Fayette County, Tennessee, sits forty minutes east of Memphis along the Mississippi line. Haywood County adjoins Fayette to the north. These two Tennessee counties battled for voting rights and economic opportunity for over ten years during the national Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Unlike the notable and well-publicised protests in Mississippi, Alabama, and even Memphis, the struggles in Fayette and Haywood counties were carried primarily by local citizens without the publicity or direct assistance of nationally prominent leaders or organizations. The Third UTM Civil Rights Conference focuses on the earliest action in that decade-long fight: the right to vote, an economic boycott, and an ersatz community of refugees called "Tent City."
For further reading:
Linda T. Wynn, "Toward a Perfect Democracy: The Struggle
of African Americans in Fayette County, Tennessee, to Fulfill
the Unfulfilled Right of the Franchise," Tennessee Historical
Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 202223.
Robert Hamburger, ed. Our Portion of Hell: Fayette County,
Tennessee: An Oral History of the Struggle for Civil Rights
(New York: Links Books, 1973).
"October 1960: The Untold Story of Jackson's Civil Rights
Movement," (7-part series) Part 4, "Fayette, Haywood
County blacks forced from their homes for trying to exercise right
to vote," Jackson Sun (Tennessee), accessible online
at: http://jacksonsun.com/ civilrights/sec4_tent_city.shtml.
THE FAYETTE COUNTY struggle had its immediate roots in a near
lynching almost twenty years before Tent City. In 1940, black
farmer Burton Dodson came to blows in a heated disagreement with
another man. His opponent, who was white, quickly gathered some
friends. Hastily deputized by the county sheriff, the band surrounded
the Dodson farm-house on the night of May 23 and called for him
to surrender. Dodson managed to escape into the woods through
an excited and ineffective crossfire, firing back wildly toward
his attackers as he fled. In the fray, one of the "deputies"
was fatally wounded in the back. In 1959, Dodson was located in
East St. Louis, Illinois and extradited to stand trial for murder.
The Dodson trial was held at the county courthouse in Somerville.
James F. Estes, one of only five or six black lawyers in Tennessee
at the time, drove from Memphis specifically to plead Dodson's
case. Two black veterans of World War II, Harpman Jameson and
James McFerren, Sr., were concerned about the fairness of Dodson's
trial, specifically when they learned that no blacks would sit
on the jury. Juries are drawn from a pool of the county's registered
voters, and virtually no black citizens were registered to vote.
During jury selection Estes pointedly asked potential jurors if
they believed their black neighbors should have the right to vote.
Some replied that they did not object. Estes lost the case and
the 70-year-old Dodson was sentenced to prison, but the lawyer
had managed to extract at least verbal agreements from county
residents supporting black voting. With the benefit of Estes'
legal advice, in the spring of 1959 two groups of black citizens
filed organizational charters for the Fayette County Civic and
Welfare League and the Haywood County Civic and Welfare League.
Early Civil Rights Action
In Somerville, the Fayette County seat, the first action
of the new organization was coordinating a voter registration
drive among the county's black residents. Though such registrations
became well-known activities throughout the later 1960s, the Fayette
County action was the very first voter registration drive conducted
among black citizens in the rural South. The effort immediately
drew threats from the white populace. Concerned, John McFerren,
Harpman Jameson, and J. F. Estes drove 22 hours to Washington
to speak with John Doar of the U. S. Department of Justice's Civil
Rights Division. Doar promised legal action. Though in 1990 African
Americans comprised about 45% of Fayette County's population,
in 1960 blacks made up 70%, yet before 1959 fewer than fifty had
ever registered and fewer than a dozen actually voted.
A few hundred determined black Fayette County residents braved
heat, intimidation, and stonewalling officials, managing to register
during the summer of 1959. Despite bearing valid registrations,
black voters were uniformly turned away from the county Democratic
primary election on August first. The Supreme Court had already
ruled that any denial of participation in a party's primary election
was illegal (in racial cases, a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment
as well). Still, de facto traditions and practices were
well entrenched. So well, in fact, that with so many black Fayette
County voters registered, the local Democratic organization had
circulated a letter instructing that "If any Negroes should
ask to vote in your district, they are to be informed that this
is a White Democratic Primary and not a general election."
The letter had been distributed to the precincts with the official
ballot boxes.
On November 16, 1959, the U. S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit
in federal court against the county party's executive organization,
the first voting-related action filed under the provisions of
the federal Civil Rights Act of 1957. The FBI was asked to investigate.
In March, 1960 the Fayette County election commission resigned,
protesting what they felt was federal meddling in elections, a
long-standing states-rights issue and an attempt to close down
registrations. The case never went to trial; Memphis federal district
judge Marion Boyd issued a consent judgment that specifically
forbade the county's election discriminations. In May, 1960, though
black citizens registered in Fayette County the previous year,
Haywood County opened its books to black registrants for the first
time since Reconstruction.
The situations in these two west Tennessee counties were contributing
factors to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The legislation
attempted to address violence and intimidation directed against
African Americans without compromising the authority of state
and local officials over elections. It would not be enough against
the stone wall of tradition.
Economic Pressure
Fayette and Haywood counties had been dominated by a handful
of white families who controlled county politics and the local
economy for over four decades. These same individuals had a strong
grip over the county's White Citizen's Council as well. Having
lost on the registration and election issue, the group responded
to the political challenge by instituting an informal but effective
economic freeze against registered black citizens-and their local
supporters among white citizens-in the spring of 1960. The embargo
was probably an attempt to drive politically active Negros from
the county by economic ruin. Services were refused to blacks that
had voted or attempted to vote: insurance policies were canceled,
bank loans were rejected, jobs were lost, store credit (which
had long kept farm workers riveted to landowners) was suddenly
denied. Farms and families were left without the means to purchase
commodities or supplies. The economic pressure forced families
to travel to Memphis for even the most basic supplies. Under threats,
regional gasoline dealers who did business in the county refused
to supply black businesses. One deputy sheriff even waited at
the county line and turned back gasoline shipments bound for FCCWL
chairman John McFerren's store. At the insistence of the Justice
Department the FBI instituted a second investigation in the county
in July. Though businessmen hotly denied that the illegal boycott
was a coordinated effort, the existence of an informal blacklist
was finally discovered. A copy of the list was smuggled out of
one Somerville business, duplicated, and publicized in Ebony
that fall as part of a six-page article about the Fayette County
situation.
In September, the Justice Department filed charges against 27
local busi-nesses and two banks in Haywood County, charging them
with using economic pressure to discourage black citizens from
voting. Two months later in the 1960 election, black voters swung
the election and pulled the Repub-lican Party into power in Fayette
County for the first time in its history.
The Founding of Tent City
Pressure within the county increased again in the late
fall of 1960. Within a month of the November county election and
the resulting Republican takeover, a few white Fayette and Haywood
county landowners began evicting their black tenant laborers and
families. With nowhere to go and virtually no other options open,
black landowner Shepherd Towles offered to let homeless families
stay on his farm, about five miles south of Somerville. The FCCWL
hurriedly acquired fourteen canvas tents as Army surplus from
a sympathetic white businessman (who remains anonymous to this
day) and pitched them on Towles' field. Earlie B. Williams and
his family moved into the first tent on December 14, 1960. Eighty-one
people from eleven families were housed in the ersatz settlement
by March, 1961. The settlement was officially known as "Fayette
County Freedom Village" but is better known as simply "Tent
City." Evictions continued until 345 families from Fayette
and Haywood counties had been pushed into homelessness. Not all
of them migrated to the canvas community, but more tents went
up and a second "Tent City" sprouted fifteen miles south
on the Gertrude Beasley's property near Moscow. The location of
this second, larger site was kept secret to reduce the possibility
of violence or reprisal. The canvas communities remained in place
and occupied for over two years while the county remained embattled.
Living conditions at both sites of Tent City made life challenging.
Most families had left their homes in early winter with only the
barest essentials, which included little furniture or other amenities.
Small wood-burning stoves provided both heat and a cooking surface.
There was no electricity, and water was available only by hauling
it in buckets from Towles' own well. Once over-use ran that one
dry, another had to be drilled. Laundry was done in iron kettles
heated over outdoor fires. Initially the tents were floored only
with beaten dirt or cardboard. In January, 1961 wooden flooring
began being installed in the tents. Still, some residents felt
that the tents were an improvement over the housing they had occupied
only months earlier.
Even within Fayette and Haywood counties the Tent City residents
were not entirely friendless. Some local whites, mostly among
the counties' poorer families, supported their black neighbors
in pursuing the voting and the underlying economic issues but
did little themselves. Some landowners refused to evict their
tenants or call for early loan repayments, despite pressure from
the White Citizen's Council, and a few provided goods to Tent
City citizens under cover or anonymously.
Contributions by labor unions, the National Baptist Convention,
NAACP, and community organizations in various cities helped feed
and clothe Tent City residents. Seven truckloads of badly needed
goods and donated commodities arrived from New York in mid January
1961. Merely one week earlier the Department of Agriculture had
reported no need for Meanwhile, problems boiled among the Fayette
County Civic and Welfare League leadership. Estes was dismissed
as legal counsel and allegations of misappropriation were made
against John McFerren. At the same time the NAACP fought rumors
that recipients were being required to pay for donated aid. Eventually
the League split and divided the aid being committed to the Tent
City residents. McFerren and the majority reincorporated under
the name of the Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League.
The League continued supporting Tent City for another year and
a half.
The Issues Resolved and the Struggle Continued
The legal questions that underlay the voting issues, economic
embargo, and Tent City itself were resolved by the federal courts.
On July 26, 1962 the Federal District Court issued a consent decree
that permanently prohibited landowners from using economic pressure
to discourage black citizens from voting. The legal arguments
and courts decisions did little to relieve the Tent City residents.
Tent City survived as a refugee community through the rest of
1962 and into the following year. Eventually residents left to
work in places beyond the county, or moved to houses built on
the land bought for their resettlement. The site of the first
Tent City reverted to farmland and remains the property of the
Towles family to this day.
Students from several northern universities arrived in Fayette
and Hay-wood counties during the summer of 1962, even as Tent
City's residents began dispersing. They came to assist in registering
the counties' largely rural population. Unlike the better-known
student-driven registration drives in Mississippi and Alabama
the following year, these students participated in a process that
had already begun. For many black citizens, these college students
were the first friendly and openly supportive white people they
had met. Students came again in 1963 and 1964.
It took the far-reaching Voting Rights Act of 1965 to end at last
formal and informal racial discrimination in any election for
any office. But in Fayette and Haywood counties, despite this
legal remedy to the situation, blacks and whites remained segregated
in other important ways. Encouraged by their success and with
voting rights assured, the local struggle for civil rights shifted
to fighting segregated education. In the 1970s the issue became
securing fair representation in elected county offices, a struggle
for civil rights that continued for another decade.
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