I keep complaining that there’s no good biography of Z. Alexander Looby and how it was a hindrance to the research for my book Dynamite Nashville. And people keep saying, “Well, you should write it.” And I keep saying, “He would not have wanted that.” There’s also another reason, which is that I don’t know enough about Black intellectual movements either in the world or just here in Tennessee — the kinds of discussions people were having that led them to act.Â
I mean, here’s just a fundamental question I don’t know the answer to: Why did Z. Alexander Looby decide to come to Tennessee at all? I have a hard time believing that a kid from the British West Indies who studied at Howard, NYU and Columbia and who was in New York at the height of the Harlem Renaissance was eager to give that all up for — and no offense to us — Nashville in the depths of Jim Crow. But he was in New York at the same time W.E.B. DuBois was there, and DuBois was a Fisk graduate. Was there a connection there?Â
Also, just as a bit of side knowledge I picked up doing my research: Marcus Garvey spoke in Nashville at least twice. Did Tennessee hold some position in the Caribbean imagination that I just don’t know about? I don’t even know how to start answering this question.
In July, Third Man Books will release my book about the racist violence of Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s
"Where did Garvey speak," you ask? Oh God, please no. You’ve asked it again? OK, fine, listen. We need to talk about Braden Memorial Methodist Church, because apparently that church just wanders around town. You’re doing your dishes, looking out your back window, and that building, which I’m supposing must be on chicken legs like Baba Yaga’s hut, just wanders by heading over to your neighbor’s house to check in and make sure they’re still singing the 756-verse-long Charles Wesley hymn they started singing three months back.
According to the mainstream media and Braden Memorial’s own website, it was the first Black church and first Methodist church in East Nashville, which seems to indicate that the church is, you know, in East Nashville. And I’ve driven by it countless times in East Nashville, there on Main Street. So far so good.
On Friday, March 9, 1917, the Nashville Globe ran a story about how Professor Garvey was going to speak that Sunday at Braden Memorial M.E. Church, 711 Georgia St. The only Georgia I know of is over in The Nations, and I couldn’t find a Georgia Street in East Nashville on any old maps, but there are enough context clues to make me feel OK about this being in East Nashville. The Tennessean in May of that same year had a story on the president of Meharry Medical College, Dr. G.W. Hubbard, preaching at Braden Memorial. The paper describes it as being “located on Georgia street in East Nashville and is one of the most successful new churches of the Methodist connection in the city.” OK, settled, right? But by December 1917, The Tennessean says Braden Memorial is at 711 Donelson St., with the rectory at 93 Claiborn[e] St. The only conclusion to be reached is that the church followed Hubbard back to South Nashville on its chicken legs and nested along Browns Creek for a time.
Anyway, Garvey was in Braden Memorial in 1917, likely in the spot where it is right now, with the caveat that the location of Braden Memorial that year was not a settled fact.Â
Then, on Monday, Sept. 29, 1924, Garvey spoke at the corner of Fourth Avenue South and Peabody. Garvey certainly wasn’t the first Black separatist to draw crowds in Nashville. A generation before Garvey, Benjamin Singleton convinced a number of Black Tennesseans to go with him to Kansas because he lost faith in white Southerners ever treating Black Southerners fairly. Toward the end of his life, he was leaning toward Black people abandoning the U.S. altogether. But man, when you think about Black Nashville, whose family members had listened to Singleton coming out to hear Marcus Garvey twice, and then naming a park after Frederick Douglass, it makes me feel like there was a strong strain of Black radical thought that was popular here that we don’t really hear about now. It’s kind of like, “Well, there was the Civil War, then things got very shitty for Black people, and then there was the civil rights movement, and now everything is better.” Hell, in 1927, the Chattanooga division of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association went to war against the police. They got in a firefight as the police tried to stop them from buying 200 “30-30 high powered repeating rifles” and new uniforms. You definitely don’t hear about that these days, even though trials from the firefight stretched out for months and resulted in a high-profile kidnapping. (It’s a whole other story.)
So now, keeping all this history in mind, let’s turn to the second day of school in 1957. This is from The Tennessean, on Sept. 11:
It happened shortly before noon, as Rev. Edward W. Jackson accompanied one of the children to the nearby home of her grandmother. As they walked west on Garfield, part of a crowd of white people—most of them adutls—followed. Half a block away from the home, Jackson, the girl and her grandmother were stoned by the white people who followed them. As they reached the goal, the girl’s grandfather stood waiting for them in his front yard. Rocks were thrown at the house. The grandfather picked up one and stood waiting for the next move by the white people.
“This made me nervous,” said Jackson, “and that’s when I took the pistol out.”
He was arrested and released on bail. Later that night, he gave a statement to his church where he said what he’d done was wrong and “the bearing of arms is in direct contradiction to the teachings of the Christ who loves all mankind.” He then said, “It is now my belief that the best defense in this situation is the one of Christian nonviolent resistance ...”
Y’all, let me reiterate. This is September 1957. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference is barely 9 months old. The Nashville Christian Leadership Committee doesn’t exist yet. The Rev. James Lawson hasn’t come to Nashville. And yet, here’s the Rev. Jackson talking about Christian nonviolent resistance to racist oppression and wrestling with his own conscience over whether violence in defense of others is acceptable. Already. The movement wasn’t even here yet, and Jackson is grappling with one of the questions that’s going to become central to it in the next decade. A question that has been being asked since Garvey was here. Since Singleton was here.
Even if it weren't in the Morris Memorial Building, such a museum would be a boon for our city
OK then, so I’m reading David Greenberg’s Politico story on John Lewis. (Greenberg will be at the Southern Festival of Books on Saturday talking about his Lewis biography, if you’re interested.) Greenberg writes:
Dave Kotelchuck, a white Vanderbilt physics professor who often picketed with Lewis, told him that without the street brawling and the looming threat of wide-scale violence, the spring marches might not have worked. “John,” Kotelchuck said, “you say that this shows that nonviolence works. But you’ve demonstrated that the fear of violence is effective in making change. When you have mass demonstrations with violence as possible, things will happen. That’s not the success of nonviolence.”
This is Kotelchuck and Lewis in 1963, arguing about whether violence is necessary for change. Same thread that reached back probably to the end of the Civil War. Can Black people achieve freedom and justice without violence in a multiracial society? And what is the best response when faced with white violence? These are hard questions that we still don’t have answers for, but Black Nashville has been asking them for generations, and is still asking them.
This is why I’m so convinced that we need a whole civil rights museum. As a city we barely understand the important place we’ve held in this discussion of who we are as a country. How many of you are learning that Marcus Garvey came here at least twice from a middle-aged white woman who stumbled across that fact by accident? I think it’s meaningful, too, that Methodist churches have come up so often in the discussion today, but I can’t tell you why, because I don’t know very much about the Black Methodist church. That’s not a sustainable way to have a city history. We need a place for experts and the public to come together and share in these discussions and deepen and enrich our knowledge. I want to be a member of the public getting my knowledge deepened and enriched.
