Black Tennesseans have a 150-year history of serving in state legislature | Opinion

Black Tennesseans have served in the state House of Representatives on and off for 150 years after the first one was elected in 1873. Some passed significant legislation and some were disappointed that their bills got no consideration. One was expelled in 1897. Yet they all made their voices heard for the benefit of their constituents.

The recent expulsions and reinstatements of state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson came 59 years after A.W. Willis became the the first Black citizen elected to the Tennessee House in modern times. He was elected from Memphis in 1964. In 1966 he was joined by five others – two from Memphis, two from Nashville and one from Knoxville. One of those from Nashville, Dr. Dorothy Brown, was the first Black woman to serve in the General Assembly.

The first Black state senators, J.O. Patterson of Memphis and Avon Williams of Nashville, were elected in 1968. Those elections in the 1960s were the first since the 1890s in which Black people could realistically be elected to the state legislature because for decades, districts had been so jerrymandered that was impossible.

In 1873, 41-year-old Sampson Keeble was the first Black person ever elected to the Tennessee House. He was born a slave in Rutherford County and had no formal education. From 1854 until the Civil War he worked in the printing department of the Rutherford Telegraph newspaper in Murfreesboro. He introduced a bill to amend the Nashville City Charter to allow Black businesses to operate in the downtown business district, but it failed.Keeble also introduced a bill, which also failed, to benefit the Tennessee Manual Labor School.

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He served on the Military Affairs Committee and was the only Black man in the legislature prior to 1881.

In 1881 five Black Tennesseans were elected to the House from Tipton, Davidson and Shelby counties. One of them, Thomas Sykes of Davidson, introduced a bill to allow Black children to attend the School for the Blind in Nashville and the School for the Deaf in Knoxville in separate facilities. It became law May 8, 1881. One strange bill was introduced by Black Shelby County Rep. T. Frank Cassels that would prohibit sexual intercourse between the races. It never saw the light of day.

In 1883 Black men were elected to the legislature from Haywood, Fayette and Shelby counties. In 1885, for the first time a Black East Tennessean, William C. Hodge, was elected; he represented Hamilton County. Others elected that year were Green E. Evans, a former Fisk Jubilee singer, and William A. Fields of Shelby County.

In 1896 Jesse M.H. Graham was elected to the legislature from Montgomery County. He had studied English at Fisk University and had taught school in Kentucky. In 1895 he became editor of a Black weekly, the Clarksville Enterprise. On Jan. 4, 1897, he took his seat in the legislature while the Committee on Elections investigated whether he had been a resident of the state for at least three years, as required by the Tennessee Constitution.

On Jan. 20, 1897, 56 Democrats and 20 Republicans passed a resolution declaring his seat vacant. Twenty-three others did not vote. After his ouster, Graham went to the Philippines as a clerk in the U.S. Bureau of Audit. In World War I he was a 48-year-old second lieutenant at Fort Des Moines in Iowa. He was a founder of American Legion Post No. 143 in Clarksville.

Robert J. Booker is a freelance writer and former executive director of the Beck Cultural Exchange Center. He may be reached at 865-546-1576.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Opinion: Black citizens have long history of serving in legislature