Registering To Vote Leads To Mass Evictions, Housing Crisis in Tennessee

Dec. 28, 1960, Sharecropper Early Williams, and his family had gone to sleep for the night in their tent on the farm of Shepard Towles, a Black landowner in Sommerville, Tennessee when shots tore through their tent. Williams got a minor flesh wound that was treated at the hospital in Memphis. White teens had shot up the tent whether for laughs or as a real murder attempt because law enforcement did not arrest anyone for the assault.

This was the first outbreak of violence against the Black families living in these “Tent Cities” set up on the farms of Towles and fellow Black farmer Gertrude Beasley. These encampments came into being because White landowners in Fayette and Haywood Counties evicted Black sharecropping families for having the audacity to vote.

The evictions were not the only reprisals as White-owned stores in the two counties refused to sell the evicted farmers, and banks would not provide loans or even saving accounts. White doctors and hospitals refused care and the KKK and White Citizen Councils attempted to terrorize the occupants of the Tent Cities.

According to one estimate, 345 families were displaced during the peak of the tent city movement. Most of them took refuge in donated tents on Towles’ or Beasley’s property. At this time the situation had begun to make national news and brought some heavyweight attention. On November 18, 1960, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit against thirty-six landowners who had evicted their black tenant farmers. On December 14, 1960, the Justice Department filed suit against an additional forty-five landowners, twenty-four merchants, and one financial institution in Fayette County for violating the civil rights of African Americans. 

Also famed Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, a rare southern Democrat who favored Civil Rights, worked with the Department of Agriculture to investigate and provide relief. The senator got into a very public battle with the Red Cross who refused to provide assistance to the sharecroppers. “I believe in alleviating human hardship,” said Kefauver. “This is a matter about which we must search our souls and if we do, I’m sure any needs will be met.”

On July 26, 1962, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Malcolm McRae Jr., ruled that the landowners were permanently enjoined from engaging in any acts for the purpose of interfering with the right of any person to register to vote for candidates for public office.

By 1962, many African Americans including most of those forced into the Tent Cities of Fayette and Haywood Counties had registered to vote and the encampments were disbanded. “Tent City was a miserable life,” recalled Early B. Williams, who was evicted by his landlord in the fall of 1959; in “Our Portion of Hell,” a book written by a civil rights activist named Robert Hamburger. “I was never sorry I registered. I figured we’d overcome someday,” Early added.

Photo Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, © Ernest C. Withers Trust.

Sources:

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/tent-cities-of-fayette-and-haywood-counties-1960-1962/

https://www.tnmagazine.org/12103-2/

https://www.memphis.edu/tentcity/moving-shacks-tents.php

https://www.newspapers.com/image/604299129/