in his church choir, and became the first black secretary of the local barbers’ union. He and his wife Robbie had four children they adored, and they were delighted when the Supreme Court ordered the schools to desegregate because they lived within walking distance of a previously segregated junior high school. But when Robert, their 14-year-old, was turned away from East Junior High and sent across town to Pearl Junior High, A. Z. Kelley agreed to become the lead plaintiff in a 1955 lawsuit, representing his son and twenty other youngsters who had been barred from attending East and other Nashville city schools. Kelley’s attorneys were Z. A. Looby and Avon N. Williams Jr., assisted by Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first African American Supreme Court Justice in October 1967. By the time Kelley v Board of Education, Tennessee’s longest-running school desegregation case, was finally settled in 1998, Kelley and all three of the attorneys had died. During the period when the case was under litigation, Kelley became even more deeply involved in political and civil rights activities: he participated in the 1963 march on Washington, held the position of president of the local NAACP chapter, and served as Sergeant-at-Arms of the Tennessee State Senate.

This historic video from the Library of Congress website shows Diane Nash, Mayor Ben West, and others discussing the historic student march to the court house after the April 19, 1960, bombing of Attorney Z. Alexander Looby’s home: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/multimedia/nashville-city-hall-confrontation.html

Some of this material has been adapted from the Greenwood Project.

Nashville-Tuskegee Ties, Part I: Medicine, Music, & Architecture

by Kathy B. Lauder.

Nashvillians have built some important connections with Tuskegee, Alabama, over the years, primarily in the fields of education, medicine, music, and the military.

*Dr. Halley Tanner Dillon Johnson (1864-1901)*

Booker T. Washington hired Dr. Halley Tanner Dillon (1864-1901) to be resident physician at Tuskegee Institute in 1891. After passing the state’s challenging medical exam, Dillon became the first woman, black or white, to practice medicine in Alabama. At Tuskegee she taught several classes, supervised the infirmary, established a dispensary where she mixed her own medicines, and founded a nursing school. She returned to Nashville after marrying Pastor John Quincy Johnson in 1894. When she died in childbirth at age 36, her death certificate listed her profession as “housekeeper.”

Dr. John Henry Hale (1878-1944), a member of the Meharry faculty for nearly 40 years, was chairman of the Department of Surgery (performing more than 30,000 operations) as well as associate director of the Tumor Clinic, while also serving as head surgeon at Nashville’s Millie E. Hale Hospital. President (1935) of the National Medical Association, he was a longtime patron of the Tuskegee Institute and oversaw the Surgical Clinics there.

Dr. John Christopher Ashhurst (1908-1995), a native of British Guyana, served as chief pathologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, before moving to Nashville in the mid-1960s to become head of surgical pathology at Meharry Medical College, while at the same time serving as the county medical examiner.

Thomas W. Talley (1870-1952), acknowledged as Tennessee’s first African American folklorist, began collecting folk songs about 1900 and published a collection, Negro Folk Rhymes, in 1922, a decade before Lomax and Niles. A Fisk graduate who later taught chemistry and choral music at his alma mater, Talley had previously taught at Tuskegee Institute (1900-1903).

Marcus H. Gunter (1918-2003) earned a degree in music at Tuskegee Institute. During college he performed with the Tuskegee Melody Barons, a popular dance band, and he later studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. During World War II, Gunter, a warrant officer, was director of the 41^st Engineers Band in France. In 1947 he began a 39-year teaching career as music teacher and band director at Pearl High School. After retiring from his teaching career, he became owner and director of a Nashville funeral home.

Daughter of a Philadelphia longshoreman, Dorothy Coley Edmond (1927-2006) attended Fisk University, then earning a nursing degree from Meharry Medical College, a master’s degree from Columbia University, and an Ed.D. from Peabody College. She worked as a nursing instructor at Tuskegee Institute before marrying and returning to Nashville, where she established the School of Nursing at Tennessee State University. She is believed to be the first African American registered nurse ever to become a member of the Tennessee Nurses Association.

Born in Pulaski, Tennessee, Moses McKissack III (1879-1952) was the grandson of a slave who passed on his skills as a “master builder” to his descendants. As a teenager, Moses was hired by a local contractor to create designs and drawings for a Pulaski construction business. From 1895-1905 the youngster oversaw building crews in Tennessee and Alabama before moving to Nashville, where he and his brother Calvin opened their own firm –Among their first projects were Fisk University’s Carnegie Library and the residence of Vanderbilt’s dean of architecture and engineering. Later projects included Pearl High School and the TSU Memorial Library, as well as many other schools, homes, churches, and office buildings throughout the South. Now based in New York City and Washington, D.C., McKissack & McKissack remains the oldest minority-owned architectural engineering company in the U.S.

Like his older brother Moses, Fisk University graduate Calvin McKissack (1890-1968) earned his architecture degree through a correspondence course and from lessons passed down by their grandfather. Not long after they opened their Nashville firm (1905), Calvin started a satellite company in Dallas. However, he eventually returned to Nashville to teach industrial drawing at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School (now Tennessee State University), which had opened in June 1912. Six years later he was hired to be director of Pearl High School’s industrial arts department, and he presently became executive secretary of the Tennessee State Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. When the state enacted a law requiring architects to be registered (1921), the McKissacks were nearly banned from taking the licensing examination because of their race. State administrators eventually conceded, evidently assuming neither brother would be able to pass, but when the authorities continued to dither after both men sailed through the exam, the national media took up the story . . . whereupon the McKissack brothers promptly received their licenses, and their company officially became Tennessee’s first professional African American architectural firm. Their $5.7 million contract (1942) to design and build the 99^th Pursuit Squadron Air Base in Tuskegee, Alabama, was the largest federal contract ever granted to an African American firm up to that time. The base was the home of the Tuskegee Airmen, African American fighter pilots who would gain the admiration of the entire world for their skill and courage in combat. Moses McKissack, whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed to the White House Conference on Housing Problems, continued to head the firm until his death in 1952. His brother Calvin succeeded him, handing the reins to Moses’s son, William DeBerry McKissack, in 1968.

Learn more about the Tuskegee Airmen in “Nashville-Tuskegee Connections, Part II.”

Some of this material has been adapted from the Greenwood Project.

The Stieglitz Collection at Fisk University

by C. Michael Norton.*

Georgia O’Keeffe received word in 1946 in New Mexico that her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, had suffered a serious stroke in New York. Catching the next airplane from Albuquerque, she was by his side when he died on July 13. No one at Fisk University in Nashville knew then that Stieglitz’s death had put into motion a chain of events which would lead to Fisk’s receiving, in 1949, an art collection considered “the finest of its type anywhere in the South.”

The Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery on the Fisk University campus

Stieglitz, one of the greatest photographers in the history of the medium, is credited with transforming photography from a method of documentation into an art form. As a premier collector and gallery owner of his time, Stieglitz encouraged and acquired art work by many young American artists, including Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, and John Marin. He is also credited with mounting the first exhibition of African sculpture in the United States. O’Keeffe, generally considered the most important female artist in 20th century America (a description that would have irritated her), had both a business and personal relationship with the much older Stieglitz. They married in 1924, despite the 23-year difference in their ages.

Along with his own photographs, Stieglitz amassed a substantial collection of paintings, but he failed to do anything with the collection during his lifetime, leaving that particular burden to O’Keeffe after his death. His will granted O’Keeffe the right to select the recipients of the art, provided it went to “one or more” non-profit corporations “under such arrangements as will assure to the public, under reasonable regulations, access thereto to promote the study of art.”

1918 Alfred Stieglitz photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe (public domain)

O’Keeffe undertook the difficult task of organizing and giving away over 1,000 pieces of art. She eventually divided the works among six institutions. The first five were logical choices: the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The sixth choice was a surprise: Fisk University.

Founded in 1866 to educate newly freed slaves, Fisk is one of Nashville’s oldest universities. Outside the black community, Fisk was at that time probably best known for its choir, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who have performed throughout this country and others since 1871. Fisk was also respected for offering a solid academic program: in 1930 it became the first African-American institution to earn accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The obvious question, however, is why Fisk was selected to receive 101 pieces of art from the collection, when neither Stieglitz nor O’Keeffe had ever visited this small, historically black college in the South, where rigid segregation was the order of the day.

Enter Carl Van Vechten, New York writer/photographer and friend of both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe. A patron of the Harlem Renaissance with a consuming interest in black culture, he was also a friend of Fisk President Charles Spurgeon Johnson. Van Vechten informed O’Keeffe of his intention to leave many of his photographs and other materials to the school and introduced her to President Johnson. A sociologist by training, Dr. Johnson had come to Fisk in 1928 after spending several years in New York as director of research for the National Urban League and as a supporter of the arts. Elected president of Fisk in 1946, Johnson was the first black to occupy that position.

Later O’Keeffe explained that she picked Fisk because it would have made Stieglitz happy. Since she had given portions of the collections to institutions in the Northeast and the Midwest, she thought it logical that some of the collection go to another part of the country.

Whatever her reasons, the choice was not without problems. In late October 1949, O’Keeffe and her assistant drove to Nashville from New Mexico to inspect the gallery (to be named in honor of Van Vechten) and to assist with the hanging of the art. Fisk had gone to considerable effort and expense to convert its old gymnasium into an art gallery, hiring a New York architect to design the space. When O’Keeffe saw the gallery for the first time, she hated it. She and her assistant began conforming the space to her wishes, coming in at 7:00 each morning to meet with the workmen. For at least a week she made changes: replacing the lighting, removing molding, painting walls, changing the color of cabinets, and more. Still unhappy with the lights, she flew in a lighting expert on the morning of the opening to make a few final changes.

The opening ceremonies took place on the afternoon of November 4, 1949, in Memorial Chapel, filled to capacity with more than 900 present. President Johnson introduced O’Keeffe, who declined to approach the rostrum, speaking instead from her chair: “Dr. Johnson wrote and asked me to speak and I did not answer. I had and have no intention of speaking. These paintings and sculptures are a gift from Stieglitz. They are for the students. I hope you will go back and look at them more than once.” Van Vechten also spoke briefly, concluding that the gallery was “not equaled by any in New York City.” The dean of education at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art delivered the major address.

The Stieglitz Collection consists of 101 art works: five pieces of African tribal art, nineteen Stieglitz photographs, two paintings by O’Keeffe, prints by Cezanne and Renoir, and a number of paintings by Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, and John Marin.

*Editor’s note: A seven-year legal battle, which took place during a period of severe financial hardship for Fisk, ended in a partnership between Fisk University and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. According to the terms of the final $30 million agreement, the two institutions, each now owning half of the relevant art pieces, agree to share the Stieglitz Collection, passing it back and forth on a two-year rotation. (Author Mike Norton was part of the legal team that fashioned this agreement.) The collection returned to Fisk University in April 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic has forced it to be closed to the public much of the time since its return. This short film from NPT provides a useful introduction to the museum and its collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5NcJhqZjEM

Walker, Taylor, and Carr: The Men behind Nashville’s African American Parks and Cemeteries

by Kathy B. Lauder.

Although City Cemetery, Nashville’s first public burial ground (1822) accepted people of all races from the beginning, the rise of the “Jim Crow” South after the Civil War compelled African Americans to look elsewhere for a final resting place. In 1869 black businessman Nelson Walker and the Colored Benevolent Society bought land for Mt. Ararat Cemetery near the Elm Hill-Murfreesboro Pike intersection, directly behind today’s Purity Dairy plant. Walker (1825-1875), a barber at the Maxwell House, became an important figure in African American politics after the Civil War. Elected president of the first State Colored Men’s Convention (August 1865), he was active in the Masonic Order, the Sons of Relief, and the State Colored Emigration Board. Largely self-educated, he became a practicing attorney and later a Davidson County magistrate. An outspoken supporter of the public schools, Walker encouraged his seven children to become well educated – his daughter Virginia was a member of Fisk University’s first graduating class in 1875.

· The Maxwell House Hotel, built between 1859 and 1869, was partially completed in 1862, when the occupying Federal forces used it as a hospital, a prison, and barracks for Union soldiers. (In 1863 over 100 Confederate soldiers fell five stories when a staircase collapsed, killing up to 45 men and injuring many more.) Maxwell House coffee, introduced by Nashville’s Cheek family, was served in the hotel dining room. The building was destroyed by fire on Christmas night 1961.

When Mt. Ararat burial plots went on sale in May 1869, church leaders urged their parishioners to purchase them. Mt. Ararat received considerable media attention in 1890 when Reverend Nelson Merry’s remains were reinterred there from City Cemetery, and again in 1892, after three heroic African American firemen lost their lives fighting a devastating fire in downtown Nashville. The day of their burial was declared a city-wide day of mourning, and the procession leading from their funeral ceremony at the Capitol to the cemetery was said to be over a mile long. Mt. Ararat (now Greenwood West) became part of the Greenwood Cemetery complex in 1982.

Another key figure in Nashville history was the Reverend Preston Taylor (1849-1931). Born into slavery, he served as a Union Army drummer boy when he was a young teenager. While still in his 20s he founded a Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, church, attracting the largest congregation in the state during his fifteen years there, while also working as a contractor to build several sections of the Big Sandy Railroad. After moving to Nashville, he preached at the Gay Street Christian church and also joined the Masons and the IOOF, holding state offices in both organizations.

As the 19^th century ended, Preston Taylor committed himself to improving the social and economic condition of Nashville’s black community. Already well known as a local religious leader and businessman, he opened the city’s first African American mortuary, the Taylor Funeral Company, in 1888, the same year he and three others came together to purchase land for a “first class burial space . . . available at cost” for African American families. After his partners backed out of the project, Taylor alone funded the purchase of a 37-acre site on Elm Hill Pike and Spence Lane, near Buttermilk Ridge (so-called because of the scattering of dairy farms along the big S-curve on Lebanon Road east of Spence). Greenwood Cemetery, still in operation today, opened in 1888. Preston Taylor’s will deeded the cemetery to the Disciples of Christ religious organization, who continue to operate the facility (now merged with Mt. Ararat/ Greenwood West) as a non-profit enterprise. Preston Taylor is buried beneath a striking monument near the entrance to Greenwood. He was also involved in establishing the Lea Avenue Christian Church, the National Colored Christian Missionary Convention, the One Cent Bank (now Citizens Savings & Trust), and Tennessee State A&I Normal School (now Tennessee State University).

Preston Taylor’s monument in Greenwood Cemetery. (photo from NHN collection)

Jim Crow laws barred African Americans not only from cemeteries but also from many entertainment venues. However, in 1905 Preston Taylor responded to these restrictions by opening Greenwood Park north of the cemetery on the large unused portion of his original 37-acre land purchase. The park’s entrance stood just west of the intersection of Lebanon Road and Spence Lane. The first recreational park for Nashville’s black community, its attractions included a merry-go-round, a roller coaster, a shooting gallery, and a skating rink. Visitors could attend events at a baseball park, a bandstand, or a theatre, and if they were hungry, they could eat at a barbecue stand, a lunchroom, or a well-maintained picnic area. The area was spacious enough to include a Boy Scout camp, a racetrack, and a zoo, and it was home to the Colored State Fair, as well as other popular annual celebrations on Labor Day and July 4^th. The Barbers’ Union, Masonic Lodges, and USCT veterans scheduled special events in the park. Taylor, who actually lived on the grounds, banned fighting, drinking, or cursing by Greenwood visitors and required them to dress appropriately. When white neighbors complained about Greenwood and its attendant congestion, only Ben Carr’s last-minute appeal to Governor Patterson rescued the park from ruinous legislation. In 1910 a suspicious fire destroyed Greenwood’s large grandstand, but no one was ever charged with the crime. Preston Taylor died in 1931, but the park survived until 1949, superintended by Taylor’s widow.

The Taylor home in Greenwood Park. (photo courtesy of Peggy Dillard)

Benjamin J. Carr (1875-1935) was another remarkable Tennessean, whose concern for his fellow black citizens resulted in the creation of both a second park and a notable educational institution. Born into poverty, Carr grew up working on farms in Trousdale County, Tennessee. He carefully set aside most of his meager earnings (50¢ per day) to purchase his own farm. In time, the frugal young man was able to pay off his mortgage with income from his tobacco crop. Shortly before 1900 Carr came to Nashville, where he was elected porter for the state Supreme Court and became an unexpected friend and ally of Governor Malcolm Patterson (1907-1911), who sent Carr on a lecture tour throughout Middle Tennessee to educate and inspire black farmers. Carr headed the citizens’ organization that brought the Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State Normal School (Tennessee A&I, known today as Tennessee State University) to Nashville, and he was the school’s first agriculture teacher. He was also the driving force behind the city’s purchase of 34 acres near the college for use as a municipal park. When Mayor Hilary Howse dedicated Nashville’s Hadley Park in 1912, it became the first public park for African Americans in the entire nation.

Ben Carr (TSLA photo from Calvert Collection)

The name given to Hadley Park is still a matter of some dispute. When Major Eugene C. Lewis (chairman of the Nashville, Chattanooga, & St. Louis Railway and director-general of the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition) named the park, many assumed the title was a tribute to John L. Hadley, a white slave owner whose home plantation became the site of Tennessee State University. However, Lewis may have intended instead to honor Dr. W. A. Hadley (1850-1901), a physician-educator with whom he had worked closely during the Centennial Exposition, and for whom the Hadley School was named. A graduate of Meharry Medical College, Dr. Hadley had taught briefly in Davidson County schools before opening his medical practice. In 1880 he was elected secretary of the newly formed State Medical Association, and in 1883 he was chosen as a delegate to the National Convention of Colored Men at Louisville. He founded the Independent Order of the Immaculates and served on the executive committee (with Major E. C. Lewis) of the 1897 Centennial. After practicing medicine for several years, Hadley returned to teaching. At the time of his death, he was principal of Carter Public School in Nashville.

Adapted from the Greenwood Project.

Lee Loventhal: Citizen Exemplar

by Jean Roseman.

“His heart was as big as he was, and he was a big man . . .” (Herbert Kohn, former Executive Secretary of the Y.M.H.A.). “He was a terrific force in the Jewish and in the non-Jewish community. He participated in everything” (Percy Cohen, lifelong Nashville resident). “He probably did more for Nashville than any other citizen in the last century” (a proud nephew).

*Lee Loventhal poster courtesy of Vanderbilt University library*

These accolades characterize Lee J. Loventhal, a man of limitless energy. Born in East Nashville in 1875, he was the son of L. J. and Mary Sulzbacher Loventhal, a Jewish couple of German ancestry. Salutatorian of his Fogg High School class in 1892, he entered Vanderbilt intending to study law, but his father’s death in 1895 left him — a 19-year-old college student — responsible for his mother, his six siblings, and his father’s bustling insurance business. Not only did he manage the company successfully, but he also continued to work diligently at his studies, graduating from Vanderbilt with honors. His insurance company still thrives today, the oldest of its kind in Nashville under continuous ownership by one family.

Loventhal was a citizen exemplar in business as well as in service to the Nashville community. There was hardly an aspect of civic life in which he was not involved. For a quarter of a century he served on the Park Commission, helping develop the magnificent system of parks and playgrounds that still enhance life in Nashville. His concern for education led him to accept the position of Commissioner of Watkins Institute. He also served on the Board of Trustees and various important committees of Fisk University, whose gratitude for his support is recorded in this inscription: “Lee J. Loventhal helped to carry into our day the splendid American tradition of faith in the education and training of young men and women irrespective of color which inspired the founding of Fisk University at the close of the Civil War.”

Always loyal to Vanderbilt, Loventhal served on its Board of Trust for 22 years, donating both time and money to the university. He established the Lee J. Loventhal Prize in Public Speaking with an annual gift perpetuated in his will. Author Bill Carey names him as a major force behind fundraising for the new Vanderbilt stadium in the 1920s. When the university offered a degree in business administration, businessman Loventhal was invited to be a guest lecturer.

His generosity also extended to the Y.M.C.A. Graduate School. When this institution cooperated with Vanderbilt, Peabody, and Scarritt to form the Joint University Libraries system, Loventhal worked tirelessly on the campaign, donating generously himself. His very presence on a board lent it stature: the Public Health Nursing Society, the Nashville Boy Scouts, the Nashville Boys’ Club, and the Tennessee Children’s Home-Finding Society all benefited from his efforts.

During World War I he served as state treasurer of United War Work in Tennessee, collecting and sending the National Treasury over two million dollars to support the war effort. Meanwhile, in his role as finance chairman of the local Red Cross, he successfully raised contingency funds to keep that organization active.

*Young Men’s/Young Women’s Hebrew Association Building. (Postcard from NHN Collection)*

At the end of the war, as society readjusted, many charities emerged. It was not uncommon then to find each street corner “worked” by well-intentioned solicitors, to the great discomfort of passers-by. Loventhal and a few others realized they could adapt the wartime effort to peacetime causes. Their vision and initiative gave rise in 1925 to the Nashville Community Chest, which coordinated fund raising with disbursements to charities. He himself served as its first president and sat on the executive committee for many years.

Amid his many commitments, Loventhal was also a charter member of the Kiwanis Club, a Mason, a Knight Commander of the Scottish Rite, and a Shriner. He helped found the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and campaigned vigorously to establish what is now the Gordon Jewish Community Center, serving for six years as its first president and working many more years as its treasurer. So vital was he in the creation of the Y.M.H.A. that a picture of him, inscribed “Our First President,” hung for years in the entrance of the building. According to a well-known anecdote of the time, a young Jewish lad who spent much time at the Y.M.H.A. was asked by a teacher whether he knew the name of the first president. Without hesitation, the boy responded, “Lee J. Loventhal.”

Devoted to Jewish causes, Loventhal served on the boards of the Federated Jewish charities, the B’nai B’rith Maimonides Lodge, and the Vine Street Temple. He also gave active support to several Jewish institutions outside Nashville: the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the Leo N. Levy Hospital in Hot Springs, and the Old Folks’ Home in Memphis.

Despite his busy schedule, Loventhal was first and foremost a family man. His 1899 marriage to Gertrude Moses of Baltimore produced two daughters, one of whom died in childhood, and two beloved grandchildren.

Men playing checkers at Young Men’s Hebrew Association in Nashville, about 1930 (photo by Marvin W. Wiles)

Lee J. Loventhal died in 1940 after a four-month illness. In 1944 the Joint University Libraries* acquired a memorial fund from his family and friends to establish a collection of Jewish books in his honor, with specially commissioned bookplates designed by artist Robert Gregory Gifford. The collection upholds the ideals that guided Loventhal’s life: education and service to one’s fellow man.

* A trust indenture from Nashville, Tennessee established the Joint University Libraries on December 28, 1938. Libraries included in the cooperative are those of Vanderbilt University, George Peabody College for Teachers, and Scarritt College for Christian Workers.

SOURCES
Jewish Federation Archives
Vanderbilt Special Collections