(Most recently updated 15 November 2021)
The first Africans in the Americas
Contrary to the claims of Anglocentric history, the first
Africans brought to the Americas did not arrive in Jamestown in 1619. The Portugese, in fact, inaugurated that
crime against humanity in 1526 in what would become the Empire of Brasil.
Further to the north, in what would grow into the Capitania-General
de La Florida under the Virreinato (Viceroyalty) de Nueva EspaƱa, one hundred Africans were
brought to Sapelo Island, Georgia, in September 1526. Here
they were meant to be slaves of the 600 colonists of San Miguel de Guadalpe,
led by Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon. Things
did not go as planned.
In addition to coming into conflict with the locals, almost
certainly from one of the Guale tribes, disease also hit the colony, bypassing
the would-be slaves. Because the colonists
arrived so late in the year, it was too late to plant crops. Then in October, the slaves rebelled against
the Spanish in the midst of infighting among the colonists.
The entire contingent of Africans escaped, almost certainly
to live among the Guale. They were thus
the first non-native settlers in North America above the Rio Grande since the
Vikings of 1000 CE. They also carried
out the first slave revolt in the Americas against European oppressors.
The surviving colonists sailed out east in mid-November,
only 150 of them making it back to Spain.
There were also Africans taken from Spanish colonies in
Colombia (then known as Cartagena) landed at Roanoke by Francis Drake in 1586.
First Africans in Chattanooga Country
In some accounts of the Cherokee who moved into the area
then known as the Chickamauga Towns (Hamilton County, roughly) in late 1776,
the native militants found escaped slaves from British colonies. Not a great number but some.
This being well before any of the Southeast natives began
adopting bad habits of the “Virginians”, these maroons, as the Spanish called
them, were assimilated into or at least accomodated by the dissidents Cherokee community. Such refugees were common in northern Florida
in large enough numbers to create their own settlements.
When the Chickamauga Cherokee moved to the Five Lower Towns
area (south Marion Co. in Tennessee,
north Jackson Co. in Alabama, Dade Co. in Georgia) in 1782, maroons were already
there also.
After the Cherokee-American Wars (1775-1795) concluded, Afro-Americans continued to live among the Cherokee in the vicinity, some slaves, some free. Both could own property and free Afro-Americans could become citizens, until the Constitution of the Cherokee Nation East was adopted in 1827.
Of note in the local region, in Marion County but
close to Hamilton County, was a landmark denoted as Negro Sugar Camp in the 8
July 1817 Treaty of Cherokee Agency and on Charles Royce’s 1883 map of the
Cherokee Nation (the actual land that stood upon was not ceded until the 27 February 1819 Treaty of
Washington City). A settlement of free Afro-Americans, it lay on the
right bank/north side of the Tennessee River in Bennett Hollow, across from the
head of Oates Island.
Antebellum times
Until 1838, all of the Chattanooga Country south and east of the Tennessee River belonged to the
Cherokee Nation. Some Cherokee had slaves, but no large groups until Joseph Vann established a plantation at what became Harrison but was then known as Vann’s Town.
As illustrated by Courtney Elizabeth Knapp in her book Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie, the 1820 census the year after Hamilton County
was established north of the Tennessee River in 1819 showed 16 free Afro-Americans and 39 who were enslaved in the new county. The county then included just that north on the right bank/north side of the Tennessee River. Whites in large numbers did not settle south of the river until after the Cherokee Removal in 1838, although some did. The 1840 census two years after Removal 93 free Afro-Americans and 584 who were enslaved.
Although many whites in Hamilton County owned slaves in the
antebellum period, few owned more than a couple or a handful. Only ten owned twenty or more, the number required
for one’s farm to be considered a plantation, no matter how large in acreage.
A number of free blacks also lived in Chattanooga, such as
William Lewis, who earned enough money as a blacksmith to buy his freedom then that
of his family. Not all slave owners
allowed slaves to do that.
Another feature of the Chattanooga Country’s
antebellum history about which most Chattanoogans and Hamilton Countians are
unaware is that one of the main stations on the Underground Railroad for
escaped slaves fleeing to non-slave states in the North was on Joshua Beck’s farm in what became North Chattanooga.
The overwhelming majority of ancestors of Chattanooga’s
Afro-American community came from points south after being liberated during
Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign and March to the Sea.
During the War of the Rebellion
In 1861, Hamilton County voted quite decisively against
secession and to remain in the Union twice.
On 9 February, the vote was 1445 against versus 445 for; on 8 June, the
vote was 1260 against versus 854 for.
When the county’s 7th Tennessee Militia mustered in the summer of 1861,
it did so for the Union.
Beginning 9 September 1863, Chattanooga served as
headquarters for the Union Army’s Department of the Cumberland, and, later,
beginning with the Atlanta Campaign, as rear base for its primary field
component, the Army of the Cumberland, after serving as its bivouac in the
winter of 1863-1864.
The Federal Military
Occupation of Chattanooga lasted from 9 September 1863 through 30 April 1866,
when the last two federal units mustered out of service, though the city
remained headquarters for the Military District of East Tennessee until the end
of the year.
From late 1863 through mid-spring 1864, five infantry
regiments of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) were stationed in Chattanooga, which became their base. Of these five, two were raised in Chattanooga while the other three were transferred here. The five were assigned to the Dept. of
the Cumberland’s District of the Etowah based in Chattanooga. These regiments were:
14th U.S. Colored Troops
16th U.S. Colored Troops
18th U.S. Colored Troops
42nd U.S. Colored Troops
44th U.S. Colored Troops
Not long after they all arrived, the five regiments were
gathered into the Department of the Cumberland’s First Colored Brigade.
Far from being used solely for “fatigue duty” (manual labor)
and other routine garrison duty, all the units saw combat.
The 14th USCT fought in the First Battle of Dalton, 14-15
August 1863.
The 44th USCT fought against the vanguard of the Confederate
Army of Tennessee in the Second Battle of Dalton on 13 October 1864.
The 14th USCT saw action again at the Battle of Decatur,
27-30 October 1864.
From November 1864 through January 1865, four regiments of
the First Colored Brigade were in Middle Tennessee campaigning against the
Confederate Army of Tennessee. The 14th,
16th, 18th, and 44th USCTs all fought in the Battle of Nashville, 15-16
December 1864, which put the final nails in the coffin of the above-mentioned
Army of Tennessee as an effective field unit.
During this time, they were temporarily replaced by the units
of the Second Colored Brigade laying over here before its transfer to the department’s
District of East Tennessee based in Knoxville.
While it was here, the 42nd USCT fell under this brigade, which was
composed of the 12th USCT, the 13th USCT, and the 100th USCT, as well as the
1st Independent Battery of Kansas Heavy Artillery, a white unit.
The 42nd USCT served as primarily as garrison troops in
Chattanooga, headquarters of the Department of the Cumberland, and a large part
of their duties was to maintain fortifications there, build roads, construct
Chattanooga’s first bridge (the Meigs Allee), etc. After all, the regiment organized to provide
an opportunity for men not up to the rigors of regular soldiering. However, its soldiers were also one of
primary anti-guerrilla forces for the immediate vicnity, particularly in North
Georgia, though its sister regiments also provided such support.
In August 1865, the Department of the Cumberland ceased to
be and the regiments of its First Colored Brigade became part of the 2nd
Brigade, 4th Division, District of East Tennessee, Department of Tennessee,
Military Division of the Tennessee.
The 14th USCT soon transferred elsewhere in the district,
but the other four remained to demobilize in Chattanooga on various dates in
the spring of 1866. There, most joined
the large population of former slaves who had migrated there in the wake of
Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign and March to the Sea and concentrated at Camp
Contraband north the Tennessee River.
(For more on
Afro-American troops in the Chattanooga area during the Civil War, see Raymond
Evans’ Contributions of United States Colored Troops in the local history section of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County
Bicentennial Library.)
Emancipation and Abolition in Tennessee
The Emancipation Proclamation announced by President Abraham Lincoln on 22 September 1862 to go into effect 1 January 1863 did not cover all slaves in the U.S. but only those within Confederate-held territory at the time. Thus, the states of Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee (yes, the entire state), Louisiana parishes east of the Mississippi River, and several counties in northern Virginia were exempt.
As a class, slaves in Tennessee did not gain legal freedom until military governor Andrew Johnson emancipated them by executive proclamation on 24 October 1864. This order was followed by a referendum on the question on 22 February 1865, upon the overwhelming approval of which slavery in the State of Tennessee was abolished. However, the electorate at the time was quite limited as neither Afro-Americans nor former Confederates and supporters had the right of franchise at the time.
Reconstruction postbellum
Chattanooga was very fortunate after the Civil War in that
it experienced no outbreak of riots like that in Memphis 1-3 May 1866. In that violence, 46 blacks and 2 whites were
killed, 75 other persons were wounded, 5 black women were raped, over 100
people robbed, and 4 churches, 12 schools, and 91 houses were burned to the
ground. These “riots” were actually an
invasion of the black shantytown near Fort Pickering by white policemen,
firemen, laborers, and small businessmen.
With the Union occupation of the city at the beginning of
the Chattanooga Campaign, two men, one a former slave who had earned enough
money as a blacksmith to free both himself and his family and the other his
free-born nephew, spearheaded the business development among
Afro-Americans. William “Uncle Bill”
Lewis made himself wealthy by the end of the war, and his nephew, John S.
Lovell, was well on his way.
Lewis’ primary business after the war was real estate,
primarily for the former slaves who poured into the area in Sherman’s wake or
migrated to Chattanooga afterwards.
The postwar population of Chattanooga was two-thirds
Afro-American, and so was its city police force and its fire department. In addition to the former Camp Contraband,
which eventually became Hill City, Chattanooga’s black citizens occupied
primarily its Fourth Ward (the later Westside, Blue Goose Hollow, Tannery Flats) in the years after the war.
Lewis and Lovell’s commercial and real estate ventures
helped spur the growth of the black neighborhood along East 9th Street past the
Irish Hill area. We can tell from the
fact that the latter community sent a “regiment” to Canada with the Fenian
invasion of 1867 that Irish and Irish-Americans, many of them Union vets, were
still around
Along the north side of the street, the neighborhood that
grew up came to be called Tadetown, while along its south side the neighborhood
was known as Scruggstown. Naturally, the
avenue that ran betwixt the two, East 9th Street, became the focus of
commercial and cultural life from an early stage.
Among Lovell’s other ventures, he owned a racetrack and
stables east of Missionary Ridge along with real estate holdings that
ultimately became the foundation of the Afro-American section of the later 19th
century community of Hornville, which in 1909 became East Dale, and
Johnsonville, the lost Afro-American community between Hornville and Sunnyside. Pleasant Garden Cemetery dates back to this
time, as do Mission Ridge Colored School (1868) and Mission Ridge Baptist
Church (1874).
The main wartime refugee center for escaped and freed slaves
during the Atlanta Campaign and March to the Sea, Camp Contraband on the right
bank/north side of the Tennessee River, eventually grew into the community of
Hill City.
Reconstruction in the State of Tennessee lasted only as long
as the Parson Brownlow administration in Nashville, which ended in 1869. Brownlow’s successor, Dewitt Senter,
immediately removed all the legal disabilities against former Confederates
placed by the preceding administration and began rolling back rights won by the
freedmen. However, in Chattanooga
Afro-Americans were two-thirds of the population and managed to maintain some
power longer than in most places in the state.
That year, 1869, was the same in which Chattanooga expanded
its southern boundaries from Baldwin Street to East End (now Central) Avenue
and from Missionary Avenue (Twenty-third Street) to Chattanooga Avenue (now
West Twenty-eighth Street). The older
boundaries dated from 1851, when the former Town of Chattanooga first expanded
from its original limits with its incorporation as the City of Chattanooga.
There were no further annexations in the 19th century except in 1886, when the city took in the area upon which to build Baroness Erlanger Hospital.
Howard Free School
In late 1866, local Freedmen’s Bureau chief and Congregational minister the Rev. Ewing O. Tade
founded the first public school in Hamilton County and Chattanooga, Oliver O. Howard Free School,
to serve the black community of Chattanooga, most of whom were recently freed
slaves. Classes were first held in the former Bragg Hospital at Sixth and Pine Streets.
Maj. Gen. Howard was commander of XI Corps in the Union Army
of the Cumberland during the Battles of Chattanooga in 1863. At the time of the school’s foundation,
Howard was commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned
Lands, or Freedmen’s Bureau.
Rev. Tade became the county’s first Superintendent of
Education as well as headmaster of Howard, where his wife was one of the
teachers. In early 1869, Tade reported to the county that 82 public schools had been established in the county, 28 of them for black schoolchildren.
In 1871, Howard Free School moved into its own new building at Branham (East 9th) Street and A (Lyndsay) Street. By 1883, Howard High School was holding classes in the top floors of its new building at Gilmer (East 8th) and D (Douglas) Streets, next to Shiloh (First) Baptist Church. Gilmer Street School held classes in the lower floors.
Public schools for white
children were finally established in Chattanooga in 1873, with the opening of
three district primary schools.
Superintendent Tade was very soon summarily deposed. Afterwards, his congregation sent him to
California as pastor to the First Congregational Church of Ferndale.
In 1886, Bell Washington became the first female high school
graduate and very first high school graduate of Howard School in a class of
one. The first male high school
graduate, Augustus Wickliff, followed her the next year, also in a class of
one.
Citico City
St. Elmo is often heralded as Chattanooga’s oldest suburb,
but in reality it shares longevity with Sherman Heights (now called Glass Farm
District and originally called Tunnel) and is surpassed in age by Boyce (later
East Chattanooga, now Boyce Station).
Another neighborhood that began as a suburb for Afro-Americans can also
claim greater age.
In 1882, the Roane Iron Company purchased a large tract of
land at the mouth of Citico Creek on its left bank upon which to build the
facility of its subsidiary, Citico Furnace Company, a venture headed by Hiram
S. Chamberlain and Dwight P. Montague. Citico
Furnace began operations in 1884 and lasted longer than its sister plant, the
Roane Iron and Steel Works west of Cameron Hill, producing until 1911. The Citico Rail Yards came into being
primarily to serve the plant’s needs.
All of the laborers at the furnace were Afro-American, and
most of the original crew had also worked on the plant’s construction. To house its workers, the company built
Citico City, certainly by 1883 and possibly as early as the year before.
The community, annexed in 1925, is now known as Lincoln
Park, and was once two-thirds larger extending east for two blocks and north to
the railroad tracks. This extended area,
covered by tracks of the Citico (DeButts) Yard since the 1930s, included the
Citico Inn hotel for transient workers on Southern Railway, which was relocated to Scruggs Street after the railway annexed those lands.
Freedmen’s Bank in Chattanooga
Along with Howard School and the county school system, Tade established a branch of the National Freedmen’s Savings & Trust Bank in Chattanooga in 1867. The institution flourished locally, only going under with the collapse of its parent body in 1871,
Steele Home for Needy Children
In 1884, Almira S. Steele, originally of Chelsea,
Massachusetts, opened Steele Home for Needy Children in the Afro-American
section of Fort Wood, at what is now the soccer field behind the Challenger
Center. At the time, it was on the north
side of Straight (East 4th) Street next to the tracks of the East Tennessee,
Virginia, & Georgia Railroad (later Southern Railway), next to the East
Fifth Street School.
Initially, the Steele Home was a frame structure. After arsonists burned it down, Steele built
in its place a three-story brick structure with forty-four rooms. The Steele Home, run with her daughter Mira,
functioned as a boarding school for Afro-American orphan children, offering
“Christian education combined with industrial training”. Late adolescents were sent to trade schools
or colleges.
From 1884 to 1925, the Steele Home housed and schooled more
than one thousand six hundred children, only closing its doors with her death.
“Negro removal” in 19th century Chattanooga
According to a 5 December 1887 Chattanooga Times article “A City of Negroes”, the reason for the
relocation of Afro-Americans to areas east of the Citico Yard from “the
valuable hilltops” in the east side of the city was due to “the advance in real
estate in the city” (i.e., the creation of the posh white suburbs of Fort Wood
and Park Place).
In other words, the mass outward relocation of
Afro-Americans in the mid-1880s from the city to the suburbs was due to
gentrification and what the opponents of “urban renewal” in the 1950s and ‘60s
called by the more accurate name, “Negro Removal”, which was the title of a
recent report on the current situation published by Chattanoogans Organized for
Action (COA). And that is very likely
most of the story, but not all of it.
According to that same 1887 article, there were already 800
people in the area (all Afro-American except for one family) and that 110
houses had been built. This lay the
foundations for the “black hamlets” of Bushtown, Churchville, Stanleyville, and
Rosstown and the suburb of Orchard Knob.
Afro-Americans in government
Several Afro-Americans served the region in various
positions of city, county, state, and federal government, from the time the
Federal Military Occupation’s provost marshal allowed the return of civilian
government until the city’s adoption of the at-large commission government
which shut Afro-Americans out of power completely.
Until 1900, the City of Chattanooga had a unicameral Board
of Aldermen elected by ward, of which there were five.
Afro-Americans who served as Aldermen during Reconstruction,
Redemption, and early Jim Crow included the following:
Commodore P. Letcher, 1868
M. Shields, 1869
Clem Shaw, 1870 and 1873
David Medlow, 1871 and 1875-1876
George Sewell, 1871-1872
R.P. McCronklin, 1872
Robert Marsh, 1873-1875
Andrew F. Thompson, 1878
W.B. Kennedy, 1878-1879
William C. Hodge, 1878-1884
Hiram Tyree, 1888-1902
J.W. White, 1889
Eugene Reid, 1899
Sam W. Duncan, 1899
George Shaw, 1901
In 1900, Chattanooga adopted a bicameral form of government
with the introduction of a City Council as its lower house. Due to the way in which boundaries for
elections were now drawn, it was nearly impossible for a black man to be
elected as Alderman.
Three Afro-Americans served on the City Council before the
adoption of a commission form of government with members elected at-large
prevented any more black men from being elected for decades. These were:
Eugene Reid, 1901-1902
Hiram Tyree, 1904-1911
Charles Grigsby, 1901-1902, 1904-1911
In 1911, the city ordinance mandating the commission form of
government went into effect, only being overturned by the case of Brown v. City of Chattanooga in 1989.
Five Afro-Americans served the Hamilton County Court before
Jim Crow brought its hammer down, four as Justices of the Peace:
Alexander P. Flowers (elected
1867)
George Sewell
G.L. Nelson
B.F. Whiteside, 1904-1910
One Afro-American served as Circuit Court Clerk: John J. Irvine, who won election by 1400
votes over white candidates from both parties.
Two Afro-Americans were appointed to the Police Commission
in 1880: A.L. Thompson (Fourth Ward) and
W.A. Henderson (Second Ward).
In addition to his other offices, Hiram Tyree served the
county as School Commissioner for 10 years, as did Dr. T. Edinburg from 1904 to
1908.
Hamilton County sent two Afro-Americans to the Tennessee
General Assembly during the years before Jim Crow tightened its grip:
William C. Hodge,
1885-1886
Styles Hutchins,
1887-1888
In addition to his stints as Alderman and Justice of the
Peace, George Sewell was the Federal Court Cryer in Hamilton County for 20
years. As such, he introduced judges,
called witnesses to the stand, and announced opening and adjournment of court
sessions. In the federal court system,
the cryer ranked above the bailiff and the marshal.
Another Afro-American, Henry C. Smith, served the county as
its Federal Clerk, a Democrat where most Afro-Americans were Republicans.
Other Afro-Americans who served in various official
capacities included Jim Hodge, Larkin Fralix, Marion Keith, Charles Bird,
William Richardson, Isaac Allen, Woodson Weaver, Andy Thompson, and J.R.
Franklin.
Of all these elected and appointed officials, Hiram Tyree,
boss of the Fourth Ward until dethroned by Walter C. Robinson in 1928, was
unquestionably the most influential and longest-lasting. The Fourth Ward included the West Side, Blue
Goose Hollow, and Tannery Flats.
Styles Hutchins was one of the last two Afro-Americans to
serve in the Tennessee State Legislature (1887-1888) until the civil rights
movement of the mid-20th century. The
other was Monroe W. Gooden (D-Fayette County), who served in the same assembly
as Hutchins. Jesse M.H. Graham
(Republican), was elected to serve 1897-1898, but a legal challenge to his
eligibility to hold office was successful, so the seat lay vacant.
Afro-Americans in civil service
Civilian government returned to Chattanooga in October 1865 when the federal Provost Marshal allowed its reestablishment. That government established a voluntary force to police the city until the state government passed an act established a Metropolitan Police force in the city with 24 officers, 2 sergeants, and one commissioner.
In 1869, the office of city marshal was reestablished, with a lieutenant and a force of 10 officers, later increased to 12. Under this design, the city police operated with one-third to one-half of its officers being Afro-American. This changed with the new city charter in 1883, which changed the process by which police officers were appointed, placing that power in the hands of a three-person commission, after which there were no more black officers until the mid-20th century.
The Chattanooga Fire Department began as an all-volunteer service in 1871. In 1882, two more volunteer companies were added, and the next year the city established a paid company, with another paid company added in 1885. Afro-Americans may have served in all the companies, but at least one of these (probably one of the volunteer companies) was all Afro-Americans.
Afro-American newspapers
In addition to his many other endeavors, Styles Hutchins
established a newspaper for the black community, The Independent Age, in 1882, of which he was editor.
Other postbellum newspapers for Afro-Americans by
Afro-Americans established during this time were Justice, published by Edward Horn and H.H. Wilson, and The Liberator, published by James P.
Easley and W.H. Hasty. Easley began
publishing another paper, Chattanooga
Herald, with Noah Parden in 1895.
The cream of the crop, however, was The Weekly Blade, published by Randolph Miller. Miller had come to Chattanooga in 1864 when
the city (and the county) were under federal occupation. Eventually, he got a job as a pressman at the
Chattanooga Gazette. When the firm of Kirby & Gamble began
publishing the Chattanooga Times in
1869, Miller moved there.
In 1898, Miller started The
Blade, which eventually became nationally-syndicated. It was very progressive, especially for its
time, and Miller was far from submissive and accomodating when discussing Jim
Crow. In spite of that, The Blade had an audience of both blacks
and whites. The offices were located at
East 9th and Houston Streets.
Penny Savings Bank
The failure of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company in
1874 left the most recently freed slaves without access to any financial
institution. In Chattanooga, J.W. White
and H.N. Willis joined in 1890 to form the Penny Savings Bank. Their main problem was timing, for just three
years later the Panic of 1893 caused the bank’s collapse. Though short-lived, the bank’s existence
bears witness to their enterprise.
The Invisible Empire Strikes Back
Not the invisible empire you’re probably thinking about upon
seeing that headline. The City of
Chattanooga was lucky in having no activity whatsoever by the post-bellum Ku
Klux Klan which ran rampant in other parts of the state. Of course, two-thirds of the residents were
Afro-American and the city was under federal military occupation until the end
of summer 1866. As a matter of fact, in
1868 ads appeared in the local newspapers and others in the north inviting
northern carpetbaggers to come to the city and start businesses.
There may have been some pro-Confederate sentiment in the
eastern part of the county, but according to contemporary legends desperado Joe
Ritchey, a former lieutenant in Co. D, 4th Tennessee Cavalry, USA, cleaned out
any serious threats by killing or driving out veterans of the bushwacking
Snow’s Scouts based in Snow Hill. That
group’s leader was William Snow, who had been Sheriff of Hamilton County
1858-1862.
The northern parts of the county had been the location of
the strongest pro-Union sentiment, home to men like William Clift, who built
Fort Clift at Sale Creek Camp Ground and mustered the county’s militia as the
7th Tennessee Federal Militia after the state voted to secede.
Nope, the invisible empire I refer to is described thus:
“Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high
places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to
prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth
is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
During the Federal
Military Occupation of Chattanooga, many Union officers who either were
themselves or had ties to industrialists in the North noted many
characteristics that offered opportunity for exploitation. For example, plans for what later became the
Cincinnati Southern Railway began as early as later 1865, in large part because
of the many coal seams in the northern part of the county.
Chattanooga’s
industrial boom did in fact begin after the war, led almost entirely by former
Union officers. Nearly all the members
of the boards of their corporations were either in or from the North, along
with management, supervisors, even many of the foremen. Low-level laboring jobs were those alotted to
local hires, though some few worked their way up.
These northern
capitalists adopted two main methods of exploiting the most from their workers
while compensating them the least.
At former Brig. Gen.
John T. Wilder’s Roane Iron Company, white and black laborers were paid the same
low wages, with the both spoken and unspoken threat against the white workers
that if they struck or tried to organize unions they would be replaced with black
workers.
Former Maj. Gen.
Hiram Chamberlain (also a partner in Roane) avoided the potential problem of
white workers standing up for themselves by only hiring black workers at his
factories, in particular Citico Furnace.
Open racial tensions flare up
Neither of these
approaches endeared either set of workers to the other and laid some of the
foundation for the blowback that began in the later 19th century as well as
adding fuel to the flame of racial prejudice.
On the night of 24 September
1870, an Afro-American sharecropper named Dan Tucker was taken from his home on
the Cummings farm in Wauhatchie (Lookout Valley), beaten, and shot to death by
a band of 25 to 30 masked night riders in place of his cousin from Chattanooga,
Solomon Crooks (by then back in town), accused of molesting a 14-year old white
girl. Another Afro-American living in
the next cabin, Hiram Crockett, was dragged out, whipped, and forced to witness
the lynching.
On 7 October 1873, Elridge Merrill, an Afro-American from
the Gambletown section of St. Elmo in Hamilton County, then well outside the
city limits of Chattanooga, was brutally beaten, whipped, tortured, and lynched
from a corn crib in St. Elmo by a mob of white men angered over his
cohabitation with a white woman named “Dink” Norris. Norris herself was warned never again to do
the same or receive the same treatment.
There was another incident in 1882 in which a mixed race
couple, Amandy Copeland (white) and Charles Francis (black) were persecuted,
but this time it only led to arrest rather than torture and murder.
Chattanooga attempted several times to enforce segregation
in public transportation on its streetcars, at least as early as 1882, via
municipal ordinances. There was
significant protest and resistance, sometimes violent. Several Afro-Americans both male and female
were arrested for refusing to leave or attempting to board whites-only cars or
sections.
In early 1885, a minister in the East 9th Street area, one
Rev. Susine, openly advocated for racial integration in housing, including
mixed race marriage, calling anti-misegenation laws a barbaric heritage of
slavery. In response, whites became
neighbors of those in the neighborhoods of Tadetown and Scruggstown on either
side of East 9th. When the police raided
the area in March, they found more than thirty mixed race couples, whom they
charged, naming Susine as an accessory in each case.
Charles William lynching and near armed conflict
The most vigorous case of resistance the city’s segregation
ordinances occurred on 7 September 1885, when Charles Williams shot a street
car driver who tried to enforce Chattanooga’s segregated seating
ordinance. The driver, Polk Mitchell, was also a former
city constable, and partly because of this, Williams was lynched from the
rafters of the third floor of the Hamilton County Jail the day after his
arrest.
As related by Tim Ezell in Chattanooga, 1865-1900: A City Set Down in Dixie, Sheriff William C. Pyatt and his deputies attempted to protect Williams from the mob, to the extent of calling up the county militia, but Pyatt was unable to contact the governor to get authorization to arm them.
Meanwhile, a militia of black citizens armed themselves and proceeded to the jail, which at the time was on Walnut Street, many of its members being veterans of the Union army. This Afro-American militia reached the jail just after the mob and broken in and was proceeding to hang Charles Williams, and a firefight broke out along with a huge riot. Immediate threat of armed conflict faded when the black militia learned Williams was dead, but whites in the city were terrified and stockpiled arms and ammo for weeks.
Civil War veterans’ organizations
In the 1880s, interest in the War of the Rebellion returned to the fore, with organizations of veterans being organized or revived.
On the Confederate side, veterans were first brought together in 1885 by Joseph Shipp, former captain of Co. G, 60th Tennessee Mounted Infantry, as N.B. Forrest Camp No. 3, Confederate Veterans. In 1889, this group became a charter member of the United Confederate Veterans Association, which Shipp spearheaded, as N.B. Forrest Camp No. 4. This group was the sole organization for Confederate veterans in the county.
By contrast, Union veterans could support five chapters of their organization, the Grand Army of the Republic. In Chattanooga, there were Lookout Post No. 2, Chickamauga Post No. 22, and Mission Ridge Post No. 45; in Soddy there was Robert L. McCook Post No. 36; and in Sale Creek there was Gordon Grainger Post No. 84. Chickamauga Post No. 22 was composed of Afro-American veterans of the U.S. Colored Troops.
In addition to the five chapters of the G.A.R., the city hosted two chapters of the Society of the Army of the Cumberland, a veterans’ group for former commissioned officers who served in that federal army. These were the Moccasin Point Camp and the Lookout Mountain Camp, which combined in 1895 as the Mountain City Club.
More lynchings in Hamilton County
On 24 July 1889, Thomas Gailiff, a white man, was dragged
out of his dwelling in East End, Tennessee, in Hamilton County by White Caps
who then hung him from a tree in the yard for being a “traducer of women”. He managed to escape, but was caught and hung
again near Ross’ Gap. His more likely
“offense” was cohabitating with an Afro-American woman. The White Caps were a forerunner of the 1915
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
On 14 February 1893, Alfred Blount, an Afro-American migrant
laborer living in a boarding house at the south end of Maple Street (at the
mouth of the gully between Terrace Hill and College Hill) was accused of
sexually assaulting a white woman. He
was dragged from the Hamilton County Jail and hanged from the southernmost
(first) span of the County (Walnut Street) Bridge. He had not even been formally charged because
the victim repeatedly denied he was the perpetrator.
On 25 February 1897, Charles Brown, an Afro-American of
Bakewell (aka Retro), Tennessee, was lynched from a bridge over North
Chickamauga Creek near Soddy, Tennessee, after being accused of molesting a
local white woman.
Chattanooga National Medical College
In 1898, Dr. Thomas W. Haigler founded Chattanooga National Medical College, the third medical school for Afro-Americans in the states and one of only seven such schools in the entire country during its existence. Named after Haigler’s alma mater (Louisville National Medical College), the school was chartered 19 June 1899, the same year Chattanooga Medical College opened at the campus of Grant University in Chattanooga.
Haigler operated the school out of 602 East 8th Street, sharing space with his home and own medical office, though instruction was undoubtedly held at several locations. At its peak, CNMC had 19 instructors on staff at least part-time, and 16 students graduated as medical professionals. According to most sources, the school closed it doors in 1904, probably for lack of funding, though other sources report CNMC lasting until 1908, the same year one of its graduates (unnamed) passed the state board exams.
At the dawn of the 20th century
Afro-Americans in the City of Chattanooga – since 1869 bound
by the Tennessee River, East End (Central) Avenue, and Chattanooga Avenue (West
28th Street) – concentrated in the West Side neighborhoods of Blue Goose
Hollow, College Hill, Five Points, South Africa, Tannery Flats, Tenderloin, and
Whiteside Flats; in the South Chattanooga neighborhoods of Happy Hollow, Hooterville,
Washington Park, White’s Hill; and in the East Side neighborhoods of Cocaine
Alley (more formally Douglas Street Alley), Darktown, Scruggstown, Tadetown, and
Tincup Alley.
Suburbs of Chattanooga that were inhabited exclusively
or mostly by Afro-Americans included Bushtown, Churchville (Stanleytown), Citico City, East
End, Fort Cheatham, Little Egypt, Orchard Knob, Rosstown, and Park City. Specifically Afro-American sections of
suburbs included Bozentown in East Chattanooga, Chinch Row and Red Row in Murray’s
Field extension south of Chattanooga Creek, and western Hill City.
Citico City is now better known as Lincoln Park. Jasper was adjacent to the Hixson community. Little Egypt lay in East Chattanooga, west of
Dodson Avenue from the Southern Railway to the south side of Farleigh Street.
Rural exclusively or predominately Afro-American communities
in Hamilton County included Antioch, Bird's Mill, Black Belt, Chickamauga, Hawkinsville, Jasper,
Johnsonville, Magby Pond, Pankeytown, Shot Hollow, and Turkey Foot Hollow.
Antioch lay long what’s now Greenwood Road. Black Belt lay along the Silverdale-Harrison
Road. Chickamauga was the original name
of Shepherd. Hawkinsville lay along
Hickory Valley Road north of Chattanooga-Cleveland Pike and the village of
Tyner. Jasper was adjacent to the Hixson
community. Johnsonville lay between
Hornville (now Eastdale) and Sunnyside, including nearly the entire length of
Ridgeside/Rogers Road and Pleasant Gardens Cemetery (the eastern section
survives as today’s Menlo Park). Magby
Pond lay where Murray Hills is now; the pond is still there but is more of a
puddle. Shot Hollow lay along Oakwood
Drive, formerly Shot Hollow Road. Turkey
Foot was a village where Booker T. Washington State Park is now.
There were also enclaves of Afro-Americans in Bakewell,
Coulterville, Daisy, Soddy, and Wauhatchie.
In
James County to the east, now part of Hamilton again but separate 1871-1919,
there were four all Afro-American communities.
The community of Black Ankle stood on the west side of the railroad
across from the town and county seat of Ooltewah while that of (another) Little
Egypt (also called East Ooltewah) lay on the east side of the town. Summit City centered on the crossroads of Old
Lee Highway, Apison Pike, and School Street, though it spread across a much
broader area. There were also enclaves
in Apison and Georgetown.
Rail Transportation
The only known rail station in an Afro-American community on a long-haul railway at the turn of the century was Summit Station on the Southern Railway (formerly the line of the East Tennessee, Virginia, & Georgia Railroad).
The Chattanooga Belt Railway and later Chattanooga Rapid Transit had a station called Bald Knob then Orchard Knob (which was mostly Afro-American) and another first called Stanleyville then Churchville on their Orchard Knob Division. On its Radcliff Division, this electric railway had a station called East End in the eponymous predominantly Afro-American suburb. On its Ridgedale Division, this railway had a station in the almost entirely Afro-American community of Fort Cheatham. On its Mountain Division, this railway had a station called Beulah serving the Afro-American community of Gambletown, nestled between St. Elmo and Mountain Junction.
The rival Chattanooga Electric Railway, meanwhile, had two lines which served entirely Afro-American communities, the East 9th Street Division (which turned north at East End Avenue to serve the Afro-American section of Fort Wood and Citico City, the later Lincoln Park) and the Carter Street Division, which served the communities of College Hill (Westside), Tannery Flats, and Blue Goose Hollow. Its Sherman Heights-East Chattanooga (Boyce) Division served the mostly or entirely Afro-American communities of Citico City, Orchard Knob, Bushtown, Churchville, and Stanleyville.
Education under Jim Crow
Under segregation, white children and black children were
required to attend separate schools. In
cases where the names of two schools, one for black children and one for white
children, were the same, the descriptor “Colored” was added after the name of
the school for Afro-American children, even if it was the elder in existence.
Chattanooga City Schools
By the 20th century, two other schools for Afro-American
children had joined the pioneer Howard School. Gilmer Street School (1-8) shared a building with Howard High School at Gilmer (East 8th) and D (Douglas) Streets. Montgomery Avenue School met at its building at Montgomery Avenue (West Main Street) and College Street.
In 1904, Howard High School had moved to Gillespie (East 11th) Street, while its building mate moved to the later East 5th Street and became Carolina Street School (soon to be East Fifth Street School).
In the 1913-1914 school year, Chattanooga Avenue School at West 28th and Williams Streets for black students was added to the system.
Hamilton County Schools
Two of the earliest public schools established for
Afro-American children in the county were Chickamauga School (1871) and Mission
Ridge School (1868). The first stood a
half-mile south of Chickamauga Station depot on Chickamauga (now Airport) Road
at the current site of Whispering Pines Mobile Homes is now, serving children
of the Chickamauga (later Shepherd) community.
The second stood at 237 Shallowford Road on the west side of Mission
Ridge Baptist Church for Afro-Americans, serving children of the Hornville
(Eastdale) community.
The Hamilton County Schools were first organized into a
system in 1873 after the State of Tennessee passed an act authorizing local
entities to establish public schools and organize them into a system, along
with providing financial support.
Initially, only primary schools were authorized and its was not until
1883 that public secondary grades were added to existing schools. For Afro-American children, high school programs were added to Churchville School and Magby Pond School.
As the 20th century opened, Afro-American children attended
the following schools:
Chickamauga School (Colored),
Chickamauga/Shepherd
Churchville School
Coulterville School (Colored)
Fort Cheatham School, Grant and E.
24th Sts.
Hill City School (Colored), 1312
Spears Ave.
Hixson School (Colored), Jasper
community
Magby Pond School
Mission Ridge School (Colored), 237
Shallowford Rd.
School No. 6, vicinity of Soddy
Orchard Knob School, E. 4th St. and
Orchard Knob Ave.
Retro School (Colored), Bakewell
Sherman Heights School (Colored),
2410 Dodson Ave.
Soddy School (Colored)
St. Elmo School (Colored), W. 38th
and Church Sts.
Turkey Foot School
Tyner School (Colored), Hawkinsville
Wauhatchie School (Colored)
After the 1905-1906 school year, Churchville merged into
Orchard Knob School and Wauhatchie (Colored) merged into St. Elmo (Colored).
By the 1907-1908 school year, Daisy School (Colored) began
classes, and after that year Coulterville (Colored) merged into Soddy
(Colored). But more
importantly, the high school classes at Magby Pond were consolidated with those
of Churchville to create Orchard Knob
High School.
By the 1911-1912 school year, East End School opened for
classes on Rossville Avenue (Boulevard); Mission Ridge (Colored) moved to the
corner of South and Line Streets and became East Dale (Colored); Sherman
Heights (Colored) became East Chattanooga (Colored); and Hill City (Colored)
became North Chattanooga (Colored).
Sometime shortly afterwards, Retro School (Colored) became Bakewell
(Colored).
National Negro Business League, Chattanooga
In 1905, G.W. Franklin and others established a chapter of
Booker T. Washington’s NNBL, with staunch support from Randolph Miller and the Chattanooga Weekly Blade. The most influential chapter of NNBL
nationally was the one in Nashville but Chattanooga’s was a close second, out of over 600 chapters in 34 states by 1915.
Though purportedly dedicated to promoting black businesses
and keeping those in Afro-American hands, the Chattanooga chapter became
involved in social justice and social welfare matters, though it almost always
pushed the gradualist approach of the NNBL’s founder.
The Chattanooga Streetcar Boycott of 1905
The working-class citizens of Chattanooga boycotted
streetcars in support of striking carmen in 1899, 1911, 1916, and 1917, but
those boycotts were over labor issues.
This boycott was solely about human dignity.
In July 1905, the State of Tennessee, whose original
constitution in 1796 guaranteed universal suffrage to all men, including free
blacks, enacted a law segregating all public transportation in the state at all
levels. In response, Randolph Miller,
publisher of nationally-syndicated The
Weekly Blade, and Hiram Tyree, Alderman from the Fourth Ward, led a boycott
of Chattanooga’s streetcars. They were
partially inspired by the similar boycott being conducted in Nashville.
As part of the boycott, Miller organized four horse-powered
hack lines to the Afro-American communities of St. Elmo (Gambletown section),
Fort Cheatham, Tannery Flats (along with Blue Goose Hollow), and Churchville
(including Bushtown and Stanleyville).
After some success with the hack lines, Miller and others
set about forming the Transfer Omnibus Motor Car Company , patterned after a
successful such venture in Nashville, an early version of a taxi service, but
the effort never materialized due to lack of investors.
The boycott managed to hold out for three months before
collapsing in the face of resistance from white political leaders, harassment
by police, and opposition from a sizable number of Afro-American businessmen as
wel as virtually all the black religious leaders. This despite the fact that average
Afro-Americans in Chattanooga supported it as did a large portion of the local
NNBL chapter.
In the last month of 1905, rumors of a “black crime wave”
spread throughout the county, and a number of Afro-Americans were arrested for
crimes against whites. These included
Floyd Westfield of Chickamauga (now Shepherd), who shot an armed white
constable on Christmas Eve.
Chattanooga’s last public lynching
On 23 January 1906, a white woman named Nevada Taylor was
walking from a streetcar stop to her home at Forest Hills Cemetery (where her
father was caretaker) when she was attacked and raped. Sheriff Joseph Shipp arrested two men based
on Taylor’s vague description, James Broaden and Ed Johnson. A grand jury indicted Johnson on 26 January.
The trial began on 6 February, with Johnson’s defense led by
former judge Lewis Shepherd, who had been appointed by the court. It ended three days later with Johnson’s
conviction, even though Taylor refused to swear under oath that he was her
assailant. His execution was set for 13
March.
When Shepherd and his team did not appeal, Noah Parden and
Styles Hutchins stepped in. After their
petitions to the state court of appeals and Tennessee supreme court were
denied, Parden filed for a writ of habeus corpus with the federal district
court in Knoxville. The case was
eventually approved to be heard at the U.S. Supreme Court, with a stay of
execution granted by Justice John Marshall Harlan. It was the first time in history that SCOTUS
had ever intervened in a state criminal case.
Before that could happen, however, on the evening of 19
March 1906, a huge crowd stormed the jail, overwhelming the single guard
present who tried to resist, dragged Johnson out to Walnut Street Bridge, and
hanged him from the second span of the County Bridge. After two minutes, they riddle him with fifty
bullets.
Response by the Afro-American community usually goes
unmentioned, but it was substantial. In
the aftermath, the black community held meetings, conducted marches, and
engaged in various other forms of protest.
These included a one-day general strike by the entire Afro-American
community; employers wisely chose not to penalize participants.
In the only case ever tried before the Supreme Court (United States v. Shipp et al, argued 4-5
December, decided 24 December 1906), Sheriff Shipp and others were convicted of
contempt of court, with he and two others sentenced to 90 days and two others
to 60 days. Their defence was led by
none other than Judge Lewis Shepherd.
Sheriff Shipp fought with the Army of Tennessee during the War of the Rebellion, rising to the rank of captain. As commander of the N.B. Forrest Camp, Confederate Veterans (est. Sept. 1885), he was the driving force behind the organization of the United Confederate Veterans in 1889 and remained one of its national staff officers (Assistant Quartermaster General) until his death. It was due to his leading role that the UCV held its first convention in Chattanooga in 1890. Shipp served as Sheriff for two terms, 1904-1908. After his death in 1925, he was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in his Confederate uniform.
Floyd Westfield case
On 24 December 1905, Floyd Westfield and his friends were
celebrating Christmas Eve at his grandmother’s house in Chickamauga (Shepherd),
including fireworks. County constable
Lon Rains, a denizen of Concord community, was attending another party at
Chickamauga School.
Rain’s party was at the Chickamauga School for white
children, which at the time stood next to what was then Chickamauga Chapel Baptist Church (later Shepherd Baptist). The older Chickamauga School (Colored) stood
where Whispering Pines Mobile Homes is now.
Constable Rains was courting Miss Hattie Fox, the school’s
teacher, and became enraged at what he deemed the rude disruption of the noisy,
more lively party nearby. Even with his
friends trying to dissuade him, Rains invaded Westfield’s grandmother’s house,
pistol drawn, so Westfield shot him, admitted he did when arrested and claiming
self-defence.
It is important to note that a county constable was not
merely a law enforcement officer but an elected official, like justice of the
peace. There were two constables elected
for each of three districts in the county (and three justices of the peace
each).
At his trials, Rains’ friends testified that Westfield had
been justifiably in fear of his life. The
case ultimately ended with Westfield’s acquittal in 1907 after at least two
overturned convictions.
Westfield’s lead defense attorney was Judge Lewis Shepherd.
Abraham Lincoln High School
The Hamilton County Schools opened its first separate high
school buildings in 1907, for grades 7-12 (termed third-class high schools by
the state); these later became second-class high schools (grades 9 thru 12). As mentioned above, for Afro-American students, this meant Orchard Knob High School.
Abraham Lincoln High School opened its doors for the 1914-1915 school year. Lincoln High grew out out of Orchard Knob High School, with the principal of Orchard Knob HS, H.F. Taliaferro, becoming principal of the new Lincoln High.
At the time, Lincoln was not only the first high school for
Afro-Americans but the only county public high school (in terms of being in a separate building) for Afro-American
children in the entire State of Tennessee.
For years it served as the county school system’s only high school for
Afro-Americans (the city’d had Howard School since 1867). The building stood at the corner of North
Holly Street and Cleveland Avenue.
Tennessee Socialist Party platform, 1912
In its platform for state and national races in 1912, the Socialist Party of Tennessee declared that “the question of white supremacy is injected into
white workers’ minds by the capitalist class to keep the workers divided on
the economic field”.
Walden Hospital
Dr. Emma Rochelle Wheeler graduated from Walden University’s
Meharry Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical College in Nashville in 1905. Dr. Rochelle married her fiance, fellow
graduate Dr. Joseph Wheeler, the same week, and the two moved to Chattanooga
and set up a joint practice on East Main Street.
One thing that really bothered the female Dr. Wheeler was the
lack of hospital facilities for Afro-Americans short of the basements of
hospitals such as Erlanger Hospital and Newell Clinic.
After ten years, Dr. Emma Wheeler purchased two lots on the
southwest corner of East 8th and Douglas Streets and built a three-story brick
hospital using her own money. There were
three departments: surgical, maternity,
and nursing. In-patient facilities
included nine rooms with two beds each and a ward with twelve beds.
The hospital was staffed by two doctors, one of whom was
herself, and three nurses; in addition, seventeen physicians and surgeons from
Mountain City Medical Society serviced patients there. Walden Hospital opened its doors for patients
in July 1915.
Meanwhile, Dr. Joseph Wheeler moved his practice to the
building where the Whole Note now stands.
His wife had an office there too.
Ten years later, frustrated by the lack of a nursing school
for Afro-American women in the city, Dr. Wheeler established Walden Hospital
Nurse Training School at her hospital. The
program lasted until 1945.
Also in 1925, Dr. Wheeler pioneered what may be considered
the first managed care plan with the Nurse Service Club. For a relatively small subscription each
month (25¢), a client would be assured of an otherwise cost-free two-week stay
in the hospital followed by at-home nursing care if needed for recovery.
For nearly forty years, Dr. Wheeler helmed Walden Hospital
before being forced to step down by her own health issues, though she continued
her own practice. Walden Hospital shut
its doors in June 1952.
Leo Frank case
In the summer of 1913, Leo Frank, a director of the National
Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia, and president of the city’s B’nai Brith
organization, was wrongly convicted of the murder of 14-year old worker Mary
Phagan in the basement of the factory.
Frank’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed in April 1915. The case connects to Chattanooga because the
lawyers working on his appeal leaned on Judge Lewis Shepherd for advice and
direction.
After reviewing the evidence and considering other
information that had not been available at trial, Gov. John M. Slaton commuted
Frank’s sentence from death to life imprisonment. The Georgia National Guard had to be called
out to protect Slaton from the outraged public.
A secret society formed to take matters into its own hands
called the Knights of Mary Phagan made up of some 28 men. Thomas Watson, a Populist who once strongly
advocated for poor whites and blacks working together but had since become one
of the strongest advocates of segregation and white supremacy, openly called
for Frank to be lynched.
On 16 August 1915, a mob broke into Milledgeville State
Penitentiary where Frank was being held, kidnapped him, and hung him at Frey’s
Gin, two miles east of Marietta, at 7 am the next morning.
Chattanooga Socialist Local, 1915
In this year, the Left Wing Local of the Socialist Party in Chattanooga voted unanimously to join the newly formed Socialist Propaganda League of America, a caucus within the bigger Socialist Party of America. The SPLA would become the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party in 1919, the forerunner of the Communist Party USA. As the Socialist Party was not segregated in Tennessee, this necessarily included a number of Chattanooga Afro-American radicals.
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
The evening of Thanksgiving 1915 (November 25), Indiana-born
William J. Simmons and seventeen other men who were almost all alumni of the
Knights of Mary Phagan, founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Stone
Mountain, Georgia.
Despite claims to the contrary, the new organization had no
connection to the postbellum terror organization. Instead, it was based on Simmons’
interpretation of the highly romanticized fictional version he had seen in that
year’s blockbuster movie, The Birth of a
Nation. Their fantasy roleplay
combined with a subculture inherited from the White Caps movement of the late
19th and early 20th centuries were the group’s actual antecedents. For instance, individucal members of the
earlier group were known as “Ghouls” rather than the more pretentious name of
“Knights”.
The influence of D.W. Griffith’s movie should not be
underestimated. It was, for instance,
the first motion picture ever to be shown in the White House, for a President
Woodrow Wilson who sobbed at its conclusion.
Before the movie, the story had been the subject of a play in vaudeville
houses across the South and the nation called The Clansman, based on Thomas Dixon’s novel of the same name.
In 1923, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan put forward full
slates in the municipal elections of Chattanooga and Memphis. Incredibly, they campaigned in the black
communities of both cities. This version
of the Klan, they told them, wasn’t anti-black so much as anti-Jewish,
anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and anti-socialist. In Memphis, at least, the local klavern even
tried to persuade the Afro-American community to organize its own version of
the Knights of the KKK.
The Town of North Chattanooga
By the second decade of the 20th century, the area
immediately north of downtown Chattanooga across the Tennessee River had become
widely known as North Chattanooga. It
was originally called Hill City.
In 1915, the almost exclusively white neighborhoods of eastern
North Chattanooga incorporated themselves as a town. In early November that year, Mayor J. Read
Voight introduced an ordinance prohibiting Afro-Americans from settling inside
its borders, with a grandfather clause allowing the two families already within
the town to continue living there.
It was also around this time that the name of Forest Avenue,
which divided the Town of North Chattanooga from the unincorporated and mostly
Afro-American section to the west, was changed to Forrest Avenue in honor of
Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first and perhaps only Grand
Wizard of the postbellum Ku Klux Klan.
Within just a few years, however, the council of the town
voted to annex the remaining unincorporated area of North Chattanooga,
effectively cancelling out Voight’s racist ordinance.
Lincoln Park
In 1918, Chattanooga opened one of the first municipal public
parks for Afro-Americans in the entire State of Tennessee. It bordered the nearly forty-year old
community of Citico City on the latter’s northwest.
At its height, Lincoln Park was three times or more the size
that it is now, with not only a ballfield and picnic area but a ferris wheel, a
merry-go-round, other rides, tennis courts, a concession stand, a dance hall
that doubled as a vaudeville and later movie theater, and the Links-o-Linc miniature golf course.
In 1937, the park opened its olympic-sized swimming pool,
built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), greatly enlarged from the
original version first built.
The park attracted Afro-American visitors from all over the
South, gave its name to the former Citico City, and in the 1929 season served
as the home field for the Chattanooga Black Cats in the Negro Southern League.
Over 15,000 people came to Lincoln Park for the Fourth of
July in 1947 from all over the South.
Despite its history and attractive features, the passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barring segregation in public accommodations led to
Lincoln Park’s decline once Warner Park was opened for Afro-Americans.
Two-thirds of Lincoln Park are now occupied by peripheral
facilities of Erlanger Hospital and the city has been trying to extend Central
Avenue to Riverside Drive, which would greatly impact what is left.
Afro-American parks before Lincoln Park
The earliest park for Afro-Americans in Chattanooga,
or at least in its suburbs, was Lovell’s Park in Bushtown, reachable by the
Orchard Knob Division of the Chattanooga Union Railway (Belt Line), which
opened in August 1889. It was built and
owned by John S. Lovell, nephew of noted community leader William Lewis, and
included a race track for horses. Privately
owned, it lay on the site of today’s Carver Recreational Center, later becoming
Washington Park, then Roosevelt Park, Magnolia Park, and Roosevelt Park again,
under which name it became a public park of the City of Chattanooga a decade
before.
At the turn of the century, there were three parks named
Washington Park (probably for Booker T.), privately-owned and exclusively for
the use of Afro-Americans, in the city and its near suburbs: one west of Carter Street across from the end
of Henry (West 19th) Street in South Chattanooga, one on Ruoh’s Crossing
(Orchard Knob Avenue) in Bushtown, and one in Gambletown at the edge of
Mountain Junction. Nothing is available
about the one in Gambletown, but the one in South Chattanooga was closed by
order of the Chattanooga police chief due to several incidents of violent crime
in September 1906.
The Washington Park shut down by the police chief was
replaced shortly thereafter by Luna Park at the corner of Missionary Avenue
(West 23rd Street) and Carter Street. It
served as home field in the 1909 and 1910 seasons for the barnstorming baseball
club simply called Chattanooga.
About the same time, the Washington Park in Bushtown came
into new ownership, which rechristened it Roosevelt Park. In a few years, other new owners named it
Magnolia Park, but that only lasted a year before it was reacquired by former
owner Moses Stokes and the name reverted to Roosevelt Park.
Commissioner Joseph H. Warner of the then (1911) new
Department of Public Utilities, Buildings, and Parks not only put his energy
into renewing the current city-owned parks, all of which at the time were for
whites-only, but purchasing existing private parks for both whites and for
blacks in the community and making them city-funded public parks.
The parks for whites included Sam Houston Park in South
Chattanooga, Boynton Park atop Cameron Hill, Montague Park near Oak
Grove, the Chattanooga Electric Railway-owned Olympia Park at the edge of the
city along East End (Central) Avenue, Jackson Park (circling the National
Cemetery, then confined to the hill) and East Lake Park, with Olympia being
turned into the crown jewel of the city park system as Warner Park.
For black residents, Warner pushed the city to purchase Luna Park and
Roosevelt Park, the latter even though its community, Bushtown, was not yet in
the city limits, and like his vision for Olympia Park, he planned Lincoln Park as the
crown jewel for the city and the region’s Afro-American citizens.
Chattanooga Negro League baseball
For a period of fifty years, Chattanooga hosted baseball
teams that played in the Negro Southern League, that went barnstorming, or did
both in different seasons. Regarding
what barnstorming was, think The Bingo
Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976).
The city’s Afro-American community fielded a team known simply as Chattanooga in the earliest of Negro League in the country, the Southern League of Colored
Base Ballists, which lasted one season, 1886.
The Chattanooga
Unions barnstormed during the 1901 season, home-based at Stanton Field.
Another team simply known as Chattanooga
barnstormed during the 1909 and 1910 seasons, home-based at Luna Park in South Chattanooga on the
West Side.
The Chattanooga Black
Lookouts I played in the Negro Southern League in the 1920 season, based at
Andrews Field.
The Chattanooga
Tigers barnstormed during seasons 1921-1923, home-based at Andrews Field.
The Chattanooga White
Sox played in the Negro Southern League in the first half of the 1926
season, home-based at Andrews Field.
The Chattanooga Black
Lookouts II (White Sox renamed) played the second half of the 1926 season
and all of the 1927 season in the Negro Southern League, home-based at Andrews
Field. In the 1927 season, they were
league champions.
The Chattanooga Black
Cats played in the Negro Southern League in the 1929 season, home-based at
Lincoln Park Field.
The Chattanooga Black
Lookouts III played in the Negro Southern League during the 1931 season,
home-based at Engel Stadium, and barnstormed for seasons 1933-1936.
The Chattanooga Choo Choos
barnstormed during seasons 1940-1944 and played in the Negro Southern League
during seasons 1945-1948, home-based at Engel Stadium.
The Chattanooga
All-Stars barnstormed during the 1949 season.
The Chattanooga Black
Choo Choos played in the Negro Southern League during the 1950 season,
home-based at Engel Stadium.
The Chattanooga Stars
played in the Negro Southern League during the 1951 season, home-based at Engel
Stadium.
Two of the greatest baseball players in the history of the Negro
Leagues who later played Major League Baseball got their start in pro ball in
Chattanooga:
Satchel Paige (widely regarded as the greatest pitcher of
all time, black or white) got his start with the Chattanooga White Sox.
Willie Mays (who shares the record number of All-Star games
with Hank Aaron and Stan Musial) got his start with the Chattanooga Choo Choos.
NAACP in Chattanooga
Two of the founders of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People in 1909 in NYC had strong ties to Tennessee. W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells both attended
Fisk University in Nashville. Between
the two, Mississippi-born Ida B. Wells had ties that were stronger as she had
moved to Memphis early in her adult life.
Of all the civil rights leaders of that era, Ida B. Wells
stands out, stands tall, and stands alone.
She was a fierce advocate for both her fellow Afro-Americans and her
fellow women, especially rape victims.
She was the explicitly anointed successor of Frederick Douglas himself
and the leading anti-lynching crusader of her time.
Not until 1918, however, was a chapter of the NAACP
organized in Chattanooga, with M.W. Dent as its secretary. For various reasons, the city chapter had
difficulties in its early years and was later surpassed in popularity by Marcus
Garvey’s organization here. After that,
it existed only on paper and had to be rechartered in 1940.
Hamilton County endorses white supremacy
In 1919, the A.P. Stewart camp of the United Daughers of the
Confederacy joined with the local klavern of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to
install an equestrian statue of former Lt. Gen. Alexander P. Stewart, last
general commanding of the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee, on the front lawn of
the county courthouse, in full Confederate uniform. The groups ended up having to settle for a bust.
For eighteen years, Stewart was a commissioner of the
Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Its board was composed of three members, one
from the War Department, one from the Union army, and one from the Confederate
army. It was by mutual agreement of the
first two that Stewart was chosen as the last.
Such an action could only have been taken with the support
of the county judge and county court. It
also spit in the face of history, given that the vote on secession for
Tennessee 8 June 1861 had been overwhelmingly against such action in Hamilton
County, with a vote of 1260 against versus 854 in favor. The prior vote in February that year had been
even more lopsided against.
James County schools for Afro-Americans
In 1871, the eastern half of the county broke away as James
County, with its seat at the Town of Ooltewah.
For the Town of Harrison, this was both snub and insult, since having
the county seat moved from it to the Town of Chattanooga was what had caused it
to initiate the separation.
In 1919, the county went bankrupt and folded, merging back
into Hamilton County. With this merger,
three more schools for Afro-American children entered the Hamilton County
school system. These were Georgetown
School (Colored), Ooltewah School (Colored), and Summit School.
At one time there had also been an Apison School (Colored),
but the families whose children attended it had relocated out of that area.
After James County’s schools had been absorbed by Hamilton,
the newly-enlarged county system merged Ooltewah (Colored) into Summit School.
Booker T. Washington School
In 1924, Turkey Foot School, Magby Pond School, and Tyner
School (Colored) consolidated to become Booker T. Washington School. At first, the schools served grades one
through eight, but it added a grade every year until a separate high school was
formed in 1930. The funds for the
building were provided by the Rosenwald Fund and the curriculum was designed by
the Tuskegee Institute.
According to C.B. Robinson, many of the parents in Bushtown,
Churchville, Stanleyville, Orchard Knob, and Rosstown preferred to send their
children to Booker T. Washington High once it developed rather than Howard.
The new school was located in the Shot Hollow community,
centered on Shot Hollow Road from state Highway 58 to Hickory Valley Road, the
surviving stretch of which became Oakwood Drive soon after the U.S. Army’s
taking half the road and community for the TNT plant in 1940.
While its curriculum was largely determined by Tuskegee,
Washington School was a public school that was part of the Hamilton County
system until it was annexed by Chattanooga in 1975. The city closed the high school when it
annexed the area, as it had previously done with East Chattanooga School
(Colored) in 1925 and East Dale School (Colored) in 1953, but continued
Washington Elementary School until 1989, when it became one of the sixteen
schools closed that year.
Other Rosenwald schools
The Rosenwald Fund had previously replaced the building of
East Dale School (Colored) and established Harrison School (Colored) in
1923. In 1926, it provided Chickamauga
School (Colored) and Summit School with brand new buildings.
At the 1928-1929 school year, the foundation established
Roland Hayes School at Crutchfield Street and Riverside Drive for the
Afro-American children of Sherwood Forest and Bozentown between Riverside Drive
and Amnicola Highway, and later Riverside Park and Roland Hayes Courts.
Bessie Smith was a badass
Now, I’ve heard two versions of this story about the Empress
of the Blues, so I’m using poetic license to choose my favorite.
Bessie Smith had her great homecoming to Chattanooga after
making it big in March 1925. For it, she
and her troupe scheduled shows seven nights in a row at the Liberty Theatre at
312 East 9th Street, an establishment that was white-owned but for blacks only
as clientele.
After the show, she and her troupe went to a nearby juke
joint which was supposed to have delicious pigs feet, collard greens,
black-eyed peas, and cornbread. They ate
their fill, then drink plenty, and danced on the makeshift dance floor.
One of the male customers, a local, kept messing with one of
her troupe, and Bessie got in his face.
When he wanted to know who the hell she thought she was, she knocked him
flat on his ass.
Around four in the morning, after the liquor was all gone,
Bessie and her troupe were headed back to their hotel. The rude dude from earlier that night
appeared out of the dark and stuck a knife in Bessie’s side, then took
off. Bessie ran after him, chasing him
for three blocks then stabbing him with the same knife before collapsing.
People took her to Erlanger Hospital, where she was treated
for her injuries and recommended at least two days of bed rest. She refused, going back to her hotel and
performing for the matinee crowd at two in the afternoon.
Marcus Garvey’s UNIA in Chattanooga
Marcus Garvey visited Chattanooga in 1923 and spoke at
meetings held here, but his ideas did not take off until 1925. In that year, Milton Manyard, formerly of
Chicago, organized the Chattanooga Division of the Universal Negro Improvement
Association and along with it a unit of UNIA’s uniformed paramilitary arm, the
African Legion.
The division was fully organized by the end of the year, at
which it began meeting in the former Steele Home for Needy Children at 865 East
4th Street, which the members rechristened Chattanooga Liberty Hall (after
Liberty Hall in Harlem). Chattanooga was
the only major municipality in the state where Garvey’s ideas gained any
traction, but by early 1927, weekly meetings at Chattanooga Liberty Hall were
filled to capacity.
On Thursday, 4 August 1927, Chattanooga police attempted to
raid a UNIA meeting at the hall, but found themselves blocked by uniformed and
armed members of the African Legion. The Legion members would not let the cops in because they did not have a warrant.
In
the resulting melee, one policeman and two Legion members were wounded. The two wounded, James Jackson and Ira
Johnson, were charged with felonies along with fellow UNIA members Emery Bailey
and Louis Moore. They were acquitted of
the felonies but found guilty of the misdemeanors, fined $50, and sentenced to
60 days.
For the next couple of years, the Chattanooga Division seems
to have gone dark, but in 1929 it resurfaced, with the same liaison as
before, Minerva Alexander, reporting to to UNIA’s national office. However, this was just before the Great
Depression and the arrival of a new player in town.
Red Chattanooga
In the late 19th century, Afro-Americans had their own local
chapter of the Knights of Labor, with about 150 members. The white local had twice that many members,
but there were also more white workers. Though
separate by necessity, the two coordinated their actions as much as they could.
By the second decade of the 20th century, the Chattanooga
local of the Socialist Party of America included both blacks and whites. The city’s Left Wing Local of SPA voted
unanimously in 1915 to join the radical Socialist Propaganda League within the
party. Allied to the Bolshevik wing of
the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the SPL was the primary antecedent
of SPA’s Left Wing Section in 1919 that ultimately became the Communist Party
USA (CPUSA).
CPUSA’s first inroad into the city of Chattanooga came in
1930 via the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL).
The TUUL was CPUSA’s arm for organizing labor at the time. The local was staffed by Amy Shechter, Fred
Totheroe, Red Hendrix, and an “unnamed Negro” (according to the Chattanooga Times).
Tom Johnson came to Chattanooga as chief organizer for the
entire Southern region as well as chair of CPUSA’s District 17 (TN, GA,
AL). Regional and district headquarters
were located here in Chattanooga.
Afro-American members of the party’s Central Committee Harry Haywood and
Hosea Hudson took a special interest in the region and were heavily involved in
both the Scottsboro case and the Share Croppers Union.
Sherman Bell, a resident of Chattanooga and major figure of
the local black community, served as chair of the local branch of CPUSA’s
recently founded League of Struggle for Negro Rights, whose national chair was
poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes .
One of TUUL’s first organizing activities here was creating
an Unemployed Council , the chair of which was Amy Licht. Another was an anti-lynching conference in
1930. The TUUL and local party also
produced information forums, held conferences and conventions, organized
demonstrations, and supported anti-eviction protests.
CPUSA’s regional newspaper, Southern Worker, began publishing in 1930, with issues printed in a
Rossville, Georgia, shop that had the North Georgia kleagle (recruiter) of the
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as one of its owners.
The Scottsboro Boys
On 25 March 1931, a Southern Railway freight train left
Chattanooga bound for Memphis, carrying a number of hoboes which included nine
young black men, am equal number of young white men, and two female mill
workers who on occasion worked as prostitutes.
At the Stevenson, AL, station, a dispute broke out along racial lines,
and the blacks disembarked.
The black men soon found themselves arrested for rape of the
two white women, but escaped being lynched by the angry mob because they were
fiercely protected by the sheriff to whose jail they were brought. Tried by an all-white jury in the seat of
Jackson County at Scottsboro, they were all convicted. With the exception of the 13-year old
defendant, they were sentenced on 9 April to be electrocuted on 10 July that
same year.
Licht learned of their plight while she was in jail awaiting
trial for sedition over a speech she never gave at a demonstration of the
unemployed that never happened. After the
defendants were acquitted, Licht related the whole story to Joe Brodsky, their
lawyer from the International Labor Defense, the party’s legal arm.
That was how the ILD became defender of the Scottsboro Nine
for their appeals, which eventually reached the Supreme Court. Brodsky was assisted by Irving Schwab and
Allen Taub, with their base here in Chattanooga. In fact, it was the ILD and Southern Worker which made the case a
national and international issue.
Share Croppers Union
In 1931, recently arrived from his time training in Moscow,
Mack Coad, a black CPUSA leader, ran for city judge. He did not win. He did, however, remain in the city to help
organize the working class.
Another venture of District 17, one which had effects that
lasted into the 1960’s, was the Share Croppers Union. Originally based in Birmingham, it
headquarters had to strategically redeploy to Chattanooga sometime after its
founding. The SCU gathered under one
roof both black and white sharecroppers.
Mack Coad was the party’s main liaison to the SCU.
The TUUL closed its doors in 1935 when CPUSA supported the
new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
In 1937, the SCU merged into the CIO’s United Cannery Agricultural
Packers and Allied Workers of America.
Veterans of SCU became the most hardcore supporters of SNCC
(Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in the 1960s.
Apex and collapse of Chattanooga’s CPUSA
In 1937, CPUSA held its regional convention and forum for
the entire South at the city’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Auditorium. Its keynote speaker was the CPUSA’s general
secretary, Earl Browder.
Not a single one of the city’s three newspapers—Chattanooga Times, Chattanooga Free Press, Chattanooga
News—reported on the convention, not even its having taken place.
Shortly afterwards, a change in its marching orders from the
Comintern shifting from “Third Period” tactics that were more confrontational
to the “Popular Front” tactics of resisting fascism, forced the militancy of
the CPUSA to decline, and with that its local support.
The Southern Worker
(always published from Chattanooga regardless of what its banner said) ceased
publication after its September 1937 issue.
Many of CPUSA’s most experienced cadre left to fight
Francisco Franco’s fascist Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War as
volunteers for the Republican cause in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the XV
International Brigade. Locals known to
have done so include Harold George Forsha and at least four others, plus former
SCU liaison Mack Coad.
Booker T. Washington State Park
Officially established as Harrison Bay Negro State Park in
1938, this park was one of the two first state parks in Tennessee for
Afro-Americans; by 1940, its name had become Booker T. Washington State Park
for Negroes. The Tennessee Valley
Authority had proposed putting one somewhere in East Tennessee and the Hamilton
County Planning Commission lobbied hard for it to be located here as a
counterpart to the Harrison Bay State Park.
Harrison Bay Park, established in 1937, was the first ever
state park in Tennessee and included the outskirts of the town and former
county seat of Harrison, the center of which would soon lay beneath Chickamauga
Lake. Under state segregation laws, it
was for whites only.
Washington State Park was built by Afro-Americans units of
the Civilian Conservation Corps and opened in 1938. Though in two years it would be lake side,
the gates of Chickamauga Dam were not closed until 1940.
The land the park was built on had previously been the
Afro-American community of Turkey Foot, whose residents, like all those within
a certain distance from the expected reservoir, had been evacuated.
While opened to the public in 1938, Washington State
Park (like its counterpart) sat on land still owned by TVA, and further work on
facilities was interrupted by the Second World War. Not until 1948 did construction resume in
earnest, finishing by the time the land became property of the State of
Tennessee (along with that of its
neighbor) in 1950, when it was dedicated by the state.
Though this park declined somewhat after the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 abolished segregation in public accomodations, it bounced back and
is today equal to its larger neighbor in affinities if not in size.
Earl Campbell Clinic and Mrs. Elizabeth Tolliver
In 1939, Dr. Earl Campbell, a Kentucky native recently
relocated to the city, open Campbell’s Clinic at 525 McCallie Avenue. While Campbell was white, his establishment
merits a notice because both his staff and its patients were integrated.
In the 1960s, Dr. Campbell expanded his operation into
Campbell General Hospital, which fronted on Vine Street, though the two
facilities were connected physically and otherwise. Both ceased operation in 1987, but the
buildings still remain, now serving as UTC’s Frist Hall.
Campbell was one of a few white surgeons that operated on
Afro-Americans at Erlanger. Those
patients would then be taken to Walden to recover. One day, a patient refused transfer, so Campbell
placed him in a room behind the lab, with his Afro-American sterile technician,
Elizabeth Tolliver, to watch over him.
This began her on-the-job training as a practical nurse.
In time, more and more Afro-American patients refused
transfer to Walden for recovery and Erlanger established a recovery area in the
basement of an attached building that became known as “Elizabeth’s Ward”.
Mrs. Tolliver became the first Afro-American to graduate
from Erlanger’s licensed practical nursing program after it desegregated and,
along with a friend, the first Afro-American to eat in the hospital’s
cafeteria.
Historic Afro-American churches
As reported by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in
its Guide to Church Vital Statistics in
Tennessee in 1942. Many of these
communities, even some of those predominantly Afro-American, had white
residents who also had churches, but those aren’t part of this article. The churches are divided by community, with
the name of each as listed by WPA followed by the address and year of foundation. This survey covers the entire county.
Entries are by the name of the church given in the report,
followed by the address (usually), then the year of its founding.
Alton Park
Northern part of the
area between Hawkins’ Ridge and Chattanooga Creek.
St. Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, East 39th
Street and Ohls Avenue, 1924
St. James Missionary Baptist Church, 130 West 45th Street,
1932
Antioch
Greenwood Road south of Greenwood Cemetery and the western halves of Plumwood Road and Hillwood Drive.
Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, 1892
Blue Goose Hollow
West of Cameron Hill
and north of West 6th Street, which came over the hill about where West MLK
Boulevard does now.
Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, 755 West 6th Street,
1923
Grace Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church, 620 Cross Street,
1898
Bozentown
North of Fairleigh
Street between Benton Avenue and Riverside Drive to Wood Avenue after it turns
right and intersects Riverside Drive
Joseph Chapel, African Methodist Episcopal Church, Wood Avenue and Farleigh Street (was McChesney Avenue), 1921
First Baptist Church of Bozentown, Benton Avenue, 1931
Bushtown
Roughly, from the
Holtzclaw Avenue to North Orchard Knob Avenue between East Third Street and
Citico Avenue.
Good Hope Primitive Baptist Church, 1234 Garfield Street,
1912 (Monteagle Baptist from 1912 to 1920)
Bushtown Missionary Baptist Church, Hawthorne Street
near Harrison Avenue (East 3rd Street), 1913
New Anointing Pure Holiness Church, 418 North Holly Street,
1927
Shiloh Primitive Baptist Church, 1615 Preston Street, 1933
House of Prayer Church of God, 421 North Hickory Street,
1936
East Third Street Church of God, 1252 East 3rd Street, 1938
Churchville
Roughly, from North
Orchard Knob Avenue to Dodson Avenue between East 3rd Street and Citico Avenue,
except for the part that is Stanleyville.
Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2005 Walker Road, 1884
Mount Olivet Primitive Baptist Church, southeast
corner of Walker Avenue (Road) and Lincoln Street (no longer extant), 1890s
The House of God, Which is the Church of the Living God, The
Pillar and Ground of the Truth Without Controversy, 2020 Blackford Street, 1908
Rose of Sharon Missionary Baptist Church, 2001 Blackford
Street, 1931
Galilee Missionary Baptist Church, 1900 Citico Avenue, 1934
Citico City (Lincoln
Park)
Between Central Avenue
and the tracks of the Citico, now DeButts, Rail Yards, this community was
established as Citico City and has since become known as Lincoln Park.
Tucker’s Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, northeast corner of O’Neal and
Garfield Streets, 1906
St. James Holiness Church, 1126 Lincoln Street
College Hill (Westside)
South of West 9th Street to West Main Street between Cameron Hill and the Union Rail Yards.
Second Missionary Baptist Church, 1324 Grove Street, 1866
Leonard Street Presbyterian Church, USA, 401 West 10th Street, 1888 (formerly in Tannery Flats)
Friendship Primitive Baptist Church, 831 West 11th Street, 1900
New Zion Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas, 1130 Grove Street, 1913
West Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, 410 West 14th Street, 1929
Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church, 1401 Carter Street, 1932
Antioch Primitive Baptist Church No. 2, 927 West 14th Street, 1933
Downtown Chattanooga
Officially,
Chattanooga’s downtown has always been south of the river to Ninth Street (now
MLK Boulevard) between Georgia Avenue and Cameron Hill, or rather the
westernmost street (Cypress, with Cedar, Popular, Pine, then Chestnut before
Broad Street/Railroad Avenue/Mulberry Street).
Wiley Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church, 504
Lookout Street, 1867
Warren’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Chestnut
and Sixth Street, 1871
Jehovah Missionary Baptist Church, 917 Poplar Street, 1933
East End
South of East 34th
Street between Jerome Avenue, Workman (formerly Hamill) Road, and 3rd
Avenue. All but erased from the
Chattanooga landscape now, it is usually counted as part of East Lake.
Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, 4303 7th Avenue, 1904
East Lake
East of Missionary
Ridge to 3rd Avenue between East 28th and East 36th Streets.
Union Congregational Church, 3204 14th Avenue, 1892
East Side
Includes everything
north of the East End Rail Yards between Georgia Avenue and Central (formerly
East End) Avenue to East 3rd Street.
First Baptist Church, 506 East 8th Street, 1866
*First Congregational Church, 901 Lindsay Street, 1867
Thompkins’ Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church,
Palmetto and Flynn Streets, 1875
St. James Missionary Baptist Church, 823 Mabel Street, 1886
Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, 938 Red Street, 1889
New Monumental Missionary Baptist Church, 715 East 8th
Street, 1890
Allen’s Temple, African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1014
East 4th Street, 1892
New Zion Missionary Baptist Church, East 11th and Wall
Streets, 1912
**St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, 614 East 8th Street,
1915
Olivet Missionary Baptist Church, 921 University Place, 1921
Galatia Early Church of God in Christ, 746 East 10th Street,
1927
Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church, 828 East 5th Street,
1928
Springfield Missionary Baptist Church, 418 East 10th Street,
1932
Triumph, The Church and Kingdom of God in Christ No.
2, 400 Central Avenue, 1932
Church of the First Born of the Living God, 300 East 10th
Street, 1938
* First Congregational
was the first church in Chattanooga with both black and white congregants.
** In its early years,
St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal held services at 8 am in the Lady Chapel of
Christ Episcopal, and both congregations worshipped together at Solemn Evensong
on Sunday evenings. The two
congregations also celebrated Mass together on major feast days, something which
continued even after St. Mary’s moved into their place on East 8th Street.
Fort Cheatham
East of Missionary
Ridge to 4th Avenue from I-24 south to East 28th Street.
New Enon Missionary Baptist Church, 2311 12th Avenue, 1930
Fort Negley
East of Market Street
to Rossville Avenue and Washington Street between East Main and East 20th
Streets.
New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, 1809 Kerr Street, 1905
New Bethel Fire
Baptized Holiness, 1800 Kerr Street, 1917
Thankful Missionary Baptist Church, 2125 Read Avenue, 1933
Fort Wood
The Afro-American
section of this neighborhood was north of Carolina (East 5th) Street, spilling
over Harrison Avenue (East 3rd Street) on boths sides of Baroness Erlanger
Hospital, between East End (Central) Avenue and Southern Railway.
Fort Wood Missionary Baptist Church, corner of Harrison
Avenue (East 3rd Street) and Wiehl Street
Foust Place
South Hickory Street
to 4th Avenue between I-24 and East 28th Street.
Greater St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church, 100 East 23rd
Street, 1930
Harrison
Suburbs of the former
town and former county seat of Harrison.
Mount Joy Missionary Baptist Church, Oakwood Drive (formerly
Shot Hollow Road), 1898
Hawkinsville
Formerly just north of
Tyner village across Bonny Oaks Drive (originally Chattanooga-Cleveland Pike).
Tyner Methodist Church, Central Jurisdiction, Tyner,
1888 (was Phillip’s Temple Methodist Episcopal until 1939, moved west to Jersey and became Washington Hills United Methodist in 1969)
Hawkinsville Missionary Baptist Church, Hickory Valley Road,
1907
Hill City
North of the river
between Stringer’s Ridge and Forest Avenue.
Hurst Memorial Methodist Church, 901 Dallas Road, 1866
Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church, 101 Lawn Street, 1884
Hixson (Jasper)
Centered around the
crossing of Hixson Pike (formerly Dallas Pike) over the Cincinnati, New Orleans, & Texas Pacific
Railway. These churches were in the Afro-American section
of the community known as Jasper.
Hixson Methodist Church (Col.), Mill Road
Hixson Missionary Baptist Church (Col.), Jasper Road, 1929
Hooterville
South of I-24 to
Chattanooga Creek and west of Market Street.
St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2514 Williams
Street, 1897
New Sardis Primitive Baptist Church, 1622 Carr Street, 1898
Mount Olive Primitive Baptist Church, 50 West 24th Street,
1908
Greater Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, 2634 Williams
Street, 1911
Emanuel Missionary Baptist Church, West 24th Street, 1915
Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church, 2740 Williams Street,
1921
St. Mary’s Missionary Baptist Church, 316 West 29th Street,
1922
Hamlett’s Mission Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 2301
Long Street, 1932
Howard Mission African Methodist Episcopal, Chestnut and
West 25th Streets, 1938
Jefferson Heights
East of Fort Negley,
south of East Main Street between Madison Street and the railroad.
Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church, 1616 Washington
Street, 1913
Johnsonville
First Baptist Church of Brainerd, 333 North Germantown Road,
1917
Little Egypt (East
Chattanooga)
West of Dodson Avenue and
from the Southern Railway to include at least the south side of Farleigh
Street, the area was majority Afro-American but with a substantial white,
mostly poor minority.
Rock Island Missionary Baptist Church, 2104 Farleigh Street,
1873
Sholar Avenue Baptist Church, 1604 Sholar Avenue
Lookout Mountain
The town in Tennessee
atop the eponymous mountain.
First Missionary Baptist Church, 203 North Bragg Avenue,
1904
Ooltewah
Former seat of of the
former James County.
Ooltewah Methodist Church (Col.), Ooltewah, 1870
First Missionary Baptist Church (Col.), Black Ankle, 1908
Orchard Knob
North of McCallie
Avenue to East 3rd Street between Holtzclaw Avenue and North Lyerly Street.
Orchard Knob Missionary Baptist Church, East 3rd and
Hawthorne Streets, 1887
Clegg’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Methodist
Zion Church, 356 North Holly Street, 1889
Park City
North of Doyle Street
along Cannon Avenue between Chattanooga Creek and Rossville Boulevard.
Church of God and Saints in Christ, 2621 Cannon Street, 1910
Park City African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2722 Cannon
Street, 1917
Beulah Missionary Baptist Church, 1301 Commerce Street, 1927
Rosstown
North Lyerly Street to
Derby Street between McCallie Avenue and East 5th Street, this community has
been obliterated by Parkridge Hospital.
St. Paul’s Missionary Baptist Church, Vine and North Watkins
Streets, 1906
St. Elmo
Between Lookout
Mountain and Hawkins Ridge.
Patten Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church, 3817
Church Street, 1886
St. Elmo Missionary Baptist Church (Col.), 810 West 37th
Street, 1890
St. Cephas Primitive Baptist Church, 3411 George Street,
1918
Shepherd
(Chickamauga)
The name of the
community is actually Chickamauga but the post office adopted the name Shepherd
in 1895.
Chickamauga Baptist Church (North Chickamauga and
Chattanooga Association of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A.; reported extant by WPA in 1940), 1867
Pilgrim Rock Missionary Baptist Church, 1726 Church Road,
1887
St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1724
Chickamauga Loop, 1898
Washington Park Baptist Church, 1823 Tuskegee Boulevard,
1941
Shot Hollow
Mount
Joy Missionary Baptist Church, Shot Hollow Road, 1898
Soddy
The northern part of
Soddy-Daisy.
Soddy African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1880
Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, 1926
South Chattanooga
South of Main Street
between the river and Central Avenue, excepting here Hooterville, Fort Negley,
and Jefferson Heights and including the area between East Main Street and the
Terminal Station Rail Yards.
Mount Paran Missionary Baptist Church, 1920 Cowart Street,
1879
Union Hill Missionary Baptist Church, 2740 Williams Street,
1886
Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, West Main and Cedar
Streets, 1892
Carter Street Missionary Baptist Church, 1955 Carter Street,
1898
Triumph, The Church and Kingdom of God in Christ, 2415 Long
Street, 1917
Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, 1708 South Market Street,
1926
St. Ruth’s Primitive Baptist Church, 1000 Elm Street, 1926
Williams Street Church of Christ, West 19th and Williams
Streets, 1926
Fort Street Church of God in Christ, 2102 Fort Street, 1931
Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, 1308 Slayton Street, 1934
Alleyne Memorial Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church, 1601 Williams Street, 1936
Church of The Living
God, Christian Workers for Fellowship, 2319 Chestnut Street, 1938
South Eastdale
This was the Afro-American
section of Eastdale centered on Moss, South, and Line Streets in the southeast
of the suburb. Originally the church was
at the west end of Johnsonville but was now cut off by the town of Ridgeside.
Mission Ridge Baptist Church, 239 Shallowford Road, 1868
Stanleytown (Stanleyville)
From North Willow
Street to Arlington Avenue between Blackford Street and Citico Avenue. For several decades most people have counted
it as part of its neighbor Churchville.
Stanley Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, Blackford Street
and Dodson Avenue, 1886
Prospect Missionary Baptist Church, 1887
Mount Ollie Primitive Baptist Church, 1891
Zion Early Church of God in Christ, 666 Lincoln Street, 1933
Summit
Centered on the area
between Chattanooga-Cleveland Pike and Old Lee Highway east of School Street,
but includes a much larger area.
St. Peter’s Missionary Baptist Church, 1897
Field’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 1898
Mt. Olive Primitive Baptist Church, No. 2, 1908
Tannery Flats
West of Cameron Hill
and south of West 6th Street to West Main Street.
St. James Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 911 West 14th
Street, 1889
Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1218 Ross
Street, 1895
Friendship Primitive Baptist Church,1353 Ross Street, 1912
Second Cumberland Presbyterian, 1022 Cross Street, 1934
Turkey Foot
The autonomous
Afro-American community of Turkey Foot was located where Booker T. Washington
State Park is now and adjacent areas now beneath Chickamauga Lake.
Turkey Foot Missionary Baptist Church (mentioned by C.B.
Robinson and historians of Shepherd community), c. 1867
Mount Cavalry Missionary Baptist Church, 1932
Afro-American WACs at Fort Oglethorpe
During the Second World War, Fort Oglethorpe served once
again as POW camp for captured Germans and detention center for German resident
aliens and some German-Americans as it had in the First World War. What is not as well known is that it also
hosted the main training center for both white and black recruits to the
Women’s Army Corps (WAC).
According to Raymond Evans, the black recruits into the WAC refused
to abide by or even acknowledge the existence of Georgia’s segregation laws and
customs. They ate, entertained, and did
business wherever and with whomever they chose.
No one tried to stop them, some because they were sympathetic, some
because they were too polite, and the rest because they were too afraid.
After the war, many of these Afro-American WAC vets became
frontline leaders in the civil rights movement, not only in Chattanooga and the
surrounding area but across the nation.
City and county schools later in Jim Crow
In 1921, Howard High School began classes in its new
location at Carter and West 10th Streets, where it remained until it moved to
its present location at 2500 South Market Street in 1954.
The City of Chattanooga annexed the communities of “East
Chattanooga, Avondale, and Churchville” in 1925, the last including Bushtown
and Stanleyville. Rosstown and the
remainder of Orchard Knob were annexed in 1923 along with Glendale.
With this, East Chattanooga School (Colored) should have
come into the Chattanooga City Schools; however, the city chose to close it and
ship its students to Orchard Knob School, which was also in the
annexation. At first, the city attempted
to redesignate the latter as 10th District School, but its original name held.
In addition, the city changed Lincoln High (also in the area
annexed) into Lincoln Junior High, sending its 10th, 11th, and 12th grades to
Howard High and moving the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades of Orchard Knob to Lincoln.
This same year, the city also annexed the suburbs of Fort
Cheatham, Foust Place, East Lake, East End, White City, and Park City. The city closed East End School, sending its
students to Fort Cheatham School.
By the county’s 1927-1928 school year, Daisy School
(Colored) had been merged into Soddy School (Colored).
Meanwhile, the city had turned over the formerly all-white
Second District School in the Westside at West 11th and Cedar Streets for the
use of the Afro-American children in the area.
It added grades to become Second District Elementary and Junior High
School.
The city also replaced the East Eleventh Street School with
Joseph E. Smith School at East 10th and Peeples Streets.
Lookout Mountain School (Colored) opened on North Bragg
Street for the 1928-1929 school year.
When the city annexed the town of North Chattanooga in 1930,
North Chattanooga School (Colored) became Spears Avenue School. The same year, the city opened Calvin
Donaldson School.
In the 1933-1934 school year, Park City School opened at
2608 Cannon Street, a belated replacement for East End School.
At the end of the 1935-1936 school year, the city closed
Lincoln Junior High School, transferring its students to what became Orchard
Knob Elementary and Junior High School.
Junior high school divisions were also established at Calvin Donaldson,
East Fifth Street, and Second District Schools.
The county merged Harrison School (Colored) into Booker T.
Washington School in 1938.
By the 1940-1941 school year, James A. Henry School opened
at West 12th and Grove Streets, primarily serving the children of College Hill
Courts.
By the 1950-1951 school year, Main Street School had been
renamed West Main Street School and Second District Junior High School had
dropped its lower elementary grades.
The city annexed the mixed community of East Dale in 1953
and closed East Dale Elementary School (Colored), transferring its students to
the county’s Chickamauga Elementary School in the Shepherd community.
Carver Memorial Hospital
In 1945, the city and the county gave “the Negro citizens of
Chattanooga” the former West Ellis Hospital on West 9th Street to refurbish
into a modern facility. Two years later,
Carver Memorial Hospital opened it doors and began receiving patients.
Named for famed Afro-American agricutural scientist George
Washington Carver, who among many things invented peanut butter, Carver
Memorial was the only municipally-owned, publicly-supported hospital for
Afro-Americans in the entire United States.
Interestingly, the local NAACP opposed the new hostpital on
the grounds that it was a segregated facility.
Carver was fully accredited fully accredited by the American
College of Surgeons and by the National Hospital Association. It had an
operating room, laboratory, X-ray facilities, and a maternity and nursery
suite. There were 45 adult beds, 5
pediatric beds, and 11 natal bassinettes.
Its staff included 18 physicians, 11 nurses, one laboratory
supervisor, one X-ray technician, one chef, and two office clerks. Its only white member was the hospital
administrator. The hospital had a
managed care plan based on that of Walden Hospital.
In 1948, Carver opened satellite outpatient clinics for
charity patients. The hospital had
planned to open an in-house nursing school, but those plans never reached
fruition.
Carver Memorial Hospital fell victim to the Golden Gateway
urban renewal project and was demolished in 1962.
Afro-Americans back on the beat
In 1948, along with police forces in at least the larger cities across the state, Chattanooga once again saw black officers on its streets for the first time since Reconstruction, seven in all. However, these officers were limited to foot patrols in Afro-American neighborhoods, and if they encountered white offenders had to radio for white officers to come to the scene.
Chattanooga City College
Despite widespread belief that Chattanooga never hosted a
collegiate institution for Afro-Americans, that is not true.
In 1948, Lee Roberson, pastor of Highland Park Baptist
Church, and Tennessee Temple College sponsored the organization of Zion Baptist
Institute for Afro-American high school graduates. The next year it became Zion College,
offering a dual two-year degree with Tennessee Temple.
The new school first held classes in New Monumental Baptist
Church, which at the time was on East 9th Street (it’s now in Woodmore).
At first, Zion was a two-year junior college with a
three-year seminary, then several departments were added in 1952. Its first graduate was Horace Traylor in
1953, who later became president of the college. It eventually grew to occupy three buildings
on East 9th Street at numbers 1005, 1007, and 1014, the last of these being the
original home of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church (and later Kappa Alpha
Psi fraternity house).
After the Brown v.
Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 ordering
desegregation of public schools, Roberson and Tennessee Temple severed their
connection with Zion.
In 1958, Zion became a nonsectarian junior
college. In September 1963, the college
moved temporarily into the former Park Place Junior High School until its new
campus at the former Bright School on Fort Wood Street was finished remodeling. In July 1964, it became Chattanooga City
College with full SACS accreditation.
Horace Traylor became the first Afro-American to receive a
degree from the University of Chattanooga when he got his master’s in 1965.
In July 1969, Traylor led Chattanooga City College into a
merger with the University of Chattanooga as the University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga.
St. Francis Catholic Church and School
In 1949, the Chattanooga Deanery of the Roman Catholic
Diocese of Nashville established the parish of St. Francis at the southeast
corner of North Hickory Street and Carson Avenue, with Fr. John Balt as its founding
(and only) pastor. The deanery especially
it as a home for the area’s Afro-American Catholics, though it was not formally
segregated. In fact, when St. Francis
Catholic School opened next to it in 1950, it was explicitly integrated, though
the majority of its student body were Afro-American.
The parish lasted until 1971. The school closed in 1972 and merged with
Sts. Peter and Paul Elementary School as All Saints’ Academy.
The Big Nine
Though he later joined his uncle business ventures, John S.
Lovell’s wealth sprang initially from his grand Mahogany Hall, which occupied
the block where Miller Park now sits.
Three stories tall, the establishment had a hotel, restaurants, saloons,
casino, dancehall, and brothel. Lovell
chose that site specifically because it had previous been the site of the slave
auction house, and his club drew many customers from as far away as the Deep
South.
While the residential areas of Tadetown and Scruggstown grew
up north and south, respectively, of East 9th Street, commercial and cultural
development did not truly begin until the late 1890s. This period of growth lasted until about the
beginning of American participation in World War I.
Chattanooga’s nationally-recognized East Ninth Street
Historic District covers not just East MLK Boulevard but adjacent and connected
areas of East 8th, East 10th, and East 11th Streets with all their cross
streets. In its heyday, East 9th Street
was to jazz what Beale Street in Memphis was to the blues. As a mecca for Afro-American culture, East
9th Street compared to Memphis’ Beale Street and Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue.
Of those listed, most are taken from Chattanooga City Directory, 1952 edition. Other information comes from Negro Motorist’s (Traveler’s) Green Book
of various years. Other info is gleaned
from the transcript of Moses Freeman’s 1983 interview of C.B. Robinson.
In 1952, East 9th Street hosted at least twelve groceries,
including a Red Food Store, plus a meat market and a fish market.
A tourist home was one in which a homeowner offered one or
more rooms for temporary stay to travelers and tourists, sort of like a bed
& breakfast.
A loan office was a pawnbroker.
Sales of liquor by the drink to the general public did not
become legal again in Chattanooga until 1972, thus the reference to beer
joints. There was no such regulation of
private clubs, however, so “social clubs” where you paid a nominal membership
fee proliferated. Some of these had
liquor for sale to “members” while others allowed “members” to brown bag while
they sold set ups and beer.
St. James Missionary Baptist Church, 825 Mabel St.
First Missionary Baptist Church, 506 East 8th St.
Walden Hospital, 528 E. 8th St.
Wilson’s Grocery Store, 601 E. 8th St.
St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, 614 E. 8th St.
New Monumental Missionary Baptist Church, 715 E. 8th St.
Haney’s Nursery, 724 E. 8th St.
Thompkins’ Chapel AME Zion Church, 812 Palmetto St.
Mrs. J. Baker’s Tourist Home, 843 E. 8th St.
YWCA, 924 E. 8th St.
Eighth Street Seventh Day Adventist Church, 1005 E. 8th St.
J. Carter’s Tourist Home, 1022 E. 8th St.
Mrs. E. Brown’s Tourist Home, 1129 E. 8th St.
East Side Grill, 124-126 E. 9th St.
Chattanooga Observer, 3rd Floor, 124 1/2 E. 9th St.
First Congregational Church, 128 E. 9th St.
Volunteer Garage, E. 9th and Lindsay Sts.
Chattanooga Fisheries, 200 E. 9th St.
Grand Theater (vaudeville & movies), 201-203 E. 9th St.
L&G Co. Department Store, 202 E. 9th St.
Martin Hotel, 204 E. 9th St.
La Grand Eat Shop, 205 E. 9th St.
(Mrs. Annie Ruth) Conley’s Tavern, 2nd floor, 205 E. 9th St.
Dixie Cafeteria, 206 E. 9th St.
Rainbow Room (social club), 207 E. 9th St.
Largo Lounge (beer joint), 208A E. 9th St.
Tennessee Jewelers, 208B E. 9th St.
Lookout Shoe Shop, 209 E. 9th St.
Previously: May’s
Beauty Parlor
The Olympic Club (social club), 210 E. 9th St.
Mad Hatters, 210 1/2 E. 9th St.
The Anchor (beer joint), 211 E. 9th St.
Kelley’s Place (beer joint+), 212 E. 9th St.
Kelley’s Record Shop, 212 E. 9th St.
My Shine Parlor, 212 1/2 E. 9th St.
Walter Johnson’s Liquor Store, 213 E. 9th St.
Doo Drop Inn (food), 214 E. 9th St.
Surplus Salvage Store, 215-217 E. 9th St.
Previously:
Chief’s Restaurant (215 E. 9th)
May’s Liquors, 216 E. 9th St.
Brooks Barber Shop, 216A E. 9th St.
Mercury Cab Stand, 216 1/2 E. 9th St.
Peggy’s Beauty Box, 218 E. 9th St.
Green Light Barber Shop, 219 E. 9th St.
Previously:
Wright’s Barber Shop
Apex Beauty Shop, 220 E. 9th St.
Previously:
Harlem Theater (movies)
Julia’s Chili, 221 E. 9th St.
Right Way Pressing Club, 222 E. 9th St.
Hollywood Beauty Shop, 222 1/2 E. 9th St.
North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance, 223 E. 9th St.
Knox Barber Shop, 224 E. 9th St.
Bill Davis Shoe Shop, 225 E. 9th St.
Reece Millard CafƩ No. 3, 226 E. 9th St.
Bon Ton Barber Shop, 227 E. 9th St.
Fox Furniture Compay, 229 E. 9th St.
Bon Ton Recreation Hall, 229 E. 9th St.
College Inn, 230-232 E. 9th St.
Dallas Hotel, 230 1/2 E. 9th St.
Harry’s Place (dry goods), 231 E. 9th St.
Gardenia Apartments, 231 1/2 E. 9th St.
Ace Loan Office, 233 E. 9th St.
Thomas Chicken Shack, 235 E. 9th St.
Cap’s Liquor Store, 237 E. 9th St.
Rose Drug Co., 239 E. 9th St.
Eskimo Jo Ice Cream, 300A E. 9th St.
Railway Salvage, 300B E. 9th St.
Bacon Grocery Co., 301 E. 9th St.
Rose Beauty Salon, 302A E. 9th St.
Rose Record Shop, 302B E. 9th St.
Bacon’s Market Meats, 303A E. 9th St.
City Dry Cleaners, 303B E. 9th St.
New Deal Barber Shop, 304 E. 9th St.
Factory Outlet Shoe Store, 305 E. 9th St.
Bill’s Shoe Shop, 306 E. 9th St.
Dallas Hotel Annex, 306 1/2 E. 9th St.
Grand Amusement Theater (movies), 307 E. 9th St.
Tatt’s Liquor, 309 E. 9th St.
Robert’s Lunch Room, 310 E. 9th St.
American Venetian Blind Co., 311A E. 9th St.
Perma-stone Construction Co., 311B E. 9th St.
Liberty Theatre (vaudeville & movies), 312 E. 9th St.
Kelley’s Meat Market, 313 E. 9th St.
Dayton Drug Store, 315 E. 9th St.
The Top Hat (beer joint), 317 E. 9th St.
Stephenson Transportation Co., 317 1/2 E. 9th St.
Watt’s Liquor, 320 E. 9th St.
Previously: M-Y-B
Package Shop
Manhattan Amusement Parlor & Billiards, 324 E. 9th St.
Lincoln Shoe Shop, 325 E. 9th St.
Kirk’s Super Market, 326 E. 9th St.
Mack’s Barber Shop, 327 E. 9th St.
Brown Derby Restaurant & Tavern, 329-331 E. 9th St.
Rowland Drugs, 330 E. 9th St.
Wood’s CafĆ©, 332 E. 9th St.
Rea’s Grocery, 334 E. 9th St.
400 CafƩ, 400 E. 9th St.
Up-to-Date Grocery, 401 E. 9th St.
Charlie’s Restaurant, 402-404 E. 9th St.
Klein’s Quality Cleaners, 403-405 E. 9th St.
Linsey’s Barber Shop, 407 E. 9th St.
Dixon’s Apartments, 407 1/2 E. 9th St.
Acme Army Surplus Store, 409 E. 9th St.
Gene’s Place (food), 410 E. 9th St.
Curio Products (novelties), 411 E. 9th St.
Previously: Reuben’s
Place (food)
Phantom Barber Shop, 412 E. 9th St.
J.B. Campbell Grocery, 413 E. 9th St.
Pleasant Valley Baptist Church Mission, 415 E. 9th St.
East Ninth Street Hosiery Co., 417 E. 9th St.
Strange’s Beauty Salon & School of Cosmetology, 418 E.
9th St.
Helton Bros. Hatters, 419 E. 9th St.
Home Stores Grocery, 420 E. 9th St.
OK Laundry, 421 E. 9th St.
OK Photography Studio, 421 1/2 E. 9th St.
Kirby’s Book Store, 422 E. 9th St.
Venetian Inn (food), 423 E. 9th St.
Eidex Funriture Co., 425 E. 9th St.
Kelley’s Place (drug store+), 436 E. 9th St.
Cordie’s Beauty Salon, 427 E. 9th St.
Harrell’s Barber Shop, 429 E. 9th St.
American Legion Post No. 171, 429 1/2 E. 9th St.
Wigwam Tavern (beer joint), 430 E. 9th St.
Lookout Shine Parlor, 432 E. 9th St.
Barnes Radio Service, 434 E. 9th St.
Tip Top Liquors, 436 E. 9th St.
H&F Grocery, 437 E. 9th St.
Vinson Cleaners, 439-441 E. 9th St.
Red Food Store, 500 E. 9th St.
Good Luck Club (food), 501 E. 9th St.
Little Ann Beauty Shop, 503 E. 9th St.
Tuskegee Shoe Shop, 504 E. 9th St.
La Vogue Beauty Shop, 505 E. 9th St.
Previously: Chandler’s
Drug Co.
The Green Derby (food), 506 E. 9th St.
Jimmie’s Valet Service (dry cleaner), 507 E. 9th St.
Pete’s Casa Loma (food), 508 E. 9th St.
Previously: Dr. Joseph Wheeler
Later: Whole Note
Varner Brothers Shine Parlor, 509 1/2 E. 9th St.
East Side Notion Counter, 511 E. 9th St.
Roberts Furniture Co., 513 E. 9th St.
Midway Recreation (beer joint), 514 E. 9th St.
Universal Life Insurance, 515 E. 9th St.
Brazelton’s Photo Studio, 515 1/2 E. 9th St.
Blue Front Shine Parlor, 517 E. 9th St.
Later: La Vogue
Beauty Lounge
Puckett Bros. Tailoring Shop, 519 E. 9th St.
Pal Liquor Store, 520-522 E. 9th St.
Mann Bros. Service Station, 524-526 E. 9th St.
Eddie’s Place, 527 E. 9th St. (food)
Mattie Gray Lunch Room, 528 1/2 E. 9th St.
East Side Recreation Parlor (billiards), 530 E. 9th St.
Midway Radio Service, 531A E. 9th St.
Midway Shine Parlor, 531B E. 9th St.
Signal Manufacturing Co. (cabinets), 532 E. 9th St.
Early Bird Sandwich Shop, 533 E. 9th St.
Myrick’s Shine Parlor, 535 E. 9th St.
Sylvia’s Beauty Shop, 541 E. 9th St.
Simms’ Taxi, 915 University Pl.
Olivet Missionary Baptist Church, 921 University Pl.
Spur Distributing Co., 600-602 E. 9th St.
Solomon Grocery, 601 E. 9th St.
Union Protective Assurance, 603 E. 9th St.
Kendrick Radio & Electronic School, 609-611 E. 9th St.
Stephenson Motor Co., 613 E. 9th St.
Vandsco Posters, 615 E. 9th St.
Jackson’s Service Station, 618 E. 9th St.
Royal Electronic Co. (coin-operated machines), 619 E. 9th
St.
Acme Coal Co., 622 E. 9th St.
Burger Distributing Co., 633-635 E. 9th St.
Red Top Brewing Co., 700 E. 9th St.
Cherokee Liquor Store, 706 E. 9th St.
Previously: Pat’s
Liquor
Bonam Shell Service Station, 716 E. 9th St.
T.T. Wilson Co. (building materials), 721 E. 9th St.
Your Florist, 730 E. 9th St.
Jos Trotz Grocery, 734 E. 9th St.
Walters Refrigeration Service, 738 E. 9th St.
Royal Paint Co., 742 E. 9th St.
Ada’s Beauty Lounge, 752 E. 9th St.
Astrapp’s Flower Shop, 753 E. 9th St.
Burnette’s Awning & Decorating Co., 754-756 E. 9th St.
Live and Let Live Barber Shop, 755 E. 9th St.
Right Way Lunch Room, 758 E. 9th St.
Pressman Grocery, 760 E. 9th St.
Torch’s Food Market, 763 E. 9th St.
Hardwick & Sons Funeral Home, 793 E. 9th St.
YMCA, 793 E. 9th St. (later 915 Park Ave.)
Trotz Grocery, 780 E. 9th St.
D.B. Food Store, 796 E. 9th St.
Pearlie’s Beauty Shop, 813 E. 9th St.
Ora’s Beauty Shop, 821 E. 9th St.
Ethel’s Beauty Salon, 823 E. 9th St.
Zion College, 1005-1007 & 1014 E. 9th St.
Church of the First Born of the Living God, 300 East 10th St.
Springfield Missionary Baptist Church, 418 East 10th St.
Ked’s Grocery, 501 E. 10th St.
Clark’s Grocery, 624 E. 10th St.
First Presbytrian Church Mission, 631 E. 10th St.
Samuel Monet Grocery, 737 E. 10th St.
Galatia Early Church of God in Christ, 746 East 10th St.
Fairview Baptist Chapel, 1006 Fairview Ave.
Vanity Beauty Mart, 934 E. 11th St.
New Zion Missionary Baptist Church, East 11th and Wall Sts.
Yes, there were two coexisting establishments called
Kelley’s Place at mid-century, owned by brothers. According to Moses Freeman’s conversation
with C.B. Robinson, they were referred to as “upper” Kelley’s Place and “lower”
Kelley’s Place.
Upper Kelley’s Place at 212 East 9th Street, owned by
Herbert Kelley, was a combination restaurant, sundry store, and gathering place
that also, per the city directory, was home to Kelley’s Record Shop. A sundry store was kind of like a
five-and-dime. Lower Kelley’s Place at
436 East 9th Street, owned by T.L. Kelley, was a liquor store, sundry shop, and
dance hall. The Kelley’s Meat Market at
313 East 9th Street may have been jointly owned.
First Congregational Church is now a wedding chapel.
The entire length of Ninth Street was renamed in honor of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1981, the year I graduated high school and
started UTC. Four clubs on MLK Boulevard
that I can remember from the early 1980s are the Whole Note, the Half Note,
Nightcaps, and Shirley’s Jazz Den.
The Whole Note in particular had a diverse crowd in the
evenings and some of the best dance music of any club in the city as well as
one of the best lunch buffets in town.
Shirley’s Jazz Den frequently had live jazz sessions, often
with O.D. (Oliver Davis), owner of the 621 Club on Shallowford Road in East
Dale, adding his vocals to the keyboards, drums, and other occasional
instruments.
One of the only, if not the only, businesses still operating
from the heyday of The Big Nine is Live and Let Live Barber Shop & Coin
Laundry, which is now at 763 E. MLK Blvd., proprietor Virgil McGee. It first opened its doors at its original address in 1931.
Memo’s Grill is another, but from the later days of The Big Nine, opening its doors at 430 E. 9th St. (now E. MLK Blvd.) in 1966, its specialty being its famous chopped weiner plate. Now open Thursday through Saturday.
Commerce and culture of Chattanooga’s Afro-American
community was not confined to East Ninth Street and its environs, by any means,
even during the darkest days of Jim Crow.
But it was for Afro-Americans of that time what Gunbarrel Road is for
all of us Chattanoogans in the 21st century.
In those days, it was comparable in stature to Beale Street in Memphis
and Auburn Avenue in Atlanta.
Other downtown hotels for Afro-Americans in the days of Jim
Crow included
Harris Hotel (110 1/1 Carter St.), Dent Hotel (W. 11th and
Carter Sts.), Peoples’ Hotel (1104 Carter St.), and Quinn’s Hotel (227 E. Main
St.).
Other theaters (vaudeville and/or movie) for Afro-Americans
during Jim Crow included Grand Theater (W. 9th St.), Amusu Theater (106 E. Main
St.),
Star Theater (133 E. Main St.), Lincoln Theater (Lincoln
Park), and New Theater (location unknown).
“Negro removal” mid-20th century
As Commissioner or
Public Works before becoming mayor, Rudy Olgiati managed to desegregate the
public library, Memorial Auditorium, and Engel Stadium, and had worked with the
Fire and Police Commissioner to begin integrating the police force.
In the last case,
black police were forbidden to arrest whites and had to call for white officers
to do it. That didn’t change until Ralph
Kelley became mayor and Bookie Turner became fire and police commissioner in
1963.
From 1951 to 1963,
Olgiati served as Mayor of Chattanooga. The
first attempt at urban renewal during his administration began in 1952. The targeted area was that now called
Southside, minus Cowart Place. Some 234
structures were to be raised, with drive-in motels, suburban-style shopping
centers, and large parking lots replacing what was gone.
Due to opposition from
both the residents and segments of the business community, the project fell
through.
The next project
proved more durable. Initially called
the Westside Renewal Project, the Golden Gateway Project worked in combination
with the federal government’s interstate highway project and another local
project targeting the railyards behind Union Station called Chattanooga Runaround.
Chattanooga Runaround
aimed to recover as much ground as possible from the Union Railyards and side
tracks spreading across downtown. The
highway project led to I-124 and the Olgiati Bridge over the Tennessee River to
points north. The Golden Gateway
targeted mostly areas considered slums and predominately inhabited by
Afro-Americans.
I-124 was originally
supposed to be similar to I-285 around Atlanta, but the extension north of the
river did not got very far, so instead it later tied into and became US Highway
27. Until then, I-124 ended at the Signal Mountain Boulevard exit.
Chattanooga Runaround
was the most successful in its stated goal, with nearly all of downtown now
clear of railroad tracks.
The Golden Gateway
project displaced 1400 families, destroyed over 1100 structures (many of them antebellum houses), and chopped
150 feet off the top of Cameron Hill to provide fill dirt for the
interstate. It eradicated the old
Afro-American communities of College Hill, Blue Goose Hollow, and Tannery Flats,
leaving only College Hill Courts and one short street of rowhouses that
survived until Findley Stadium was built.
In addition, the project demolished Second District Junior High School,
West Main Street School, and Carver Memorial Hospital, all of which benefited
Afro-Americans, and either destroyed or forcibly relocated over 100 businesses.
Also lost were the
white communities of Cameron Hill and Terrace Hill, the mixed community on Pine,
Poplar, Cedar, and Cypress Streets west of Chestnut, and Stillhouse Hollow (uninhabited)
between Cameron and Reservoir (Kirkman) Hills, not to mention the 10-acre
Boynton Park at the apex of Cameron Hill.
The ultimate goal
of the planners had been to turn downtown Chattanooga into a commercial
center. What happened instead was that
it became an office park. Suburban
shopping centers and malls drew away business, made more attractive with their
free parking. All the luxury apartments
built on what was once Terrace Hill eventually became public housing.
Though it was not
part of the Golden Gateway project, also lost was Ross’ Towhead, which became
part of the ground underneath I-24.
Roy Hamilton Show near riot,
1956
On 30 January 1956,
the Roy Hamilton Show with LaVern Baker, Red Prysock, the Drifters, and the
troupe’s namesake as performers played a concert and dance show at Memorial Auditorium
before a racially mixed crowd. The
promoter billed it as a show for blacks, who were the only ones on the dance
floor, but invited white youths to come and spectate.
According to police
estimates, the audience included 3500 black youth and 1750 white youth.
As Roy Hamilton
played his last number that evening in January 1956, a fight broke out between
the white spectators and the black participants that may have begun with a
black roadie from the show sitting in the section reserved to white
spectators.
Bottles were
thrown, and a knife hit one of the police, who rushed to break up the melee
before anyone got seriously hurt.
Regarding who was to blame, the police at the scene placed that squarely
with troublemakers among the white spectators.
As for the artists,
most had played here before and happily did so again, so the near-riot may not
have been as bad as local news indicated.
Chattanooga’s “Rosa Parks”
On 1 May 1956,
Lawrence Curry was riding a bus of the city’s Southern Coach Lines when
approached by a white passenger demanding he give up his seat and move
back. Curry refused to do so. The other passenger assaulted Curry,
resulting in his arrest and a fine of $50.
The incident helped
persuade Southern Coach Lines to abolish segregated seating on its buses as a
matter of company policy. The City of
Chattanooga followed suit in 1959 by abolishing segregation on all public
transportation.
Also in the late
1950s, Curry was directly responsible to the desegregation of the main U.S.
Post Office, now the Joel Solomon Federal Building.
Dixie Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
From the Great Depression through the later 1960s, East
Chattanooga was the stronghold of the local Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1957, Chattanooga Klavern No. 1 had gotten such a bad
reputation for violence among their fellow Kluxers that the U.S. Klans, Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan, at the same the largest such body in the South, expelled
them. By then, its members had committed
sixteen floggings and one bombing.
Upon their expulsion, its members organized as the Dixie
Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Their klavern hall was the former Hamilton Trust & Savings Bank
building (1922-1928) at 2507 Glass Street (probably the same they’d been using
before). The new group connected to the
anti-Jewish National States Rights Party and eventually spread into Virginia, northwest Georgia, northern
Alabama, and Mississippi.
Until klaverns in
the last state organized themselves as the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan, the Dixie Klans included the klavern in Neshoba County, Mississippi,
whose members murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwermer in 1964.
Jack Brown, the
Dixie Klans’ Imperial Wizard, was a suspect in the bombing of the 16th Baptist
Church of Birmingham, Alabama, on 15 September 1863 that killed Addie Mae
Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise
McNair (11).
From 1957 to 1960, the Dixie Klans in Chattanooga committed
seventeen bombings of homes, buses, an integrated YMCA, and Howard High School,
two shootings, a beating, and an arson, a record more than ample to earn them
the designation of domestic terrorist organization. They were brazen enough to field a team in
the local amateur baseball league with their organization’s name blazoned
across their uniforms.
Overt violence ceased after 1960, largely over fear of
penetration by special agents of the FBI.
The Dixie Klans continued at the Glass Street site at least through
1964. That year someone in city
government discovered the group had been given a tax exemption in 1960 and
wanted to collect back taxes.
The Dixie Klans affiliated with the National Association of the Ku Klux Klan by 1965. Its Chattanooga klavern had become defunct by
the early 1970s, largely because a fraction led by William Church, Sr. broke
away to form the Justice Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1968.
Chattanooga Police Department integrated
At the beginning of February 1960, Fire and Police Commissioner H.P. Dunlap and Chief of Police Ed Brown ended segregation of the department, assigning Afro-American officers to districts in patrol cars for the first time. The desegregation began in two newly-created police districts before being spread to the older districts.
Chattanooga Lunch Counter
Sit-ins, 1960
On 1 February 1960,
students of historically black North Carolina A & T University in
Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s in
downtown Greensboro and demanded to be served.
Service was refused.
Their action
sparked movement targeting lunch counters at downtown department store and
five-and-dimes that quickly spread throughout the South. In almost all instances, the actions were
planned and initiated by students from local historically black colleges and
universities. In Chattanooga, however,
the impetus came from a different group.
In the third week
of that February, a group of senior class students at Howard High School met
and decided to initiate action themselves.
These high school students included:
Paul Walker (class president), Andrew Smith (class VP), Virgil Roberson
(football team captain), Robert Parks (student council president), Robert
Winston (class business manager), Leamon Pearce, Joanne Humphries (later
Favors), and Gloria Underwood (later Jackson).
This discussion took place in trigonometry class.
Several department
stores and five-and-dimes (what we now call dollar stores) had lunch counters serving
their white customers. These shops
included S.H. Kress Five & Dime, Loveman’s Department Store, Woolworth’s
Five & Dime, McClellan Store, W.T. Grant 25 Cent Store, Liggett-Rexall Drug
Store, and Miller Brothers Department Store.
While
Afro-Americans were allowed to shop and use bathrooms marked “Colored” in these
establishments, they were forbidden from eating at the lunch counters
there. The exception was Kress, which
had a separate lunch counter for Afro-Americans. The fact that any of these stores actually
had bathrooms for Afro-Americans was a rarity in the South, by the way, with
most other localities under Jim Crow providing none at all.
After school that
Friday 19 February, some forty to fifty Howard High students made their
downtown and sat at the lunch counters of Woolworth’s then McClellan, and were
refused service at both.
The next Monday,
over two hundred Howard students converged on downtown after school, targeting
four of the stores. Again, the students
were refused service, and while white counter demonstrators showed up, there
was no violence. The students sitting
brought snacks to eat.
The demonstrations
continued on Tuesday, targeting the two stores, Kress and Woolworth’s, which
had no complied with the Chattanooga police request to shut down at 3:30
pm. A riot nearly broke out, and police
arrested eleven whites and one black student.
On Wednesday, over three thousand people, black and white, gathered downtown. The crowds became so rowdy that the fire
department was called in to use its hoses on both groups. Twenty people were arrested, eleven black and
nine white.
In the aftermath,
downtown Chattanooga was virtually shut down entirely, and a strict curfew was
instituted. Mayor Rudy Olgiati made
school principals at both black and white schools reponsible for their
students.
Once the immediate
threat of widespread violence had abated, Olgiati began negotiating matters
with the downtown merchants aided by C.B. Robinson and others.
When nothing was
done by Easter, the students, supported by the NAACP and the black ministers,
resumed their actions.
On 16 April, James Mapp
and the local NAACP launched a boycott of several downtown businesses over
their segregated lunch counters. Two
days later, students staged sit-ins at Woolworth’s, Grant’s, and Kress while a
group of ministers held public prayer standing on a traffic island at Market
and Ninth Streets. On 30 April, fifteen
students sat in at four stores. The next
day, 1 May, fifty students participated.
On 12 May, students
were first arrested merely for participating in a sit-in at Kress, largely due
to their sizable number. In court the
next morning, the judge acknowledged their right to protest but ordered them to
limit participants to six. That afternoon,
students sat-in at all seven of the store listed above, with no more than six
at any one.
The demonstrations
petered out after the end of the school year, but their persistence and
discipline spurred negotiations among community leaders, government officials,
and business owners.
On 5 August 1960,
Afro-American students were invited to sit down at the lunch counters of the
above-mentioned stores and were served for the first time. Specifically invited were those students of
Howard High School who had initiated the movement in Chattanooga.
In February 1961,
Afro-American students and civil rights leaders began holding stand-in
demonstrations at establishments such as Tivoli and Rogers theaters which had
segregated seating.
The sit-ins of 1960
in Greensboro, Nashville, and Chattanooga and fifty-five other centers in
twelve states led directly to the organization later that year of the Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
SNCC was one of the leading civil rights organizations of the 1960s
whose chairs included Marion Barry (1960-1961), Charles F. McDew (1961-1963), John
Lewis (1963-1966), Kwame Ture (as Stokely Carmichael, 1966-1967), Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (as H. Rap Brown, 1967-1968), and Phil Hutchings (1968-1969).
City and county schools at the
end of official Jim Crow
In the last years of official school segregation in
Chattanooga, the following schools served Afro-American children:
Howard School (now
grades 1-12)
Second District
Junior High School
Chattanooga Avenue
Elementary School
Calvin Donaldson Elementary
School
East Fifth Street
Elementary and Junior High School
Fort Cheatham
Elementary School
James A. Henry
Elementary School
Orchard Knob
Elementary and Junior High School
Joseph E. Smith
Elementary School
Spears Avenue
Elementary School
West Main Street
Elementary School
Those were the schools in the 1960-1961 school year. The following school year, the city split off
the top three grades of the parent school to establish a separate Orchard Knob
Junior High School. Given its history,
Orchard Knob Junior High (now Middle) School is the direct heir of the county’s
former Abraham Lincoln High School.
The schools for Afro-American children in Hamilton County
included:
Washington High
School
Bakewell Elementary
School (Colored)
Chickamauga Elementary
School
Roland Hays
Elementary School
Lookout Mountain
Elementary School (Colored)
Soddy Elementary
School (Colored)
Summit Elementary
School
Washington
Elementary School
Washington High at this time took in grades seven through
twelve, but this was the norm then, with the same range included in Central
High, East Ridge High, and Hixson High. Birchwood
and Sale Creek Schools, by the way, took in grades one through twelve. Bakewell and Lookout Mountain Elementary
Schools took in grades one through eight while the rest took in just grades one
through six.
Chattanooga City Schools opened its last segregated
all-white school for the 1960-1961 school year.
Brainerd Senior High School on North Moore Road adopted the name
“Rebels” for its sports teams, its mascot was a cartoon Confederate soldier,
its fight song was “Dixie”, and its pennant was the standard of the Army of
Tennessee (known as the Confederate flag).
In the fall of 1963, Chattanooga High School, also known as
City High, began classes at its new North Chattanooga campus on Dallas Road,
its student body still all-white. Its
former campus, Wyatt Hall and the two wings, became the last segregated
all-black school established in the city school system as Riverside High
School.
By the early 1980s, in the wake of official school
desegregation, City High’s student body was almost all black. Riverside High remained in existence until
1983. Afterward, the building became for
a time the city’s school for pregnant teens.
Finally, the campus became the Paidea-based Chattanooga School for the
Arts and Sciences, taking in grades K-12.
CSAS is the most racially balanced school in the entire county system.
Mapp et al v. Chattanooga Board of Education
Unware that the
Howard students sit-ins begun on Friday, 19 February 1960, would be continuing
that Monday, 22 February, James Mapp and a few other parents from the local
NAACP conducted an attempt to integrate the still-segregated Glenwood
Elementary School. Their attempt was
rebuffed.
On 6 April, Mapp
and other parents and their children filed suit in federal court to force the
City of Chattanooga to abide by the 1954 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown
v. Topeka Board of Education. In
October, the courts found that the city was indeed in violation of Brown and
ordered it to file a plan of correction.
The “First Plan”
was rejected, as were several following.
Finally, in April 1962, the city offered a plan to desegregate all of
its elementary schools by 1 September 1964, its junior high schools by 1
September 1967, its high schools by 1 September 1968, and Chattanooga Technical
Institute (now Chattanooga State Community College) by 1 September 1969. This schedule was accepted by the plaintiffs.
Even though the
county system was not part of the lawsuit, the Hamilton County Schools adopted
the city’s timetable.
Policies such as
“school choice” and “local schools” along with “white flight” effectively nullified
integration and stifled the plan’s execution.
This led to repeated returns back to court that left the case open until
1986, when the court, worn down and out by the integration opponents’ war of
attrition, effectively conceded defeat and closed the case.
Chattanooga’s Catholic schools
desegregated
In 1963, Notre Dame
School, attached to the adjacent Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church downtown
and then hosting grades 1-12, officially desegregated. Meanwhile, St. Francis School in Bushtown had
always operated as an integrated institution.
When grades 9-12 Notre
Dame High School opened in Glenwood in 1965, it did so, of course, officially
integrated, as did grades 1-8, which became Sts. Peter and Paul Elementary
School. In 1972, the elementary school
merged with St. Francis School at the downtown location as All Saints Academy.
Erlanger Hospital desegregated
Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 withholding federal funds from public facilities which chose to remain segregated, Baroness Erlanger Hospital remained so despite opposition from U.S. Navy veterans Dr. Minnie Vance and Dr. Eleanor Stafford, who were supported by Dr. Earl Campbell. Drs. Vance and Stafford were partners in an integrated pediatric practice on lower McCallie Avenue near Glenwood, and as detailed above, Dr. Campbell operated his own clinic on an integrated basis on upper McCallie Avenue.
After the hospital’s board finally agreed in 1966 to desegregate when the federal government threatened to cut off government funding, its chairman resigned.
Chattanooga Black Power
The year 1966 was a
big year for Black Power in Chattanooga and for Afro-Americans from
Chattanooga.
Mukasa Dada (Willie Ricks at the time) in Chattanooga was one of the 127 founding members of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960 and became one of its leading
members. Dada was one of SNCC’s best
organizers and stump speakers. After
joining James Meredith in his “March Against Fear” in 1966 along with other
SNCC members, Ricks spread the slogan of “Black Power” to mobilize youth and
sharecroppers, many of latter being veterans of SCU in the 1930s.
In Oakland,
California, Chattanooga-born Elbert “Big Man” Howard joined with Merrit College
classmates Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in addition to “Li’l” Bobby Hutton,
Reggie Forte, and Sherman Forte to found the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense this year. Howard became
the party’s Deputy Minister of Information and served on its Central Committee
and as a member of its International Solidarity Committee.
In this same year,
Viet Nam War army vet Ralph Moore returned home and founded an organization
called the Black Knights. The group became
the foundation of the Chattanooga chapter of the Black Panthers, which published
a newsletter called Black United Front from 1969 to 1971.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
In 1960, Lorenzo joined the sit-in protests downtown. When he was 16, he joined the local chapter
of SNCC, then later the Black Panthers.
After being accused of attempting to kill a Klansman and in fear of his
life, he fled to Atlanta from where he hijacked a plane to Cuba on 25 February
1969. The Eastern Airlines Flight 955
was meant to stop in Miami.
After he served a short time in jail, the Cuban government
flew him to Czechoslovakia. During the
short time he was there, Lorenzo became widely known and lionized among members
of the European Left. In fact, he still
is today, across the whole continent but especially in Scotland.
In 1971, special agents of the FBI kidnapped Lorenzo and
brought him back to the States to face charges for the 1969 hijacking. He was convicted and sentenced to serve life
at the maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was released after serving 15 years.
While in prison, Lorenzo converted from Marxism to anarchism
due in large part to his disillusionment with state socialism. He has written many books and pamphlets and
is considered one of anarchism’s leading theorists.
Brainerd High, 1969
Brainerd Senior High School began to be integrated in 1966,
at first with only a handful of black students.
By the 1969-1970 school year, the black portion of the student body had
grown to a point where those students felt less unsafe expressing their dissent
over the schools’s symbology.
At the Brainerd-Riverside football game on Friday, 3
October, black students flashed “black power” fists every time the band played
“Dixie”. Police had to intervene when
the students tried to take the cheerleader’s stage, then when they tried to
regain their seats.
Tension simmered through the first two days of the next
week, and on Wednesday, several hundred students walked out briefly before
returning to their classes.
Thursday, the local White Citizens Council marched around
the campus until being ordered away by the principal. That night, over a hundred cars drove through
Brainerd honking their horns and waving rebel flags.
Saturday, five to six hundred white students gathered in
Brainerd Village parking lot to parade and wave rebel flags, while black
students gathered at the intersection of Brainerd and Germantown Roads.
The unrest eventually spread to the new and newly-integrated
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Mayor Chunk Bender instituted a strict curfew that lasted
several days.
Once everything had quieted down, the school board adopted a
policy banning the Confederate flag, whether as an actual flag or worn on
clothing, the song “Dixie”, and the word “Rebel” from Chattanooga schools.
One student, Rudy Melton, was suspended for repeatedly
violating the ban, over which he sued the school board. The case is known as Melton v. Young, and the district judge ruled in favor of the
board. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals
upheld the district’s ruling in 1972.
There was also serious racial tension at Central High
School, which had just moved to its new campus in Harrison for the 1969-1970
school year, though not nearly as extensive as that at Brainerd High.
Brainerd High did not change the name of its sports teams until the 1981-1982 school year, when they became the Panthers.
“Negro removal”, later 20th century
Less well known and much smaller wholesale displacement than
that which took place in the West Side under the Golden Gateway project was
that which took place in 1969 involving the extension of Riverside Drive from
its junction with Amnicola Highway (formerly Curtain Pole Road). This was originally at a point parallel with
Wilson Street east of the railroad tracks.
As part of a plan to connect downtown with State Route 153, Amnicola
Highway was going to be extended east to that freeway and widened to four
lanes, while Riverside Drive was also going to be widened and extended from the
afore-mentioned junction along the river to meet Riverfront Parkway, part of the
Golden Gateway project, at Broad Street.
To make way for the extension and widening, 170 buildings in
the Old East Side, single family homes and several apartment buildings, had to
be demolished, displacing some 250 families (not all of them Afro-American, though
most of them were), along with beginning the progressive destruction of the Old
East Side than has continued with the spread of UTC.
Breaching the color bar in government
The first Afro-American to win county office since the early
20th century was Rev. Robert Richards, who served as one of three justices of
the peace for the county’s First District 1966-1968. The county was then divided into three
districts: First District was the City
of Chattanooga; Second District was everything else south of the river and east
of the city; Third District was north of the river and west of Lookout
Mountain.
In 1967, lawyer Bennie Harris became the first Afro-American
assistant city attorney in Chattanooga history.
In January 1969, he was appointed judge pro tem on the Second Division
of Chattanooga City Court. Upon being
recommended by a majority of the Chattanooga Bar Association, he was sworn in
as a full judge on 1 July 1969. In a
special election that fall, he retained his seat on the bench, winning 30.7% of
the white vote.
Lawrence Curry served as one of two county constables for
the First District 1968-1970. During his
campaign, Curry heard that the Ku Klux Klan was opposing his candidacy, so he
visited local Klan meetings to convince members to vote for him as the best
person for the job. He was the first
Afro-American Hamilton County constable ever.
In March 1971, educator John P. Franklin became the first
Afro-American to win election to the Chattanooga City Commission as it had been
constituted since 1911. The community
had never before been able to elect one of their own to the city commission,
whose members were elected at-large, because more than one candidate always
ran, splitting the vote.
Led by Rev. Paul McDaniel of Second Missionary Baptist
Church, business, civic, and religious leaders of the Afro-American community
determined there should be a single candidate in 1971, and that the candidate
should be the popular principal of Alton Park Junior High School.
Franklin was elected Commissioner of Education and Health. After his election, the health department was
stripped from his porfolio while the education department was placed under a
white administrator.
Franklin’s office was thus rendered effectively ceremonial
other than functioning as a member of the city commission. But Mr. Franklin, “Duke” to his friends, knew
that representation matters, that while sometimes it was just a cheap token,
other times it meant everything.
Franklin served five terms as Commissioner of Education,
with four of those five also serving as vice mayor, a political career spanning
twenty years. In 2019, the Chattanooga
City Council voted to name the building in which it meets in his honor.
In 1974, Franklin’s fellow educator C.B. Robinson became the
first Afro-American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly from Hamilton
County since Styles Hutchins in 1887. He
helped form the Black Caucus in the General Assembly.
Wilson Pickett riots 1971
In June of 1971, an abruptly cancelled concert led to four
days of rioting and destruction in Chattanoooga. Hugely popular soul artist Wilson Pickett was
to headline a concert at the city’s Memorial Auditorium, following The
Intruders and The Impressions.
The promoter of the show proved to be less than competent
because The Intruders and The Impressions never showed up at all while Pickett
showed up early only to learn that he wouldn’t be paid. Thus, he refused to play.
Eager fans showed up expecting the concert only to learn
what had occurred, and began to demand their money back. When they didn’t get it, they vandalized the
auditorium, then spread out into the inner city.
Racial tensions that had been long-simmering exploded into
four days of rioting and destruction, at times by over 3000 Afro-American
youths.
Mayor Robert Kirk Walker imposed a 7 pm to 8 am curfew,
calling on the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, the Tennessee Highway Patrol,
and neighboring sheriffs for assistance.
Chattanooga police shot and killed Labron Anderson, 22.
After four days, Gov. Winfield Dunn called up 2000 Tennessee
National Guard to restore order. These
split up into smaller teams to patrol neighborhoods. Between 150 and 300 were arrested for
breaking curfew.
Ooltewah High School, 1978
In the pep rally kicking off Homecoming Week at the rural
Hamilton County high school in the fall of 1978, an altercation between a black
student and a white student nearly led to a riot in the cafeteria as students
filed out of the gymnasium after the rally ended.
Tensions remained high the entire week. Pep rallies that had been planned for every
afternoon were cancelled. Students both
black and white brought weapons, including firearms (pistols, shotguns), in
their vehicles. Several carried knives,
clubs, and brass knuckles on their persons.
For the last day of Homecoming Week, Friday, the administration
relented and allowed a pep rally that afternoon, but took the precaution of
having several sheriff’s deputies on hand to avert any trouble.
Ninth Street shootings, 1980
By the late 1970s,
William Church, Jr., son of the founder, was Imperial Wizard of the Justice
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The group’s
resurgence in the public mind came when Church and his fellow Justice Knights
collected donations at intersections in northern Hamilton County near
Soddy-Daisy dressed in full regalia.
On 19 April 1980,
Church and his crew decided they needed to take some direct action to raise
their profile. Copious amounts of beer
reportedly contributed to that decision.
Dressed in camo gear decorated with patches of their faction, Church,
Larry Payne, and Marshall Thrash headed south to the Ninth Street district
along with others of their clique.
Upon arrival, they
found a vacant lot where they constructed two large wooden crosses which they
proceeded to plant upright and set afire in full view of the public. Afterwards, they convoyed down East Ninth
Street to see the crowds’ reactions.
Apparently, they
were unsatisfied, for upon reaching the intersection at East Ninth and Douglas
Streets, Thrash fired three shells from a shotgun loaded with bird shot at four
middle-aged women on a corner, hitting them in the legs. These women were Viola Ellison, Lela Mae
Evans, Katherine O. Johnson, and Opal Lee Jackson.
Further down the
street, Thrash fired three more shells at a woman watering flowers in her front
yard, Fannie Crumsey. The shots missed
her completely but shattered the windshield of the car belonging to her daughter,
Mary Tyson (who was in the house), with Mrs. Crumsey injured by flying
glass. The trio was arrested shortly
thereafter.
The acquittal that
summer of Church Jr. and Payne by an all-white jury and the slap on the wrist
given to Thrash (who’d turned state’s evidence) for the crimes he’d confessed
to led to several nights of rioting and a 7 pm curfew that lasted at least a
week. The effects of that turmoil and
the trauma inflicted on citizens lasted for years.
Having found no
justice in the criminal courts, the five women sued their attackers, and in 1982
won a judgment of $535,000. The case, Crumsey
v. Justice Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, set a precedent that enabled civil
rights attorneys to almost completely wipe out the KKK over the next years.
Renaming Ninth Street
In January 1981, led by Rev. Marvin T. Billingsley of
Greater Tucker Missionary Baptist Church in Brainerd, the Chattanooga Baptist
Ministers Union began a campaign to rename one of the city’s streets after Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Accordingly, Billingsley
and the Ministers Union petitioned the city commission to rename Ninth
Street. The commission agreed to carry
out a public debate on the issue.
Opposition arose led by developer Tommy Lupton. Lupton offered no opposition to renaming East
9th Street but protested, incorrectly, that West 9th Street had no connection
with the Afro-American community. For
the past two decades that had indeed been the case, but prior to the
destruction that took place under the Golden Gateway project, that section of
Ninth Street had also been an Afro-American center. In fact, Carver Memorial Hospital had been on
that end of Ninth Street.
Under pressure from Lupton and his associates, the
commission refused to rename the street, offering instead to name a plaza in
King’s honor. The proponents rejected
this, organizing a march down East 9th Street of 300 people who plastered
street signs and poles with green stickers that read “Dr ML King Jr. Blvd”.
This protest and growing support for the renaming from black
and white ministers led the commission to reverse its decision in July, setting
January 1982 as the date for the new name to take effect.
Lupton responded by creating a private drive to provide a
different address to the block upon which the two buildings he was developing,
the Krystal Building and the Tallan Building, One Union Square. That name derived from the fact that
Chattanooga’s Union Station once stood there, and that name is the only
remaining sign Union Station was ever there.
Concerned Citizens for Justice
After returning from the Philippines in the early 1990s, I
became a member (or at least close associate) of CCJ. I refer to Maxine, Lorenzo, and Annie by
their first names because they are my friends.
On 6 December 1983, Wadie Suttles, Sr., a World War II
veteran who had suffered from PTSD since the war, was beaten to death in the
Chattanooga City Jail. It was the same
day that Lorenzo Ervin was release from Terre Haute prison in Indiana.
Wadie’s widow, Jessie Mae Suttles, filed suit against the
City of Chattanooga and jail officers Mike Williams and Melvin Carson. The district court found no fault with the
city or either jail officer, and that finding was confirmed by the Sixth
District Court in September 1988.
Meanwhile, Wadie’s daughter, Maxine Cousin, founded Concerned
Citizens for Justice along with Annie Thomas, Annie’s daughters Lisa and Lydia,
and the recently released Lorenzo Ervin to address police brutality in Chattanooga
and surrounding communities by publicizing incidents such as the death of Wadie
Suttles, holding protests, and organizing coalitions.
One of CCJ’s first actions was initiating the organization
of the South-wide Ad Hoc Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality. In 1985, they began a campaign to build a
case against the at-large city commission which had so seriously
disenfranchised the city’s Afro-American citizens. This included a trip by Lorenzo, Maxine, and
Annie down to Atlanta to meet with the ACLU chapter there. The three also did all the hard, tedious
research work to gather information.
1984 Democratic presidential primary
To the huge surprise of many, Jesse Jackson, former chair of Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and founder of the National Rainbow Coalition (1984), topped the list in the presidential primary in Hamilton County. In the wider national primary election, he came in third.
Jackson was the fourth Afro-American candidate for national executive office, the first being Frederick Douglass, who ran as running mate to Virginia Woodhull for the Equal Rights Party in 1872; the second as George Taylor, who ran for the presidency for the Liberty Party in 1904; third was Shirley Chisholm, who ran for the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1972 (a year in which Madelaine “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t
support each other” Albright campaigned for Ed Muskie).
Brown v. Chattanooga Board of
Commissioners, 1989
The case was filed in federal district court on 12 November
1987. In addition to Lorenzo, Maxine,
and Annie, petitioners included Tommie Brown, Leamon Pearce, Herbert H. Wright,
J.K. Brown, Johnny Holloway, George Key, Bobby Ward, Norma Crowder, and Buford
McElrath.
Laughlin McDonald of the ACLU served as lead counsel with
Richard H. Dinkins as second chair. The
plaintiffs’ argument maintained that the form of city government violated the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
On 8 August 1989, U.S. District Judge R. Allan Edgar ruled
in favor of the plaintiffs and gave the city 75 days in which to come up with a
plan to correct the wrongs of the then present system. The solution was a change from commission to
council, with members elected in nine districts.
The election for the new council and mayor took place on 1
May 1990, with electees taking office at noon on Monday, 11 June. Where before under the at-large five-person
commission the Afro-American community had been lucky to elect one member,
under the new, more representative form, four Afro-Americans made it onto the
council.
As in the case with schools and the timetable for
desegregation, Hamilton County at about this same time changed over from a
council elected at-large to a commission elected by district.
1989 mass closure of schools
This action may or may not have been in retaliation for the
decision or expected decision in Brown v.
Commissioners.
In 1989, the school administration, with the support of the
mayor and most of the city commission, closed sixteen schools in the city
system. The student bodies of thirteen
of these schools were overwhelmingly or entirely black, the other three
predominately white.
Fourteen of the principals at these schools were black,
while two were white. The two white
principals were given lateral transfers while the black former principals were
demoted to teacher.
The white schools closed were Elbert Long Junior High,
Mountain Creek Elementary, and John A. Patten Elementary.
The black schools closed were Avondale Elementary, Charles
A. Bell Elementary (in Alton Park), G. Russell Brown Elementary (in North
Chattanooga), East Chattanooga Elementary, East Dale Elementary, James A. Henry
Elementary (in College Hill), Highland Park Elementary, Oak Grove Elementary,
Piney Woods Elementary, Ridgedale Elementary, St. Elmo Elementary, Sunnyside
Elementary, and Washington Elementary.
Two years before in 1987, the city education department
closed majority-black Chickamauga Elementary School, next to Howard the oldest
existing historically black school in the city.
If the hypothesis that the 1989 mass closing was in retaliation for the
decision in Brown v. Commissioners is
correct, then Chickamauga’s closing the year the lawsuit was filed could have
been a warning shot.
County Public Defender’s Office
Until 1989, Hamilton County did not have a public defender’s
office. All attorneys practicing in the
county were required to do so many pro bono cases per year. Some volunteered to do many more. Gov. Ned McWherter appointed Atty. Ardena
Garth to head the office.
When she ran for election as Public Defender and won in
1990, she became the first Afro-American elected to political office in a
county-wide vote since John J. Irvine won election as Circuit Court Clerk in
the 1880s.
Cousin v. McWherter, 1995
In this case, Maxine, Lorenzo, and Annie joined Ezra B.
Harris, Johnny B. Holloway, George Key, Buford McElrath, Greg Walton, Bobby
Ward, and Ella Bryant to challenge the at-large elections for the nine judges
of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit and three judges of the Hamilton County
General Sessions Court. Attys. Laughlin
McDonald and Richard H. Dinkins represented them once again.
The case was filed in 1990.
On 28 September 1995, the U.S. District Court handed down its decision
in favor of the plaintiffs. However, rather than ordering the judgeships be
selected on a single-district basis as the plaintiffs wanted, the court
prescribed cumulative voting.
It was the first case in which cumulative voting had been
ordered by a court. However, the State
appealed and the Sixth Circuit overturned the district court’s decision in the
1998 case of Cousin v. Sundquist.
Even though two more judgeships were added to the county’s
General Sessions Court, no Afro-American has ever won an election to it. It was not until this year, 2019, that an
Afro-American sat on the bench in the county’s General Sessions Court. In March 2019, Atty. Gerald Webb was
appointed to fill the seat of retiring Judge Clarence Shattuck.
October 22 Movement
When the October 22 Movement instigated by the RCP
(Revolutionary Communist Party) began pushing that date as a day to protest
police brutality and commemorate its many victims, CCJ quickly signed on.
From 1996, the first year the protest and commemoration was
held, through the year Maxine stepped down from the helm well into the 21st
century, CCJ held some kind of action on that date ranging in size from four or
five people to nearly a hundred and all ranges in between.
Black Liberation Radio/Chattanooga
Nationally, Black Liberation Radio began in 1996, and in
1997, Lorenzo set up his own station with help from friends. Broadcasting from his living room, the
programs included news, black liberation ideology, anarchist thought, and jazz,
blues, and both classical and avante-garde people’s music. The station continued until the year 2000.
Though the radio station itself was not a project of CCJ,
the fact that Lorenzo ran it connects it to the organization.
Tennessee ratifies the 15th Amendment
In a resolution proferred by Rep. Tommie Brown of
Chattanooga, the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee finally ratified
the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on 8 April 1997.
This amendment is plain, simply stating, “The right of
citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition
of servitude.”
Only thirty-seven states have ratified the amendment, with
Tennessee with the latest. Initially, it
rejected the amendment on 16 November 1869.
“Negro removal” in the 21st century
Chattanooga Housing Authority came into being to take
advantage of the benefits of the Housing Act of 1937. It still being the first half of the 20th
century, the housing was strictly segregated.
CHA’s first project, East Lake Courts in 1940, was for
whites only. Its second was College Hill
Courts in 1941, for blacks only.
Boone-Hysinger Courts in East Chattanooga, for whites only, and Spencer
McCallie Homes, for blacks only, followed in 1953. Maurice Poss Homes and Emma Wheeler Homes,
both exclusively for blacks, came in 1963 and 1964 respectively.
The primary reason for the construction of McCallie Homes
was to provide housing for residents displace by the clearing of College Hill (Westside), Blue
Goose Hollow, and Tannery Flats due to the Golden Gateway project.
The various housing projects of the CHA started to be
integrated after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
By the 21st century, most sites were 98% Afro-American, with none less
than 90%.
In the 21st century, the City of Chattanooga began a new
phase of “urban renewal” with no plans whatsoever to replace what was
destroyed.
Spencer McCallie Homes were the first to fall victim. Originally containing 608 units, by 2003 that
number had been reduced to 416, only 304 of which were inhabited. Their destruction was carried out 2003-2005,
with nothing offered to its 1000 residents to replace them.
Spencer McCallie was not simply a public housing project, it
was a neighborhood with a history going back to the days of the Golden Gateway
removal project. In its place arose The
Villages at Alton Park, with its “affordable” rents starting at $1000 per
month.
The 188 units of Maurice Poss Homes, with 500 occupants,
were the next to be cleansed, in 2005.
In 1985, Boone Hy Courts was renamed Harriet Tubman Homes as
a nod to the composition of its residents.
Sixty of its 500 units were demolished in 2005. The remaining 440 units were demolished in
2014 with little provision for relocation of its residents.
The only possible relocation officials offered Harriet
Tubman residents was to Emma Wheeler Homes or East Lake Courts. The problem with this was that East Chattanooga
where Harriet Tubman was located is in Crips’ territory while East Lake and
Piney Woods are in the territory of the Bloods.
As for what developers and city officials have planned for
East Chattanooga, a friend posted to Facebook recently about her aunt on fixed
income getting a notice from her landlord that her rent was going up from $615
per month to the outrageously more expensive $1100 per month. Maybe the landlord thinks they are a Big
Pharma company.
The remaining large public housing developments of the CHA are
East Lake Courts (437 units), College Hill Courts (497 units), and Emma Wheeler
Homes (340 units), all of which are slated to be destroyed.
Black Lives Matter
In 2013, with blessings from Maxine, Concerned Citizens for
Justice revived under new leadership in the wake of the murder of 14-year old
Trayvon Martin by self-appointed vigilante George Zimmerman.
On Saturday, 16 February 2016, cofounder of the Movement for
Black Lives Alicia Garza, who coined the phrase “Black Lives Matter”, spoke at
First Baptist Church.
In her closing remarks, Alicia said that she came up with
the phrase because in America, black lives don’t matter, but they should.
Maxine passed away on 4 February 2018. Lorenzo gave her eulogy.
9 comments:
This is a brilliant piece of Chattanooga's history. May I use it in my class lectures?
Please do. The seed of this was research I did for a substitute teaching gig at Howard High School in the late 1990s on the Afro-American community in the immediate postbellum years before Jim Crow. It was just a couple of days but it was an American History class and they were studying the Civil War.
Fascinating history. Thank you!
You're very welcome, Meredith, and thank you too!
Wow, what an amazing amount of work you did in compiling this report. So imformative, so interesting. Thank you so much for sharing it.
You're very welcome, Rapscallion.
Very interesting. My grandfather’s barber shop “Bon Ton Barber Shop” was listed as part of the East Ninth District. I do not know if he owned or was just employed there and want to know more about the shop. . His name was Choice Cager Lee; I did not know him.
I learned so much! THANK YOU!
Wow you have a wealth of information in this blog. Thank you so much, You have my gr grandfather listed again in another section, you have him listed as D.T. Edinburg, his real name was Daniel Trigg Edingburg.
I was wondering if you have any information on how to find African American grocery stores in Chattanooga? My Gr Grandfather Jordon L Zuber owned a grocery for many years. I have been trying to find any information other than what I already have. I have him owning a grocery store and living above it on 711 W. Main St Chattanooga, TN. I've tried looking for maps or old photos but so far no luck with the photos. thank you
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