African Americans in the state of Tennessee, or Black Tennesseans, are the second-largest census "race" category after whites, making up 17% of the state's population in 2010.17.0% refers to those who selected Black or African American, and no other race in the 2010 Census. African Americans arrived in the region prior to statehood. They lived both as slaves and as free citizens with restricted rights up to the Civil War.
The state, and particularly the major cities of Memphis and Nashville, have been important sites in African-American culture and the Civil Rights Movement. The majority of African Americans in Tennessee reside in the western part of the state, which had a concentration of large cotton plantations in the antebellum period. Many freedmen stayed in the region after emancipation and the abolition of slavery. Historically there have been much smaller Black populations in the Middle Tennessee and East Tennessee (Appalachian) regions, because of the different geography and agricultural patterns.
Demographics
In the 2020 Census, 1,092,948 Tennessee residents were identified as African American (26.3% of the total 6,910,840).This figure refers to those who report African-American and no other race. In 18 of the state's 95 counties, African Americans make up more than 10% of the population: Shelby (51.3%), Haywood (50.6%), Hardeman (40.0%), Madison (36.4%), Lauderdale (33.5%), Fayette (26.4%), Lake (26.2%), Davidson (24.2%), Montgomery (20.3%), Tipton (17.8%), Gibson (17.8%), Hamilton (17.6%), Trousdale (16.5%), Rutherford (15.8%), Dyer (14.6%), Crockett (13.5%), Maury (11.2%), Obion (10.3%). Most of these counties are in West Tennessee, where plantation agriculture was concentrated. African Americans in the seven counties of Shelby (477,321), Davidson (173,092), Hamilton (64,428), Rutherford (53,977), Montgomery (44,569), Knox (40,360), Madison (36,004) make up more than 81% of the all African Americans in the state.Data listed under Counties, Tables at
Now majority-black, the city of Memphis is home to more than four hundred thousand African Americans, making it one of the largest population centers of this ethnic group. At least eight other municipalities have African-American majorities: Bolivar, Brownsville, Gallaway, Gates, Henning, Humboldt, Mason, Stanton, Whiteville.
Historical population Davidson County, whose principal city is the state capital of Nashville, Tennessee, was home from 1800 to 1850 to the largest share of African Americans in the state, in part because it was settled before the western part and numerous planters held slaves in Middle Tennessee. Since 1860, Shelby County (where Memphis is located) has had the largest population of African Americans.
+ Black Population in Tennessee, 1790–1860 Census year 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 Total Tennessee residents 35,691 105,602 261,727 422,823 681,904 829,210 1,002,717 1,109,800 Free Black people 361 309 1,318 2,739 4,511 5,524 6,442 7,300 Blacks living in slavery 3,417 13,584 44,734 80,105 141,647 183,059 239,439 275,719
History
Most of Tennessee's African Americans were enslaved from the colonial era until the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865 and abolition of slavery. Although activists in the state played a significant role in early U.S. abolitionism, the state government backed slavery in the 1834 constitution, when it was dominated by elite whites of the planter class. The legislature also passed laws that required newly emancipated Blacks to leave the state, and encouraged European immigration. But a small population of free Blacks remained, resisting violence and other attempts to push them out. Following the 1865 end of slavery and the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment that allowed Black men to hold political office, Black Tennesseans played a prominent role in politics. During Reconstruction, they joined the Republican Party and elected a number to the state legislature, which was biracial during these years. Samuel McElwee held office in the 1880s and was nominated for Speaker of the House. Sekou Franklin and Ray Block Jr. write:"Blacks ran for state and local offices from the 1870s through the 1890s: in Chattanooga, George Sewall, Robert Marsha, David Medlow, and W. B. Kennedy were elected to local offices; in Knoxville, J. B. Young made a failed attempt at the mayor's office in 1872; William Yardley served on the Knoxville City Council in the 1870s and ran for governor in 1876. From 1871 to 1890, nine blacks were elected to the Knoxville City Council, and several blacks served on the Knox County court, including Yardley, Melvin Gentry, William Brooks Sr., and Sam Maples. In 1875, Randall Brown served on Nashville's city commission, and blacks comprised almost one-third of the municipal government personnel."
Prior to statehood Early African Americans came to Tennessee primarily from the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. They, or their parents and grandparents, arrived in North America via the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from West Africa."most slaves in both states came from approximately half a dozen countries in West Africa" Early African-American arrivals included those purchased as slaves by Cherokee Indians and brought by European traders living in native villages. Wealthy white families from Culpeper, Virginia, brought enslaved African Americans with them to the Powell Valley in southwest Virginia in 1769.
Historian Cynthia Cumfer notes that slavery in early Tennessee was an isolating experience for African Americans, even in comparison with Virginia and North Carolina. According to 1779-80 records, the vast majority of slaveholders held legal title over just one or two persons, "with the largest holding being ten or eleven slaves." Enslaved African Americans sought fellow company through taverns, churches, workplaces, and their owners' kitchens.
The territorial government of Tennessee rapidly passed laws similar to those in slave states to restrict the lives of enslaved persons, denying slaves the right to property, to bear arms (unless designated as the huntsman of their plantation), and to sell goods.
Early statehood In the 1790 Census, there were 361 free persons of color in Tennessee, and 3,417 people living in slavery. Under Tennessee's first constitution, drafted in 1795 and effective with statehood in 1796, free Blacks were not restricted from voting, although there is no evidence they were permitted to do so in practice.
As in several other states following the American Revolution, in the first three decades of the 1800s, public sentiment supporting the abolition of slavery swelled in Tennessee. The legislature passed an 1826 law that prohibited bringing slaves into the state for purposes of sale, rather than the direct use of their labor. Freedmen were required "without fail [to] have [their] emancipation records with [them] at any time and place in order to prove [their] freedom." In 1831, following Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia, however, the state government mandated that emancipated slaves must immediately depart the state, and prohibited the migration of free Blacks to Tennessee. Planters were fearful of the influence of free Blacks on enslaved persons.
By the 1834 State Constitutional Convention in Nashville, delegates defeated a proposal for gradual abolition of slavery, to take place over a twenty-year period. Despite wide-ranging debate, the pro-slavery faction was victorious across the board. The new constitution formally forbade Blacks from voting, whether slave or free. It also stripped the legislature of any "power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves, without the consent of their owner or owners." The right to bear arms was restricted to "the free white men of this State."
In 1855 the state repealed its 30-year-ban prohibiting interstate slave trading, reflecting that Memphis slave-traders like Bolton, Dickens, & Co., Byrd Hill, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, had openly flouted this law for many years.
Civil War and Reconstruction Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy, on June 24, 1861. Union forces identified Nashville as an immediate target, because it had a strategic location on the Cumberland River and railroad lines. It fell to Union troops in February 1862. Union forces moving down the Mississippi River captured Memphis, Tennessee from the Confederacy in the First Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862. While under Union control, both cities swelled with freed slaves and other refugees. In 1860 around 3,000 African Americans lived in Memphis, but by war's end, some twenty thousand had congregated in the area, many south of the city.
After the United States Colored Troops were established in 1863, African-American troops in the Union Army became a symbol of new social equality. They disrupted longstanding patterns of racial deference, publicly bore arms, and were seen to receive respect of white officers. Many Southern whites in Memphis and Nashville resented these changes.
In the aftermath of the war, Memphis became the scene of tensions between white authorities and African American soldiers. The troops effectively countermanded the proposal by Freedmen's Bureau superintendent Nathan A. M. Dudley to arrest jobless blacks and send them into contract labor on rural plantations. Black military police also resisted efforts by local white police (who were predominately ethnic Irish immigrants and their descendants) to close dance houses patronized by whites and to enforce prewar customs of Black deference.
After the last Black soldiers at Fort Pickering were discharged on April 30, 1866, confrontation arose. Newly in the status of veterans, armed Blacks confronted police who attempted to arrest one of them. Both sides exchanged gunfire, and a police officer was killed. The veterans retreated to Fort Pickering, where they were disarmed by Union officials. An uncontrolled, police-organized posse, which included white laborers, firemen, and small proprietors, began a two-day pillage and massacre of black neighborhoods of Memphis, while white Union soldiers led by Union General Stoneman did not intervene until the second day. The Army had only recently ended martial law in the city, which restored civilian control in Memphis. These Memphis riots of 1866 resulted in the deaths of 46 blacks and 2 whites, over 100 beatings and robberies of blacks, 5 reported rapes, and the destruction by fire of 91 homes, 4 churches and 12 schools (all black). Some white missionaries who were known to be teachers of or sympathetic to blacks were also beaten or threatened, after which some fled Memphis.United States Congress, House Select Committee on the Memphis Riots, Memphis Riots and Massacres, 25 July 1866, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office (reprinted by Arno Press, Inc., 1969)
Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow No hospital in Tennessee served African Americans until the Millie E. Hale Hospital was established in Nashville in July 1916 by Dr. John Henry Hale and Millie E. Hale, who were husband and wife.
Civil Rights Movement
In 1956, Clinton High School was the first public school in the state to be desegregated by federal court order. On August 26, 1956, the Clinton 12: Jo Ann Allen, Bobby Cain, Anna Theresser Caswell, Minnie Ann Dickey, Gail Ann Epps, Ronald Hayden, William Latham, Alvah J. McSwain, Maurice Soles, Robert Thacker, Regina Turner, and Alfred Williams, walked from the Green McAdoo School to the high school. On September 1 white supremacists John Kasper and Asa Carter incited cross burnings and violence. The National Guard was deployed to Clinton for two months to suppress the violence. On October 5, 1958, Clinton High School was bombed, but no one was injured. The city bussed students to Oak Ridge until 1960.About the Center