Called “the Pocahontas of her people,” Nan-ye-hi, also known as Nancy Ward, is the most eulogized of the Cherokees. Authors portray her as an exceptional woman who was a friend to frontier people in the Tennessee region in the late eighteenth century, a woman who sought harmony between her nation and the settlers. Many stories position her as a peaceful foil to her more warlike “cousin” Tsi-yugunsini (Dragging Canoe). Writers are confl icted about her motives—some see her as peace loving while others claim that she embraced the more advanced white civilization or that she sought to placate the...

It was early fall 1825 when Fanny Wright first rode into a little trading post in Tennessee called Memphis, and after a journey on horseback of more than four hundred miles, she must have been an astonishing sight. Nearly six feet tall and strong-featured like Minerva, she was a Scotswoman brought up in England to be a lady out of the pages of Jane Austen, and by now she was an ornament in the drawing rooms of the rich and famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Brilliantly educated even by the standards of the upper middle class among whom...

On March 2, 1840, sixteen-year-old Milly Swan—along with her three brothers (Nick, eighteen; Jim, seven; and Addison, about three) and four sisters (Peggy, twelve; Charity, about eleven; Kitty, about four; and Sally Ann, about one)—was indentured to Tipton County planter Ellen C. “Nelly” Newman. Court records do not reveal the extent of their mother Anna Swan’s involvement in this decision to “bind and put [the children] under the care and management” of Newman, but these sources, along with census data, suggest that the Swan children were already living with Newman and that their indenture only formalized a longstanding...

Mary Church Terrell was a pioneer in America’s civil rights struggle whose activism spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the daughter of the South’s first black millionaire and the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, Terrell recognized early in life that African Americans faced limitations in mainstream society solely because of their race. Her childhood in Memphis demonstrated clearly how African Americans were increasingly restricted to lives little better than what many had known as slaves. Furthermore, Terrell’s personal and family experiences with racism and racial violence in the city left an indelible mark...

On October 6, 1978, the lights went up on the premiere of the Robert Altman film Remember My Name at the historic Orpheum Theater. The location was not Hollywood but Memphis, Tennessee. The over twenty-six hundred people gathered at the theater at the corner of Main and Beale Streets included print and broadcast journalists, producers, directors and actors, well-wishers, and a special visitor—a petite, self-assured elderly African American woman who, for many Memphians, was the real guest of honor. She was the composer of the movie’s soundtrack and an icon in the music industry. The music that emanated from...

Aviation pioneer Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie, a contemporary of women flyers like Amelia Earhart, Jacqueline Cochran, and Florence “Pancho” Barnes, brought Tennessee into the “air age”—a romance with the promise and possibilities of aviation that blossomed in the first few decades of the twentieth century.¹ And through her leadership, her adopted state led the nation in a host of innovations in aviation. After a thrilling career as a wing walker, parachutist, and air racer, she became one of the field’s most ardent supporters and innovators, primarily through her work in aviation administration in the federal government. She was one of...

On February 9, 1919, in front of a crowd of sister suffragists, curious onlookers, newspaper reporters, and Washington policemen, Sue Shelton White burned an effigy of Woodrow Wilson. The policemen, fire extinguishers in hand, rushed forward in an attempt to rescue what they assumed to be a straw dummy of the president. But the effigy White burned was made of paper—a cartoon of Wilson delivering one of his “freedom-for-everybody” speeches with a woman’s head chained to his belt. The effigy had barely turned to ashes before police arrested White and thirty-eight other demonstrators from the National Woman’s Party (NWP)....

In June 1920 Charl Ormond Williams, Superintendent of Shelby County (Tennessee) Public Schools, became the national Democratic Party’s first female vice-chair—a remarkable feat considering that she, and millions of other women, did not yet possess full suffrage rights. Woman suffragists and antisuffragists were at that moment in a white-hot battle over the proposed Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Ratification by one more state would give millions of southern women, whose state governments had failed to enfranchise them, a federally guaranteed right to vote. When this fight came to Tennessee in August 1920 Charl Williams earned an eternal footnote in...

Lucille Thornburgh was always proud of her militancy, and her long life afforded her many opportunities to demonstrate her tendency to be “right pushy.” She organized Knoxville’s Cherokee Mill workers in the General Textile Strike of 1934, was identified as a “red” while employed at Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1940s, served on the board of the Highlander Folk Center in the 1950s, became a civil rights activist in the 1960s, edited the East Tennessee Labor News (ETLN) for twenty-six years, and championed economic and social justice for the elderly during her “retirement.” Thornburgh triumphed within a social structure...

During the years between the woman suffrage–era first wave of feminism in the 1910s and 1920s and the second wave of feminism of the 1960s, women struggled to define what their role in politics should be. Martha Ragland of Tennessee came of age in that time. As a woman who was unwilling to accept the status quo, her work—as well as the work of many other unnamed southern women—paved the way for that second wave. In a letter to Jane McMichael at the Schlesinger Library, Ragland described herself as “a life-long feminist; action-oriented and politically minded.”¹ Her...

In 2002 an interviewer asked why Tennessee writer Wilma Dykeman chose to stay in her native Appalachia. She said, “I think I could have lived a number of places, but . . . having a sense of place, a place that you know in an intimate way, is really necessary. When I say ‘know it intimately,’ I mean you know it with all your senses: you know it with your memory; you know it with your skin; you know the way it smells and sounds, a snowy morning, or the azaleas bursting into bloom. All of that is really important....

In 1970, Sarah Colley Cannon capitalized on her fame as the Grand Ole Opry’s Minnie Pearl by publishing a cookbook entitled Minnie Pearl Cooks. In the preface, Sarah wrote, “Ever since I became two people, Minnie Pearl and Sarah Ophelia Cannon, I’ve been faced with the problem of when to be Minnie and when to be Sarah Ophelia. In creating this book I’ve decided to be both.”¹ And both she was. The front cover pictured Sarah in her Minnie Pearl costume—gingham dress, black Mary Jane shoes, and a flowered hat with the price tag dangling. The back cover featured...

This chapter examines the life and activism of Diane Judith Nash, a Chicago-born Fisk University student known for her leadership in the Nashville sit-in and desegregation movements of the early 1960s. Nash, a quiet college student from a black middle-class background, publicly challenged Nashville mayor Ben West and other city leaders to desegregate downtown lunch counters and, in time, became a force in the larger civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. She was a founding member and active participant in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also involved in a desegregation movement in Rock Hill, South Carolina,...

Gray skies hung over the sixty thousand spectators at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, but all eyes looked down upon a shining star—a black woman of athletic brilliance. The date was September 8, 1960, and the event was the Olympic finals for the 400-meter relay. The crowd murmured in anticipation. Then the starting gun was fired, and off went the six competing teams. Martha Hudson burst off the blocks and rounded the turn, then handed the baton to Barbara Jones, who passed it on to Lucinda Williams. The roars built as the American women took the lead. They ran with poetic...

In 1958 Jo Walker received a phone call from “D” Kilpatrick, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, asking whether she would be interested in working for a new trade organization in Nashville. The Country Music Association, Kilpatrick explained, had recently been formed to promote country music, to improve its image among broadcasters and help it compete with rock and roll for radio airtime, and to increase its audience. At the time, Walker-Meador later recalled, a position with the organization seemed like “a nothing job. The pay was practically nothing.”¹ But when she met with the board, she reconsidered. “They were...

In 1965 Bettye Jo Berger landed a job as a booking agent with a firm in Memphis that counted all the hot local musicians as clients—Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, the Bill Black Combo, Ace Cannon—as well as other well-known artists like Count Basie. The agency booked concerts at auditoriums and nightclubs all over the southern United States, and for a while Bettye handled the lucrative new college market. She was thirty-five years old, the only woman in the agency, and the only woman agent in town. But she soon had a falling-out with the proprietor, who wouldn’t...

In the summer of 1948 President Harry S. Truman struck hard at America’s institutionalized racism when, by executive order, he simultaneously desegregated the military and forbade discriminatory hiring in the federal civil service. In the heart of the segregated South, a blond Jewish fourth-grader was engaged in her own struggle with the irrationality of racial segregation. She remembers earnestly asking her teacher, “If an [American] Indian came to Memphis, would he have to sit in the back of the bus?” Unable or unwilling to provide an answer, the teacher suggested the youngster write to ask the president of the United...

Doris Bradshaw was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 7, 1954, four months after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which ended legal public segregation in the United States. Long after the ink on the ruling had dried, however, black Memphians continued the struggle to overcome an entrenched system of racism and white privilege. Part of that system includes “environmental racism,” or the unequal distribution of toxic waste and other environmental hazards in communities of color.¹ Doris Bradshaw devoted her early years to combating racial segregation and has spent her adult years fighting for...