Fran Ansley remembered as 'fearless,' 'relentless' activist, University of Tennessee educator
Frances "Fran" Ansley, a beloved University of Tennessee College of Law professor and a community activist who fought for immigrant rights, has died. She was 77.
Ansley will be remembered as a kind and intelligent scholar and professor. She was dedicated to fighting injustice, focusing her work on plant closings, justice for immigrants and the future of teaching.
Tennessee Law Review honored her lifetime of work in those issues with the 2023 symposium "Working Toward Justice on Difficult Ground."
"She was an amazing person," Ansley's husband Jim Sessions told Knox News. "Small, and sometimes a little fragile, but very tough. She had pancreatic cancer, stage four, for two-and-a-half years. They predicted she would have died a long time ago, but she didn't. And she was pretty strong right up until the end. She was a very active, very eloquent, very personable, kind human being. That's what she was. You're talking to her husband who loved her."
Sessions said she died sometime the night of Jan. 14 or the morning of Jan. 15. The UT College of Law announced the news in a Facebook post Jan. 16.
Ansley was a civil rights activist, helping organize in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Knoxville. She spoke Spanish, and she helped Spanish-speaking immigrants in Knoxville. She also helped organize the United Campus Workers at UT Knoxville.
“When we met, Fran was too modest to tell me about her amazing accomplishments," Lonnie Brown, dean of UT's College of Law, said in the school's Facebook post. "I had to hear about those from others, and what I learned was breathtaking. Fran was a force who epitomized what we should all strive for as leaders, educators, and advocates. She will be deeply missed, but her legacy will live on in the countless lives that she influenced.”
Ansley graduated with her bachelor's degree from Harvard/Radcliffe College in 1969. In 1979, she received her law degree from UT, then her Master of Law degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.
She began teaching at UT in 1988. She retired in 2007, but she never stopped working with students and maintained a scholarship. Not to mention she stayed involved in the community.
"Fran was always there. Her retirement was quite active," UT Law professor Eric Amarante told Knox News.
She published work in law reviews, co-edited a 2009 book on Latino immigration to the Southeast, and contributed to several interdisciplinary books regarding issues of race, globalization, poverty and gender.
“Fran was everything I hope to be. She wrote with beautiful urgency, and her law review articles had an elegance that would shame most writers of fiction," Amarante said in the announcement post. "Her teaching was compassionate but demanding, and I envy the students who had the privilege to attend her classes. Her advocacy was fearless and relentless. No challenge was too great, no power too daunting. But most importantly, Fran was a dear friend. A dear, dear friend. To say I will miss her is insufficient. Whether they know it or not, all of Tennessee will miss her."
“I will never have the courage to lead in the way that Fran Ansley led," UT Law Professor Joan Heminway also said in the post. "She was a one-of-a-kind in that regard. But I will endeavor to do my part to carry on, in her honor and memory, some of the work that she did. The appreciation of that task consoles me in my grief and gives me hope for the future of our profession and our world.”
Amarante's favorite memory with Ansley was sitting on her porch social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic as she was undergoing treatment.
"What was just beautiful about it is being around this incredible intellect, one of the smartest people I've ever, ever interacted with, and yet talking about perfectly normal things: Talking about the weather, talking about her compost pile, talking about whatever was in the news that day," Amarante said. "Her ability to just be a normal human, all the while knowing that her brain is moving 1,000 times faster than mine or anybody else in the room. And yet she is just perfectly happy and maybe never happier than when she was just surrounded by friends and in community."
Ansley and her husband enjoyed hiking in the Smoky Mountains. Sessions recalled watching her examine leaves and moss with fascination. "She had an eye for beauty, a special eye for natural beauty," he said.
"This area—East Tennessee and the people and the mountains—have meant so much to us. I pretty much held my emotions in check, but yesterday I was out driving and rook a glance at the mountains, and the mountains just finished me, because we love them so much," Sessions said.
Ansley is survived by husband Jim Sessions, two children, two grandchildren and brother Brad.
Keenan Thomas is a higher education reporter. Email keenan.thomas@knoxnews.com. X, formerly known as Twitter @specialk2real.
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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Fran Ansley, University of Tennessee law professor, dies at 77
