The Tennessee secret
Shhhhh!
Last week white supremacists in Tennessee passed a law destroying the state’s only Black-majority district. The law also got rid of a rule requiring the state to notify voters of new districts. This falls in line with a long list of anti-democratic Tennessee secrets perpetuating common American myths.
One of those myths is that while, sure, the founding fathers enslaved Black people, that’s only because everyone was just kinda cool with it back then.
Of course, that’s not anywhere near true. Yeah, George Washington enslaved more Black people than most other human traffickers during his time, but our second President, George’s VP John Adams believed slavery to be “abhorrent”.
Also, by the time the Constitution was ratified, slavery had already been outlawed in five out of the original thirteen states as well as the soon-to-be-state of Vermont and the Northwest Territory which before long became the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and part of Minnesota.
So, no, not everyone was cool with Slavery. In fact, so few people were cool with it, enslavers went above and beyond to manufacture consent for their horrifying institution. For example, did you know the Constitution has a Fugitive Slave Clause? We don’t talk about it because it was basically nullified by the 13th Amendment, but yeah. It’s right there.
Here’s another little trick they pulled: In 1796—the same year this country elected its 2nd President—North Carolina’s western half became the entirely new state of Tennessee—under the strict condition that it would be a slave state.
That’s right! The very state of Tennessee itself was established with the expressed intent of expanding white supremacy, specifically in the form of slavery. Tennessee was not the only state created with this purpose (I’m looking at you, Kentucky!) and each time it happened the country added two more senators dedicating national momentum to the cause of Black bondage.
The racist manufacturing of Tennessee also meant the state operated differently than the others—even others in the South. While most of the Old South focused their human trafficking to plantations, in Tennessee, slavery was incorporated into nearly every facet of its economy. The Volunteer State (yes, it’s really called that) developed its very own slavery industrial complex. Memphis became a center of interstate slave trade. The actual city government of Nashville enslaved Black people and would give those people away as prizes in its municipal lottery.
Now, don’t get me wrong, during this time, there were also free Black people living in Tennessee. I mean, if you were a free Black person, you couldn’t vote or move freely without papers or keep company with enslaved people. Obviously, you couldn’t marry a white person and you also couldn’t marry an enslaved person—unless you wanted to risk a two-year prison sentence for “negro stealing”.
Free Black people in Tennessee also couldn’t go on strike or work any place that sold alcohol. They couldn’t “write, print, draw, engrave or abet in writing, printing, painting, drawing or engraving on paper, parchment, linen, metal or any other substance” anything that might be interpreted as “calculated to excite discontent, insurrection or rebellion amongst the slaves or free persons of color.”
So, maybe “free” isn’t exactly the right word.
But even that level of “freedom” must’ve really got on white Tennessee nerves because in 1831, a law passed requiring emancipated Black people to be removed from the state. And, of course, free Black people weren’t allowed to move into Tennessee, but they could still visit the state—for up to 20 days, legally.
A few decades later, the Civil War started. Then, the South lost and Reconstruction began. Then, Tennessee, again, a state created for the purposes of expanding white supremacy, was left without the power to force Black people to do all the work. Then, on Christmas Eve 1865, at the law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones in Pulaski, TN, six former confederate soldiers, a newspaper editor and a lawyer created the white supremacist paramilitary domestic terrorist organization called the Ku Klux Klan.
We’re all familiar with the KKK, but they didn’t have a monopoly on Tennessee acts of white supremacist terror. Not even a year after the Civil War’s end, white mobs in Memphis attacked the city’s Black community, stealing, wounding, killing and raping. This onslaught went on for three days and became known as the Memphis Massacre. It was the first of nearly 20 Freedman massacres that would occur across the South over the following decade.
Tennessee didn’t only debut the KKK and Freedman massacres. The state is also widely credited with the passage of the first Jim Crow laws. If you’re unfamiliar, these laws criminalized Black life across the South, recreated slavery-like conditions for Black people and allowed smooth transitions for former Confederates back into positions of political and social power.
Now, it should not go unsaid that, while all of this terror was happening, both Black people and white people were fighting it. Integrated state militias were combatting white supremacist terrorist groups on the ground, white and newly-elected Black lawmakers were battling in courtrooms and legislatures. The Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 were passed, granting formerly enslaved Black people citizenship, equal protection, voting rights while also banning racial discrimination by businesses and individuals.
Progress was made, but then—and tell me if any of this sounds familiar…
Wealthy, Northern, elite white moderates just really wanted to be friends again with their Southern counterparts. They wanted to find common ground, you know? Just really focus on where the two sides agreed. At the time, they called it “clasping hands across the bloody chasm” or Reconciliationism and people hated it. But, white elites forced this unpopular reuniting on their voters, ended Reconstruction and then the Supreme Court gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1875. They defaulted on the promise of the Reconstruction Amendments and ushered in 80 years of white supremacist terror across the South.
They also changed the narrative of the Civil War from being about slavery to a story of valorous soldiers on both sides. But the violence persisted and eventually, the courts and congress attempted to right their wrongs with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Tennessee never really stopped behaving like a state manufactured to expand white supremacy. There’s the Knoxville Race Riot of 1919, the resurgence of the KKK in the 1920s and the Nashville redlining of the 1930s.
In 1946, a white store owner in Columbia, TN hit a Black woman causing her son to kick the shit out of him and then a white mob started the Columbia race riot.
In 1956, Clinton High School was the first public school in Tennessee to be desegregated. Over the next two years, Black homes were bombed, cars turned over and in 1958, the high school was bombed and destroyed. The bombers were never caught.
Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. The Chattanooga Riot went from May 21-24 in 1971.
From 1980-1996, white supremacist agents of the Tennessee Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ran a whites-only event with “Nigger check points” called the Good Ol’ Boy Roundup.
The Knoxville church shooting of 2008 was a response to Obama’s presidential candidacy. In just the first year of Obama’s second term, from 2012-2013, hate crimes in Tennessee rose 17 percent.
And that’s not even mentioning the 235 reported lynchings.
Given this short summary, it’s probably not that surprising that white supremacists in the Tennessee legislature just eliminated the state’s only Black district.
The majority of white voters have voted Republican since Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And like the Reconstruction era, everything Democrats have accomplished in this country since 1965 has depended on its multi-racial coalition. And disregarding that coalition has led to nearly every setback the country has faced since. So, the next time you see a political ad about finding common ground or reaching across the aisle or any other attempt at persuading you that problems can be solved by avoiding them, don’t be fooled. You see where this is going. You know the intent of design. You know the Tennessee secret.
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/tennessee-voter-notice-law-change-gop-gerrymander/
https://www.tnmagazine.org/free-persons-of-color-werent-free-by-todays-standards/
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S2-C3-1/ALDE_00013571/
https://www.blackwallstreet.org/blk.resources.dir/cuv.tennessee.html
https://www.memphis.edu/memphis-massacre/
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/apr/30
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedmen_massacres
https://thebollard.com/2025/12/10/racisms-82/
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/CivilRightsAct1875.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_race_riot_of_1946
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Ol%27_Boys_Roundup
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/jefferson-street-gentrification-exposes-racial-fault-lines
https://www.beckcenter.net/maurice-mays
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/23/archives/150-arrested-in-2-nights-of-rioting-in-chattanooga.html
https://wpln.org/post/ethnic-hate-crimes-triple-tennessee-thats-know/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Knoxville_church_shooting
"Wealthy, Northern, elite white moderates just really wanted to be friends again with their Southern counterparts. They wanted to find common ground, you know? Just really focus on where the two sides agreed."
Love your tone here. Also, I wish history teachers everywhere would share your substack with their students. I'll bet the students would not find U.S. history boring.