Courtesy Special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries, Fair use image
My great grandmother, Frances, was living with family during this time. According to Social Security records her last known residence was in Oakland, Tennessee, a small town in Fayette County, just 14 miles south of the farm she lived on with her husband and children, and about 15 miles east of Tent City. She lived long enough to see the Civil Rights Movement in Fayette County in 1960, when 1400 hundred Blacks registered to vote in segregated county. J. F. Estes, a lawyer from Memphis, John McFerran, and Harpman Jameson went to Washington D.C. to persuade the Justice Department to intervene on behalf of the sharecroppers in Fayette County who were being targeted because they registered to vote.
Three years prior the 1957 Civil Rights Act was passed, prohibiting the use of intimidation, and interfering with a person’s right to vote. In 1958 Harpman Jameson and John McFerran founded the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League to help promote civil, economic, and political progress for Black residents of Fayette County. By this time most of Francis’s grandchildren had moved north to escape the oppressive conditions of the south. She remained with her four surviving children and their families. I can imagine this time in our history was a frightening and exciting time for her to witness, especially since she was almost 100 years old. It is almost like she stuck around to see what the young folks were up to.
White landowners evicted sharecropping families from their homes because they had registered to vote. Shepherd Towles, a black landowner allowed the evicted black sharecroppers to set up tents on his land. They called it Tent City and Freedom’s Village. It housed over 200 hundred families. These families were being blacklisted from purchasing goods and food during the Civil Rights Movement in retaliation for trying to register to vote. White supremacist groups like the Klu Klux Klan and White Citizens Council terrorized blacks in Fayette County. Families lived in Tent City for almost three years in sub par conditions. Robert Hamburger, author Our Portion of Hell, documents the struggle for civil rights through oral history by interviewing and tape recording the stories of the McFerrans, the Jamesons, and other sharecropping families.
John McFerren recounts events surrounding the struggle for the right to vote in Our Portion of Hell. McFerren, Estes, and Harpman brought a law suit against the Democratic Party. They traveled to Washington D.C. and met with the Attorney’s General Office. The landowners were indicted but this was only the beginning of Fayette County’s voting rights struggle. An editorial was written in the Fayette Falcon, threatening the eviction of a thousand black families (Hamburger, 2022, p. 17).
The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis tells the story of Fayette County’s struggle for the right to vote through the exhibit, Uplift the Vote. The exhibit showcases the testimonies of local civil rights leaders and activists like John and Viola McFerran, who share how they overcame social, political and economic oppression in Fayette County during the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s. Mary Williams a local sharecropper remembers her family’s first night sleeping in Tent City. She says it was early winter and the ground had begun to freeze and they had to put cardboard down but when the ground thawed the cardboard became wet and muddy. She says it took days to dry.
She passed away April 4, 1968, just a month after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. She had witnessed the murder of her youngest son, Weldon Boyland, and her husband, Jim Boyland’s imprisonment and death in the Western State Insane Asylum. My guess is it was about the land. The land that was rightfully inherited by a mulatto heir. She birthed thirteen children into this world, outlived most of them, watched her grandchildren flee northward in hope of a better life. She witnessed victories like the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I want to imagine that she heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s. last speech at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. His last speech was broadcasted on all three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). That she saw the future and her immortality through the generations that had come after her.
I’ve Been to The Mountain Top was the title of Dr. King’s last speech before his assassination. In 2024 this speech hits different than when I heard it before. It resonates with not only the humanity and morality of the United States being called into question but the global community as well. It is prophetic and King’s call to urgency somehow still is a sounding alarm almost 60 years later.
Resources
https://www.memphis.edu/benhooks/
Mary Williams on Moving Into Tent City
Viola McFerren: Sharecropping & Tent City Living Conditions
Uplift the Vote: Fayette County, Tennessee Civil Rights Movement
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