The Fayette County, Tennessee Civil Rights Movement began in 1959 when John McFerren and Harpman Jameson attended the trial of Burton Dodson, a black man, who was accused of killing a white deputy sheriff. They soon realized that there were no African Americans who could serve on Dodson’s jury, because only a few blacks throughout the entire county had registered to vote. Appalled at this, John F. Estes, Dodson’s attorney and also a black man, urged McFerren and Jameson to persuade other members of the black community to register. But when a small group of blacks went to vote in the primary that fall, they were told that they could not since the primary was an “all white election and no colored could vote.” With Estes as their legal counsel, these would-be voters created the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League and filed a lawsuit in federal district court contesting the legality of the white primary.

After this suit was filed, white landowners began to order the newly registered voters who sharecropped on their property to move. This action prompted the first lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice under 1957’s Civil Rights Act, but the case was not resolved until July 1962. In the meantime, many of the evicted families left the county altogether, but some of them erected tents on Shephard Towles’s farm. Soon, however, his property could not accommodate all the people who needed shelter; providing water for Tent City residents, for example, the Towles’ family well ran dry. Gertrude Beasley, a landowning elderly black woman with meager resources, agreed to accommodate additional families.

Just for staying in Tent City, displaced sharecroppers were subjected to intimidation: a group of white youth shot into the tents and injured Early Williams while he was lying on his bed. Meanwhile, members of the League wondered how they could feed and clothe families who could no longer work. Whites seeking to prevent blacks from voting had identified anyone considered a “troublemaker” on a blacklist, which was circulated to business owners in the county. Anyone named on the list could not buy food, clothing, or gasoline; nor could they obtain credit. Accordingly, almost immediately after the evictions began, John and Viola McFerren began speaking locally and nationally to publicize the plight of the Tent City residents.

Through these efforts and subsequent media reports, contributions of food, clothing and money were soon sent to the League for distribution to the black community. James Puryear, a long-distance truck driver by profession, collected food and clothing from supporters in other cities and drove them back to Fayette County for distribution. Other people came to Tent City themselves to help—installing wood floors in the Tents so that residents did not have to live directly on the dirt, for example—and left as anonymously as they came. Finally, in July 1961, President John F. Kennedy instructed the federal government to dispatch surplus food to blacks in both Fayette and Haywood counties who were suffering because they had registered to vote.

Though the movement succeeded in many of its early aims, it also experienced internal discord: in 1961, after arguing about how to distribute these donations, the League split into two groups. But efforts continued to increase voter registration, elect officials responsible to the community, improve blacks’ opportunities through education and training, and dismantle barriers that excluded blacks from credit and decent employment. Support from outside Fayette County continued as well from groups such as Operation Freedom in Cincinnati, Ohio, and also student groups around the country. Several times during the 1960s, student workers came from Oberlin College, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago. These students helped with such projects as developing a newsletter to announce demonstration marches and registration drives, building a Community Center, and organizing political campaigns for candidates for sheriff and tax assessor.

Throughout the 1960s, movement leaders, community members, and persons from outside Fayette County held mass demonstration marches to protest physical abuse of blacks by whites, discrimination of blacks in employment, segregated public facilities and denial of civil rights to blacks. Leaders including Viola McFerren and Harpman Jameson were arrested and jailed for their activities. While the Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League provided local leadership on civil rights, younger people also began to organize in the mid-1960s, observing civil rights workers in other parts of the country and attending the SNCC Freedom School in Chicago, Illinois.

Some younger activists viewed the League’s approach to integration as too methodical and conservative and sought more immediate results. A few were severely beaten when they tried to integrate public restaurants in Fayette County. When black students marched to the all-white high school and demanded to be enrolled in 1969, the Fayette County police turned them away, and many students were injured in the confrontation. Meanwhile, the federal courts ruled that the public schools must be desegregated and the curriculum redesigned, but on the same day that this plan was approved, a private academy was announced to effectively re-segregate the county’s students.

While the League and these other groups did not always agree on the tactics to accomplish their objectives, they agreed on one core principle: the time had come to end the injustices suffered by African Americans. In an article published by the New York Times on October 12, 1969, the Fayette County Movement was called the “longest sustained civil rights protest in the nation,” and the movement continued long after that: while other movements lost their momentum and turned their attention to such issues as the Vietnam War, Fayette Countians continued to press the cause for civil rights.